 What has not entirely waned, however, are debates over the nature of cultural acquisition, whether and when the spread of culture is usefully thought of in terms of replication, and if not why not. Some proponents of replication hold that most stable cultural traditions are primarily the result of imitation, and that imitation drives a kind of faithful, high fidelity copying of cultural variants that should qualify as replication (Tomasello 1999). Dual inheritance theorists argue that the type of high fidelity copying suggested by the term ‘replication’ may or may not be rare, but it is not required for complex cultural adaptations to evolve. Rather, cumulative cultural evolution can be sustained by low fidelity imitation because the influence of many teachers and models can compensate for noise and copying errors (J. Henrich &amp; Boyd 2002). Cultural epidemiologists also reject the need for replication, arguing instead that many traditions are mainly the result of ‘guided variation’. This is a phenomenon whereby learners do not simply copy what they are exposed to, but rather creatively reconstruct representations from what they observe, slightly but significantly altering the cultural variants they acquire in the process of acquiring them. In these cases, the recipient of the cultural signal is not a passive vessel, but actively filters or even transforms the representations that they adopt. Moreover, cultural epidemiologists hold that these processes of reconstructive learning are systematically influenced by stable features of human cognitive architecture, which can be represented as ‘attractors’ in the abstract possibility space of cultural evolutionary models (Sperber 1996; Claidière &amp; Sperber 2007; Claidière, Scott-Phillips, &amp; Sperber 2014; Lewens 2015; Morin 2011 [2016]; Buskell 2017; Scott-Phillips 2017). For example, a proponent of ‘pure’ replication might hold that the pronunciation of words remains relatively stable because individuals tend to copy with high fidelity the pronunciation of their peers and parents. A proponent of the cultural epidemiology approach could offer a different explanation, claiming rather that the pronunciation of words evolves in the direction of better fit with the mechanisms of verbalization, comprehension, and retention, and then stabilizes around these attractors (for similarly competing accounts of some of the common features of religion, see Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Norenzayan et al. 2016).