Juan Ramón Álvarez

After showing the semiotic and social nature of cultural sciences, this paper addresses the efforts to naturalize them following the so-called “Universal Darwinism”. This being settled, three initiatives of different depth and scope are analyzed. First, the proposal displayed by Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland for the unification of the cultural sciences in parallel with the unification of biological sciences on the basis of the principles of variation, inheritance, and selection. Second, memetics as a theory of cultural selection with memes as its basic units and imitation as the process of cultural transmission. Third, Hodgson’s and Knudsen’s program for an evolutionary economics brought forth by the interpretation of an abstract Darwinian ontology in terms of economic theory. The conclusion drawn is that the issue is still to a good extent open to ongoing research.