EDIT: This comment is a little fuzzy in places on the distinction between a culture, and a member of a culture, vs a species, and a member of a species. (Evolut

EDIT: This comment is a little fuzzy in places on the distinction between a culture, and a member of a culture, vs a species, and a member of a species. (Evolution always acts individually, and an adaption always works to increase the fitness of an individual organism) I'd clean it up, but this is a comment thread on a submission with 3 votes, so approximately nobody will ever see it... --- Alrighty, let's formalize this a little. A successful culture is one that increases the frequency of its memes in the population. (Precisely analogous to biological organisms, genes, and the genepool) A society wants the frequency of its memes to hit 100% of the population. (To the extent a society "wants" anything, sins of teleology, etc) Ok. To accomplish this goal, we have three strategies. 1.) Produce children, and inculcate them with the culture's memes. 2.) Instead of having children, infect other organisms with your culture's memes. (The Hollywood model) 3.) Instead of having children or making movies, increase the frequency of your memes by *reducing* the frequ- ency of competing memes, by killing their carriers. (The genocide model) Any given culture is pursuing all three strategies simultaneously, of course, but with differing priority for each. It's quite possible for a vigorous new culture/species to arise, have a population boom, and "evolve to extinction". (http://lesswrong.com/lw/l5/evolving_to_extinction/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/l5/evolving_to_extinction/) A series of adaptations, each of which increase the individual fitness of each individual member/organism, but inevitably lead to the population declining, and the culture/species ceasing to exist. The canonical example are the Shakers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers) who were quite active during the 19th century, but whose memes required celibacy of its members, and so the entire culture lasted for only one lifetime. Evolution doesn't care. Nothing requires that an entire culture/species abruptly switch memes/genes when an omniscient observer notices they're they're climbing a local maxima.