Social and cultural evolution

Just a thought on cultural evolution (completely unrehearsed and with no quotable or linkable evidence):

Evolutionary list one of two:

• Approximately 300+ million years ago (please correct me if I'm wrong on any of these details, but it's not overly important just yet) amphibians were the dominant organisms on earth.
• Somewhere in the late Triassic dinosaurs came to prominence and "ruled" for, say 150 million years
• Then came mammals and they were the dominant organisms, since 65 million years ago (roughly; and I know insects have been around for most of this time, but somehow they don't get recognised as dominant organisms at any particular stage, go figure).
• Then, roughly (and I'm making a very wild stab in the dark here) 10000 years ago human culture came to dominate. Doesn't really matter when exactly, but human culture, as an organism, have certainly been the dominant and most influencial organism for the last 100 years. Surely?

Evolutionary list two of two:

• Humans are pretty unique in the evolutionary scheme of things for their adaptability (which is an attribute intricately and self-referentially linked to various other attributes, such as language, use-of-tools and culture).
• Western culture, as an organism, is very similar to humans in its evolutionary adaptability

I'm not making value judgements here, okay, so any comments on morals or ethics will probably be ignored. This is just a pattern I've noticed and anyone with some insight is welcome to comment. I'll do some more research and will have more to say about the matter in time.

Some links so long, garnered by a simple google search for "Cultural Evolution". Haven't done any reading of it yet...

• Social and cultural evolution
• Daniel Dennet:

  Cultures evolve. In one sense, this is a truism; in other senses, it asserts one or another controversial, speculative, unconfirmed theory of culture. Consider a cultural inventory of some culture at some time--say 1900AD. It should include all the languages, practices, ceremonies, edifices, methods, tools, myths, music, art, and so forth, that compose that culture. Over time, that inventory changes. Today, a hundred years later, some items will have disappeared, some multiplied, some merged, some changed, and many new elements will appear for the first time. A verbatim record of this changing inventory through history would not be science; it would be a data base. That is the truism: cultures evolve over time. Everybody agrees about that. Now let's turn to the controversial question: how are we to explain the patterns to be found in that data base? Are there any good theories or models of cultural evolution?

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