Culture as applied to evolution involves the transmission of information (particularly from generation to generation) by all non-genomic means - through the senses by example, or by instructions involving language. "Cultural evolution" therefore encompasses the generation and selection of new 'learning' by all means other than encoding in the genome. Although cultural evolution is not entirely peculiar to man (see for example: John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals) it is in a highly developed form restricted to man and much tied up with the development of language and writing.

The idea that human culture changes with time is evident with the fact that human beings have become a more civilized species through history.

Though often used interchangeably with the terms "social evolution" and "sociocultural evolution," the term "cultural evolution" sometimes is useful for specifying a focus on long-term change not in properties of a social group as such (e.g., its sheer size or location), but in the way of life–the characteristic artifacts, behaviors, and ideas–of the group. Defined this way, cultural evolutionism is not inherently ethnocentric, though of course the