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***A lot of people think of cultures or civilisations as sort of like biological organisms, and thus subject to evolution: Cultures' relative fitness in the environment will determine whether they succeed and multiply, or whether they fail and decrease. Cultures become better adapted over time, or perhaps sometimes they acquire harmful mutations and die out.***

_*This is hooey. It's enormously hooey. It's embarrassing social theory, and it needs to stop.*_

The reason that cultures are not analogous to breeding populations of biological organisms is simple but vast in its implications: There are no fixed units of cultural inheritance. In this respect cultural change is utterly unlike biological evolution.

As Charles Darwin himself admitted, his theory of specialisation through natural selection could not work without some way to transmit traits in a fully realised form from one generation to the next. If a trait is present in one generation, and if it works whatever benefit or detriment effect it may have, that's well and good, but it does nothing if it's not passed down. And if it's passed down by shares - if I inherit only half the trait that my father had - then all traits will rapidly be diluted down to nothing.
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Without fixed units of inheritance that each transmit the full trait in its entirety (i.e., without genes), it can be shown that interbreeding rapidly produces an averaging of all biological traits across the population. Thus speciation is impossible.

The same would hold true in any properly considered, non-vulgar account of cultural evolution. If traits get through unimpeded and unchanged from one generation to the next, then cultural evolution can happen. But if they don't, then cultural evolution on the Darwinian model is impossible for the same reason that Darwinian biological evolution is impossible without genes.

The trouble is that we don't have a good culture-bearing analogue to the gene. Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme as a parallel to genetics, but it's highly inexact: When I inherit a gene, I experience whatever effect it's going to have on me, and if it directs my body to make a protein, then I will make that protein, and nothing I think or feel about it is going to change that. Memes don't work that way. I can encounter a meme and adopt it, or not. Every act of cultural transmission is therefore also an act of individual choice. And individual choices are still largely inscrutable.

Because any natural selection pressures that arise in the absence of a durable unit of inheritance are ONLY going to make the population at hand more uniform, it follows that the field of cultural difference reflects recent and freely made individual choices, not the ongoing workings of a Darwinian process. We are diverse not because of some biologically driven clash of cultures, but because we have freely chosen to be that way.