Culture is itself dominated by the Darwinian trio

From Matt Ridley in an essay, Determined to Be Different.

Culture is itself dominated by the Darwinian trio of replication, variation and selection.

and

The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of exchange and specialisation: the more people exchanged, the more they specialised and vice versa.

As a result, the human lifestyle moved with increasing speed away from individual self sufficiency and towards mutual interdependence, shared innovation and collective intelligence.

Today nobody even knows how to make a pencil (the person who mines graphite does not know how to fell trees), because the knowledge is stored among brains rather than in them.

History plainly shows that the bigger the exchange network, the more rapid the rate of technological change. Conversely, if people are isolated from exchange networks, their innovation rate slows – as happened in China under the Ming empire, for example.

If societies are completely isolated, innovation may even go into reverse and technologies start to be discarded – as happened in Tasmania after it became an island 10,000 years ago.

The implications of this way of seeing human society is that the bottom-up evolution of human technology and society is inevitable, inexorable and potentially infinite, but its rate depends on the degree integration of human minds into a collective brain by exchange networks.

Or to put it another way, human prosperity depends upon ideas having sex. The internet, by connecting human minds all over the world, can only accelerate innovation.