How is cultural evolution similar to natural selection?

Answer 1

Cultural evolution is the phenomenon whereby cultural ideas, notions, views, etc. propagate throughout populations, like alleles propagate throughout population gene pools in biological evolution.

Some propose that the way these ideas propagate throughout populations is similar to the ways of biological evolution, in that cultural ideas (or memes) are subject to a kind of cultural selection, that determines how fast they spread, and to what degree.

Answer 2

One could say that natural selection and cultural evolution are both driven by differential reproductive success: variant traits that breed better spread throughout the population, and variant memes (cultural ideas) that are better at entrenching themselves in people's brains spread throughout society. However, cultural evolution is so much more complex than biological evolution that one might as well think of them as entirely unrelated phenomena.