Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.

Cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, was originally developed in the 19th century by anthropologists stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology, and organizational studies. Previously, it was believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations; anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise in consequence of a combination of social, environmental, and biological influences (viewed from a nature vs nurture framework).

There have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including dual inheritance theory, sociocultural evolution, memetics, cultural evolutionism, and other variants on cultural selection theory. The approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin but in how they conceptualize the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories, and methods that they apply to its study. There has been a convergence of the cluster of related theories towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right.

Aristotle thought that development of cultural form (such as poetry) stops when it reaches its maturity. In 1873, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it was written: "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere in disadvantage".

Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself. He argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.

Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as Comte and Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen single out David George Ritchie and Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism. Despite the stereotypical image of social Darwinism that developed later in the century, neither Ritchie nor Veblen were on the political right.

The early years of the 20th century and particularly World War I saw biological concepts and metaphors shunned by most social sciences. Even uttering the word evolution carried "serious risk to one's intellectual reputation."^{[citation needed]} Darwinian ideas were also in decline following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics but were revived, especially by Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, who developed the first population genetic models and as it became known the modern synthesis.

Cultural evolutionary concepts, or even metaphors, revived more slowly. If there were one influential individual in the revival it was probably Donald T. Campbell. In 1960 he drew on Wright to draw a parallel between genetic evolution and the "blind variation and selective retention" of creative ideas; work that was developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965 (a work that includes references to other works in the then current revival of interest in the field). Campbell (1965 26) was clear that he perceived cultural evolution not as an analogy "from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general model for quasiteleological processes for which organic evolution is but one instance".