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Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson
mahir007's review against another edition
5.0
ثقافة الشرف
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لطالما كان الجنوب الأمريكي أكثر عنفًا من الشمال. هذا ما تؤكده الأوصاف الملونة للمبارزات والخلافات والقرصنة في الأدغال والإعدام خارج نطاق القانون بشكل بارز في حسابات الزوار ومقالات الصحف والسير الذاتية من القرن الثامن عشر فصاعدًا. الإحصائيات تثبت هذه الانطباعات. على سبيل المثال ، خلال الفترة 1865-1915 ، كان معدل جرائم القتل في الجنوب عشرة أضعاف المعدل الحالي في الولايات المتحدة بأكملها ، ومرتين المعدل في أكثر مدننا عنفًا. إحصائيات القتل الحديثة تروي نفس القصة.
يجادل عالما النفس «ريتشارد نيسبت» و«دوف كوهين» في كتابهما : (ثقافة الشرف) ، بأن الجنوب أكثر عنفًا من الشمال لأن سكان الجنوب لديهم معتقدات ثقافية حول الشرف الشخصي تختلف عن نظرائهم في الشمال. وهم يجادلون بأن الجنوبيين يعتقدون بقوة أكثر من الشماليين أن سمعة الشخص مهمة وتستحق الدفاع عنها حتى بتكلفة باهظة. نتيجة لذلك ، غالبًا ما تتصاعد الحجج والمواجهات التي تؤدي إلى كلمات قاسية أو مشاجرات بسيطة ثم إلى عنف مميت .
ما الذي يمكن أن يفسر هذه الاختلافات؟ يمكن لبعض سمات البيئة الجنوبية ، مثل دفئها الأكبر ، أن يفسر سبب كون الجنوبيين أكثر عنفًا. مثل هذه الفرضيات معقولة ، ويجد نيسبيت وكوهين صعوبة في اختبارها. قد يختلف الشماليون والجنوبيون وراثيًا ، لكن هذه الفرضية ليست معقولة جدًا. جاء المستوطنون في الشمال والجنوب في الغالب من الجزر البريطانية والمناطق المجاورة في شمال غرب أوروبا . السكان البشريون مختلطون جيدًا على المستوى الجيني .
يدعم نيسبت وكوهين فرضيتهما بمجموعة رائعة من الأدلة. لنبدأ بالأنماط الإحصائية للعنف. في المناطق الريفية والبلدات الصغيرة الجنوبية ، ترتفع معدلات القتل بالنسبة للجدل بين الأصدقاء والمعارف ، ولكن ليس لعمليات القتل المرتكبة في سياق جنايات أخرى.
بعبارة أخرى ، الرجال في الجنوب هم أكثر عرضة من الشماليين لقتل أحد معارفهم عندما تندلع مشادة في حانة ، لكنهم ليسوا أكثر عرضة لقتل الرجل الذي يقف خلف المنضدة عندما يدخلون محل لبيع الخمور. وبالتالي ، يبدو أن الجنوبيين أكثر عنفًا من الأمريكيين الآخرين فقط في المواقف التي تنطوي على الشرف الشخصي. الفرضيات المتنافسة لا تعمل بشكل جيد: لا لون البشرة ولا المناخ الحار ولا تاريخ العبودية يفسر هذا الاختلاف في جرائم القتل.
الاختلافات في ما يقوله الناس عن العنف تدعم فرضية "ثقافة الشرف".
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Peter J. Richerson
Not By Genes Alone
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
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لطالما كان الجنوب الأمريكي أكثر عنفًا من الشمال. هذا ما تؤكده الأوصاف الملونة للمبارزات والخلافات والقرصنة في الأدغال والإعدام خارج نطاق القانون بشكل بارز في حسابات الزوار ومقالات الصحف والسير الذاتية من القرن الثامن عشر فصاعدًا. الإحصائيات تثبت هذه الانطباعات. على سبيل المثال ، خلال الفترة 1865-1915 ، كان معدل جرائم القتل في الجنوب عشرة أضعاف المعدل الحالي في الولايات المتحدة بأكملها ، ومرتين المعدل في أكثر مدننا عنفًا. إحصائيات القتل الحديثة تروي نفس القصة.
يجادل عالما النفس «ريتشارد نيسبت» و«دوف كوهين» في كتابهما : (ثقافة الشرف) ، بأن الجنوب أكثر عنفًا من الشمال لأن سكان الجنوب لديهم معتقدات ثقافية حول الشرف الشخصي تختلف عن نظرائهم في الشمال. وهم يجادلون بأن الجنوبيين يعتقدون بقوة أكثر من الشماليين أن سمعة الشخص مهمة وتستحق الدفاع عنها حتى بتكلفة باهظة. نتيجة لذلك ، غالبًا ما تتصاعد الحجج والمواجهات التي تؤدي إلى كلمات قاسية أو مشاجرات بسيطة ثم إلى عنف مميت .
ما الذي يمكن أن يفسر هذه الاختلافات؟ يمكن لبعض سمات البيئة الجنوبية ، مثل دفئها الأكبر ، أن يفسر سبب كون الجنوبيين أكثر عنفًا. مثل هذه الفرضيات معقولة ، ويجد نيسبيت وكوهين صعوبة في اختبارها. قد يختلف الشماليون والجنوبيون وراثيًا ، لكن هذه الفرضية ليست معقولة جدًا. جاء المستوطنون في الشمال والجنوب في الغالب من الجزر البريطانية والمناطق المجاورة في شمال غرب أوروبا . السكان البشريون مختلطون جيدًا على المستوى الجيني .
يدعم نيسبت وكوهين فرضيتهما بمجموعة رائعة من الأدلة. لنبدأ بالأنماط الإحصائية للعنف. في المناطق الريفية والبلدات الصغيرة الجنوبية ، ترتفع معدلات القتل بالنسبة للجدل بين الأصدقاء والمعارف ، ولكن ليس لعمليات القتل المرتكبة في سياق جنايات أخرى.
بعبارة أخرى ، الرجال في الجنوب هم أكثر عرضة من الشماليين لقتل أحد معارفهم عندما تندلع مشادة في حانة ، لكنهم ليسوا أكثر عرضة لقتل الرجل الذي يقف خلف المنضدة عندما يدخلون محل لبيع الخمور. وبالتالي ، يبدو أن الجنوبيين أكثر عنفًا من الأمريكيين الآخرين فقط في المواقف التي تنطوي على الشرف الشخصي. الفرضيات المتنافسة لا تعمل بشكل جيد: لا لون البشرة ولا المناخ الحار ولا تاريخ العبودية يفسر هذا الاختلاف في جرائم القتل.
الاختلافات في ما يقوله الناس عن العنف تدعم فرضية "ثقافة الشرف".
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Peter J. Richerson
Not By Genes Alone
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
alexander0's review against another edition
3.0
This book is a simple introduction to a particular theory of cultural evolution written by the same authors who offer a more quantitative explanation of the same theory in _Culture and the Evolutionary Process_. This theory is a gene/culture co-evolutionary theory. Before I review, I will offer some historical background about why this book exists.
This theory was considered the main competition to memetic theory in at the turn of the millennium. Both memetics and what has been called "Dual Inheritance Theory" (DIT) had two distinct historical origins both with attempts to explain the evolutionary process of culture. The primary differences between the two (at the time of this publication) were (1) memetics aside from Susan Blackmore's camp had no direct ties to genetic necessity while DIT claims culture and genetics are two causal forces in everyday action and (2) memetics proposed a material basis called a "replicator" (a la Dawkins) or an "interactor" (a la David Hull) while DIT proposes there is no need for a material substrate for replication, nor what geneticists would call "fidelity".
All the above is to say, this book responds to Dawkins' notion of memetics while also motivating the necessity of a science of culture. It positions itself as more ideals while Dawkins' theory is more material (choosing his "brain to brain" analogy over his "mind to mind" analogy) which is kind of odd considering in recent years, we've considered Dawkins to be too idealist and not materialist enough, although I happen to agree with the author's critiques of Dawkins' theory, they do not discredit memetics as a whole. Instead they take riskier claims.
They attach culture to other theories in hypothetical ways that have causal implications. That is to say this theory is riskier because it suggests strong ties to other disciplinary theory, and necessity of these connections. This suggests it should be relatively easy to find flaws empirically with this. However, it isn't clear to me that this is true. As this is very cognitive in nature, it's validation requires us solve the philosophically hard problem of minds. They are constantly referring to suggestive validations by pointing to material actions however and assuming the cognitive reasons. In fact, once the materiality of their arguments are made, I find it difficult to distinquish this theory from Hull's, Wilkins', and (recently) Haig's conception of memetics. Perhaps, as Blackmore opined in her blog, DIT and (early) memetics are essentially the same theory in the end.
As such, this book is valuable in that it suggests a series of hypotheses worthy to be excavated and tested in more recent memetic research. I say "memetic" because largely that is the area of study that has more data at the moment relative to their theory construction and its applicability to digital spaces. The internet claimed "memetics" not "Dual Inheritance Theory", and if we are to believe there is knowledge in evolutionary epistemology, we must see the cultural choice of "meme" as what it should be called regardless of the nuances of theoretical writing.
This is a useful historical look even if significantly dated at this point. It's definitely not a book you should pick up to learn evolution of culture. There are much better works to introduce this at this point.
This theory was considered the main competition to memetic theory in at the turn of the millennium. Both memetics and what has been called "Dual Inheritance Theory" (DIT) had two distinct historical origins both with attempts to explain the evolutionary process of culture. The primary differences between the two (at the time of this publication) were (1) memetics aside from Susan Blackmore's camp had no direct ties to genetic necessity while DIT claims culture and genetics are two causal forces in everyday action and (2) memetics proposed a material basis called a "replicator" (a la Dawkins) or an "interactor" (a la David Hull) while DIT proposes there is no need for a material substrate for replication, nor what geneticists would call "fidelity".
All the above is to say, this book responds to Dawkins' notion of memetics while also motivating the necessity of a science of culture. It positions itself as more ideals while Dawkins' theory is more material (choosing his "brain to brain" analogy over his "mind to mind" analogy) which is kind of odd considering in recent years, we've considered Dawkins to be too idealist and not materialist enough, although I happen to agree with the author's critiques of Dawkins' theory, they do not discredit memetics as a whole. Instead they take riskier claims.
They attach culture to other theories in hypothetical ways that have causal implications. That is to say this theory is riskier because it suggests strong ties to other disciplinary theory, and necessity of these connections. This suggests it should be relatively easy to find flaws empirically with this. However, it isn't clear to me that this is true. As this is very cognitive in nature, it's validation requires us solve the philosophically hard problem of minds. They are constantly referring to suggestive validations by pointing to material actions however and assuming the cognitive reasons. In fact, once the materiality of their arguments are made, I find it difficult to distinquish this theory from Hull's, Wilkins', and (recently) Haig's conception of memetics. Perhaps, as Blackmore opined in her blog, DIT and (early) memetics are essentially the same theory in the end.
As such, this book is valuable in that it suggests a series of hypotheses worthy to be excavated and tested in more recent memetic research. I say "memetic" because largely that is the area of study that has more data at the moment relative to their theory construction and its applicability to digital spaces. The internet claimed "memetics" not "Dual Inheritance Theory", and if we are to believe there is knowledge in evolutionary epistemology, we must see the cultural choice of "meme" as what it should be called regardless of the nuances of theoretical writing.
This is a useful historical look even if significantly dated at this point. It's definitely not a book you should pick up to learn evolution of culture. There are much better works to introduce this at this point.
icywaterfall's review against another edition
4.0
CULTURE IS ESSENTIAL: Culture is crucial for understanding human behaviour; people acquire beliefs and values from the people around them, and you can’t explain human behaviour without taking this reality into account. Culturally acquired ideas are crucially important for explaining a wide range of human behaviour - opinions, beliefs, and attitudes, habits of thought, language, artistic styles, tools and technology, and social rules and political institutions. Culture is part of biology. We have an evolved psychology that shapes what we learn and how we think, and this in turn influences the kind of beliefs and attitudes that spread and persist. Over the evolutionary longhaul, culture has shaped our innate psychology as much as the other way around. Culture cannot be understood without population thinking. Darwin saw that species were populations of organisms that carried a variable pool of inherited information through time. To explain the properties of a species, biologists had to understand how individual events shape this pool of information, causing some variant members of the species to persist and spread, and others to diminish. Definition of culture: information capable of affecting individuals’ behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission. People in culturally distinct groups behave differently, mostly because they have acquired different skills, beliefs, and values, and these differences persist because the people of one generation acquire their beliefs and atittudes from those around them. Population thinking is the key to building a causal account of cultural evolution. We are largely what our genes and our culture make us. A sensible theory of cultural evolution will have to explain why some beliefs and attitudes spread and persist while others disappear. Superorganicism is the view that biology furnishes the blank slate on which culture and personal experience write. But this is wrong because it ignores the rich interconnections between culture and other aspects of our behaviour and anatomy. Culture is as much a part of human biology as walking upright; culture-making brains are the product of more than two million years of more or less gradual increases in brain size and cultural complexity. Further, to ask whether behaviour is determined by genes or environment does not make sense. Genes aren’t blueprints that specify the adult properties of the organism. A better analogy is that genes are like a recipe, but one in which the ingredients, cooking temperature, and so on are set by the environment. In the natural world, proximate causes are typically physiological; birds migrate toward the equator when days shorten because their brain converts changes in day length to hormonal signals that activate migratory behaviour. Ultimate causes are evolutionary; migration is an evolved straegy to exploit the favorable season at higher latitude while passing the harsh winter in less demanding habitats. Natural selection acting on culture is an ultimate cause of human behaviour, just like natural selection acting on genes. The norms and values that predominate in a group plausibly affect the probability that the group is successful, whether it survives, and whether it expands. Suppose that groups having norms that promote group solidarity are more likely to survive than groups lacking this sentiment. This creates a selective pressure that leads to the spread of solidarity. This process may be opposed by an evolved innate psychology that biases what we learn from others, making us more prone to imitate and invent selfish or nepotistic beliefs rather than ones favouring group solidarity.
CULTURE EXISTS: The main purpose of this chapter is to convince the skeptics that culture is necessary, and to show that variation in human behaviour cannot be understood without accounting for beliefs, values and other socially acquired determinants of behaviour. Heritable cultural differences are crucial for understanding human behaviour. Cultural differences account for much human variation; three things could act as proximate causes of this variation.
First, people could have different genes.
Second, genetically similar individuals could live in different environments.
Thirdly, people could have acquired different beliefs, values, and skills; they could have different cultures.
If you move a population into a new territory, will their social structure resemble their new neighbours, or will it be closer to the structure of their ancestors in their ancestral land? The Midwest in America: people from different ethnic backgrounds have dissimilar beliefs about farming and family. Freiburg was full of Germans and Libertyville was full of Yankees. The Germans value farming as a way of life, and they want one son to carry on the family tradition. The Yankees regard their farms as profit-making businesses; they buy and rent land depending on economic conditions, and if the price is right; they sell. This difference leads to different farming practices. Germans are conservative, mainly farming the land they own, while Yankee farmers aggressively expand their operations by renting. In other words, people having different cultural and institutional histories will behave differently in the same environment. Many important differences between human groups result from conservative, transmissible determinants of behaviour - either culture, genes, or persistent institutional differences. This is not because people’s behaviour necessarily depends on the behaviour of others; culture can persist even when the chain of behaviour linking the past to the present is broken. A mere disruption of the overt expression of culture will often fail to erase it; cultures aren’t immutable, however, socialisation by parents can perpetuate substantial portions of a traditional culture in an extremely hostile and radically altered social environment. Two kinds of evidence show that much of teh behavioural differences among groups are not genetic; individual cross-cultural adoptees behave like members of their adopted culture, not the culture of their biological parents. And groups of people often change behaviour much more rapidly than natural selection could change gene frequencies.
- EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGISTS DOWNPLAY CULTURE: Cosmides and Tooby introduced the distinction between epidemiological culture - differences between people that result from different ideas or values acquired from the people around them - and evoked culture - differences that aren’t transmitted, but rather are evoked by the local environment. They believe that anthropologists and historians overestimate the former. They say that culture is not transmitted; rather, children make inferences by observing the behaviour of others, inferences that are constrained by their evolved psychology. They are surely right in stating that every form of learning requires an information-rich innate psychology, and that much of the adaptive complexity we see in cultures stems from this information. However, ignoring transmitted culture completely is a big mistake. The single most adaptive feature of culture is that it allows the gradual, cumulative assembly of adaptations over many generations that no single individual could evoke on his or her own. Cumulative cultural adaptation cannot be based directly on innate, genetically encoded information. There is another way some evolutionary psychologists downplay the role of culture: some think that complex cultural adaptations do not arise gradually and blindly as they do in genetic evolution. New symphonies don’t appear bit by bit as a consequence of the differential spread and elaboration of slightly better and better melodies. Rather they emerge from people’s minds and their functional complexity arises from the action of those minds. Thomas Huxley thought that the new adaptations arose in big jumps and then antural selection accepted or rejected these hopeful monsters; but this is wrong because the likelihood that a complex adaptation will arise by chance is vanishingly small. Individuals are smart, but most of the cultural artefacts that we use (languages, social institutions, etc) are far too complex for even the most gifted innovator to create from scratch. So to sum up, people are different, at least in part, because they acquired different beliefs, attitudes, and values from others. The difference between the range of human variation and that of other animals like baboons demands an evolutionary explanation. Ten million years ago, our ancestors were an apelike species; any theory that hopes to explain the behaviour of contemporary humans must tell us what it is that causes humans to be so variable in their behaviour, and why this was favoured by natural selection.
- CULTURE EVOLVES: we don’t mean to say that cultures progress in a unilinear fashion; species are populations of individuals that carry a pool of genetically acquired information through time; human populations carry a pool of culturally acquired information too, and in order to explain why particular cultures are as they are, we need to keep track of the processes that cause some cultural variants to spread and persist while others disappear. A Darwinian account of culture does not imply that culture must be divisible into tiny, independent genelike bits that are faithfully replicated. Culture is mostly information in brains, and gets transmitted from brain to brain by way of a variety of social learning processes. The vast store of information that exists in every culture must be encoded in some material object; the most important aspects of culture are those stored in our heads. Cultural variant is simply the information stored in people’s heads (memes). What all social learning have in common is that information in one person’s brain generates some behaviour that gives rise to information in a second person’s brain that generates a similar behaviour. Transmission biases are forces that arise because people’s psychology makes them more likely to adopt some beliefs rather than others; this occurs when people preferentially adopt some cultural variants rather than others. Biases are often caused by universal characteristics of human cognition or perception. Inertial processes keep the population the same from one time period to the next. Cultural variants compete: first, they compete for the cognitive resources of the learner; for knowledge that is more difficult to acquire, the cost of learning leads to sharp competition between variants. Second, is for control of behaviour. If a cultural variant doesn’t affect behaviour, it won’t be transmitted; there are no recessive memes that do not influence phenotype yet get transmitted anyway. For natural selection on culture to occur, cultural variants (memes) must compete. All other things being equal, beliefs that cause people to behave in ways that make their beliefs more likely to be transmitted will increase in frequency.
- CULTURE IS AN ADAPTATION: culture is an adaptation. It is usually thought that because individual learning is costly, teaching, imitation allow us to inherit a vast store of useful knowledge while avoiding the costs of learning. But this is wrong. If a population only copied from someone who copied from someone, etc, then no one learns anything and there is no connection to the state of the environment and no reason that copying should be adaptive. How is culture adaptive? The ability to acquire novel behaviours by observation is essential for cumulative cultural change; imitation is the only way of learning that gives rise to cumulative cultural evolution. Adaptation by cumulative cultural evolution is not a byproduct of intelligence and social life, since apes don’t seem to be especially clever imitators. Culture is adaptive when it makes individual learning more effective; imitation may increase the average fitness of learners by allowing organisms to learn more selectively; by becoming a selective learner, an individual gains most of the advantages of both learning and imitation. Culture is adaptive when learning is difficult and environments are unpredictable. Selection favours a heavy reliance on imitation when individual learning is error prone or costly, and environments are neither too variable nor too stable. When these conditions are satisfied, our models suggest that natural selection can favor individuals who pay almost no attention to their own experience, and are almost totally bound to the ‘dead hand of custom’. If people can accurately determine the best behaviour, there there is no need to imitate; you just do it. You don’t need to observe your neighbours to duck into shelter when it rains or find shade when it is hot. If the environment changes rapidly, there is no sense in copying what had worked in the past, because what worked for Mom and Dad will be of little help today. But very few organisms have culture like we do; why? Humans adapt to a vast range of environments, and to exploit this range of habitats, humans use a dizzying diversity of subsistence practices and social systems. Humans can live in a wider range of environments than other primates because culture allows the relatively rapid accumulation of better strategies for exploiting local environments compared with genetic inheritance. Every adaptive system ‘learns’ about its environment by one mechanism; for a given amount of inherited knowledge, a learning mechanism can either have detailed information about a few environments, or less-detailed information about many environments. Human culture allows learning mechanisms to be both more accurate and more general, because cumulative cultural adaptation provides accurate and more-detailed information about the local environment.
- CULTURE IS MALADAPTIVE: reproductive restraint in the richest populations is a striking maladaptation. Most evolutionary social scientists think that such maladaptive behaviour arises because the environments in which modern humans live are radically different from those in which humans evolved. This big mistake hypothesis means that much of modern human behaviour is a big mistake from the genes’ point of view. We will make the case that much human maladaptation is an unavoidable byproduct of cumulative cultural adaptation. Professionals who are childless can succeed culturally as long as they have an important influence on the beliefs and goals of their students, employees, or subordinates. Adaptation and maladaptation have the same evolutionary roots; culture gets us lots of adaptive information but also causes us to acquire many maladaptive traits. From the point of view of a selfish viral gene, it’s fine to harm or kill your host, as long as you leave behind enough copies of yourself, and the same applies to memes, or cultural variants. If holding any cultural variant makes it more likely someone will attain one of these roles and if people in such roles play an important part in social learning, that variant will, all other things being equal, tend to spread. Adaptations always involve tradeoffs; imitation is an adaptive information-gathering system, but it involves tradeoffs; culture gets humans fast cumulative evolution on the cheap, but only if it also makes us vulnerable to selfish cultural variants. Four interrelated tradeoffs conspire to weaken the grip of genetically determined biases on cultural evolution. First, people other than parents are a crucial source of adaptive information. Second, content-biases cannot be made too restrictive without becoming too costly or sacrificing the adaptive flexibility that social learning provides. Third, fast and frugal adaptative heuristics have specific maladaptive side-effects. Fourthly, rogue cultural variants evolve devious strategies to evade the effects of content biases. The modern demographic transition may result from the evolution of selfish cultural variants. The demographic transition is at least partly caused by the increased nonparental cultural transmission associated with modernisation. Modern economies require professionals who earn lots and achieve high status; people who delay marriage and child rearing in order to invest time and energy in education and career advancement have an advantage in this competition. High-status people have a disproportionate influence in cultural transmission, so beliefs and values that lead to success in the professional sector will tend to spread. Because these beliefs will typically lead to lower fertility, family size will drop. The evolution of modern industrial societies embodies two linked but imperfectly correlated revolutions. One is a revolution in production due to industrialisation that boosts the material standard of living. The second is a revolution in the structure of the transmission of ideas of all sorts; the rise of mass media and universal education suddenly exposed people to much more nonparental cultural influence than had been experienced in more traditional societies. Proportionally, the scope for the spread of cultural variation in conflict with genetic fitness increased. The change in the relative importance of nonparental transmission in the modern period is progressive and became massive with the development of cheap mass media. And the more nonparental transmission, the greater the opportunity for maladaptive variants to spread. Rare subcultures manage to successfully ‘resist’ the demographic transition, because they have persistently higher birth-rates than other subcultures, becaus their values and beliefs cause them to have higher birth-rates. The Amish and the Hutterites are among those subcultures. Despite substantial wealth, Anabaptist customs block those same features of cultural evolution that make almost all modern societies susceptible to it. Cultural evolution explains the cultural complexity of the demographic transition: as industrial production and social modernisation began to spread from their heartlands in Britain and France, they met very different patterns of resistance and acceptance. The strength and effectiveness of resistance depended on how beliefs, values, and economic activities structured patterns of nonparental transmission of culture and generated forces that favoured or resisted modern ideas. Cultural maladaptations arise from a design tradeoff; culture allows rapid adaptation to a wide range of environments, but leads to systematic maladaptation as a result. Accurate teaching and imitation combined with relatively weak general-purpose learning mechanisms allow populations to accumulate adaptive information much more rapidly than selection could change gene frequencies.
- NOTHING ABOUT CULTURE MAKES SENSE EXCEPT IN LIGHT OF EVOLUTION; because evolution provides the ultimate explanation for why organisms are the way they are, it is the center of a web of biological explanation that links the work of all the other areas of biology into a single, satisfying, explanatory framework. The ultimate explanation for cultural phenomena lies in understanding the genetic and cultural evolutionary processes that generate them. A proper evolutionary theory of culture should make a major contribution to the unification of the social sciences. It allows a smooth integration of the human sciences with the rest of biology and links them all to one another. The social sciences have been bedevilled by a micro-macro problem; if you start with individual-based behaviour, then how can you scale up to understand society-wide phenomena, and vice versa? The basic biological theory includes genes, individuals, and populations. What happens to the individuals affects the population’s properties, even as indivduals are the prisoners of the gene pool they draw upon.
CULTURE EXISTS: The main purpose of this chapter is to convince the skeptics that culture is necessary, and to show that variation in human behaviour cannot be understood without accounting for beliefs, values and other socially acquired determinants of behaviour. Heritable cultural differences are crucial for understanding human behaviour. Cultural differences account for much human variation; three things could act as proximate causes of this variation.
First, people could have different genes.
Second, genetically similar individuals could live in different environments.
Thirdly, people could have acquired different beliefs, values, and skills; they could have different cultures.
If you move a population into a new territory, will their social structure resemble their new neighbours, or will it be closer to the structure of their ancestors in their ancestral land? The Midwest in America: people from different ethnic backgrounds have dissimilar beliefs about farming and family. Freiburg was full of Germans and Libertyville was full of Yankees. The Germans value farming as a way of life, and they want one son to carry on the family tradition. The Yankees regard their farms as profit-making businesses; they buy and rent land depending on economic conditions, and if the price is right; they sell. This difference leads to different farming practices. Germans are conservative, mainly farming the land they own, while Yankee farmers aggressively expand their operations by renting. In other words, people having different cultural and institutional histories will behave differently in the same environment. Many important differences between human groups result from conservative, transmissible determinants of behaviour - either culture, genes, or persistent institutional differences. This is not because people’s behaviour necessarily depends on the behaviour of others; culture can persist even when the chain of behaviour linking the past to the present is broken. A mere disruption of the overt expression of culture will often fail to erase it; cultures aren’t immutable, however, socialisation by parents can perpetuate substantial portions of a traditional culture in an extremely hostile and radically altered social environment. Two kinds of evidence show that much of teh behavioural differences among groups are not genetic; individual cross-cultural adoptees behave like members of their adopted culture, not the culture of their biological parents. And groups of people often change behaviour much more rapidly than natural selection could change gene frequencies.
- EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGISTS DOWNPLAY CULTURE: Cosmides and Tooby introduced the distinction between epidemiological culture - differences between people that result from different ideas or values acquired from the people around them - and evoked culture - differences that aren’t transmitted, but rather are evoked by the local environment. They believe that anthropologists and historians overestimate the former. They say that culture is not transmitted; rather, children make inferences by observing the behaviour of others, inferences that are constrained by their evolved psychology. They are surely right in stating that every form of learning requires an information-rich innate psychology, and that much of the adaptive complexity we see in cultures stems from this information. However, ignoring transmitted culture completely is a big mistake. The single most adaptive feature of culture is that it allows the gradual, cumulative assembly of adaptations over many generations that no single individual could evoke on his or her own. Cumulative cultural adaptation cannot be based directly on innate, genetically encoded information. There is another way some evolutionary psychologists downplay the role of culture: some think that complex cultural adaptations do not arise gradually and blindly as they do in genetic evolution. New symphonies don’t appear bit by bit as a consequence of the differential spread and elaboration of slightly better and better melodies. Rather they emerge from people’s minds and their functional complexity arises from the action of those minds. Thomas Huxley thought that the new adaptations arose in big jumps and then antural selection accepted or rejected these hopeful monsters; but this is wrong because the likelihood that a complex adaptation will arise by chance is vanishingly small. Individuals are smart, but most of the cultural artefacts that we use (languages, social institutions, etc) are far too complex for even the most gifted innovator to create from scratch. So to sum up, people are different, at least in part, because they acquired different beliefs, attitudes, and values from others. The difference between the range of human variation and that of other animals like baboons demands an evolutionary explanation. Ten million years ago, our ancestors were an apelike species; any theory that hopes to explain the behaviour of contemporary humans must tell us what it is that causes humans to be so variable in their behaviour, and why this was favoured by natural selection.
- CULTURE EVOLVES: we don’t mean to say that cultures progress in a unilinear fashion; species are populations of individuals that carry a pool of genetically acquired information through time; human populations carry a pool of culturally acquired information too, and in order to explain why particular cultures are as they are, we need to keep track of the processes that cause some cultural variants to spread and persist while others disappear. A Darwinian account of culture does not imply that culture must be divisible into tiny, independent genelike bits that are faithfully replicated. Culture is mostly information in brains, and gets transmitted from brain to brain by way of a variety of social learning processes. The vast store of information that exists in every culture must be encoded in some material object; the most important aspects of culture are those stored in our heads. Cultural variant is simply the information stored in people’s heads (memes). What all social learning have in common is that information in one person’s brain generates some behaviour that gives rise to information in a second person’s brain that generates a similar behaviour. Transmission biases are forces that arise because people’s psychology makes them more likely to adopt some beliefs rather than others; this occurs when people preferentially adopt some cultural variants rather than others. Biases are often caused by universal characteristics of human cognition or perception. Inertial processes keep the population the same from one time period to the next. Cultural variants compete: first, they compete for the cognitive resources of the learner; for knowledge that is more difficult to acquire, the cost of learning leads to sharp competition between variants. Second, is for control of behaviour. If a cultural variant doesn’t affect behaviour, it won’t be transmitted; there are no recessive memes that do not influence phenotype yet get transmitted anyway. For natural selection on culture to occur, cultural variants (memes) must compete. All other things being equal, beliefs that cause people to behave in ways that make their beliefs more likely to be transmitted will increase in frequency.
- CULTURE IS AN ADAPTATION: culture is an adaptation. It is usually thought that because individual learning is costly, teaching, imitation allow us to inherit a vast store of useful knowledge while avoiding the costs of learning. But this is wrong. If a population only copied from someone who copied from someone, etc, then no one learns anything and there is no connection to the state of the environment and no reason that copying should be adaptive. How is culture adaptive? The ability to acquire novel behaviours by observation is essential for cumulative cultural change; imitation is the only way of learning that gives rise to cumulative cultural evolution. Adaptation by cumulative cultural evolution is not a byproduct of intelligence and social life, since apes don’t seem to be especially clever imitators. Culture is adaptive when it makes individual learning more effective; imitation may increase the average fitness of learners by allowing organisms to learn more selectively; by becoming a selective learner, an individual gains most of the advantages of both learning and imitation. Culture is adaptive when learning is difficult and environments are unpredictable. Selection favours a heavy reliance on imitation when individual learning is error prone or costly, and environments are neither too variable nor too stable. When these conditions are satisfied, our models suggest that natural selection can favor individuals who pay almost no attention to their own experience, and are almost totally bound to the ‘dead hand of custom’. If people can accurately determine the best behaviour, there there is no need to imitate; you just do it. You don’t need to observe your neighbours to duck into shelter when it rains or find shade when it is hot. If the environment changes rapidly, there is no sense in copying what had worked in the past, because what worked for Mom and Dad will be of little help today. But very few organisms have culture like we do; why? Humans adapt to a vast range of environments, and to exploit this range of habitats, humans use a dizzying diversity of subsistence practices and social systems. Humans can live in a wider range of environments than other primates because culture allows the relatively rapid accumulation of better strategies for exploiting local environments compared with genetic inheritance. Every adaptive system ‘learns’ about its environment by one mechanism; for a given amount of inherited knowledge, a learning mechanism can either have detailed information about a few environments, or less-detailed information about many environments. Human culture allows learning mechanisms to be both more accurate and more general, because cumulative cultural adaptation provides accurate and more-detailed information about the local environment.
- CULTURE IS MALADAPTIVE: reproductive restraint in the richest populations is a striking maladaptation. Most evolutionary social scientists think that such maladaptive behaviour arises because the environments in which modern humans live are radically different from those in which humans evolved. This big mistake hypothesis means that much of modern human behaviour is a big mistake from the genes’ point of view. We will make the case that much human maladaptation is an unavoidable byproduct of cumulative cultural adaptation. Professionals who are childless can succeed culturally as long as they have an important influence on the beliefs and goals of their students, employees, or subordinates. Adaptation and maladaptation have the same evolutionary roots; culture gets us lots of adaptive information but also causes us to acquire many maladaptive traits. From the point of view of a selfish viral gene, it’s fine to harm or kill your host, as long as you leave behind enough copies of yourself, and the same applies to memes, or cultural variants. If holding any cultural variant makes it more likely someone will attain one of these roles and if people in such roles play an important part in social learning, that variant will, all other things being equal, tend to spread. Adaptations always involve tradeoffs; imitation is an adaptive information-gathering system, but it involves tradeoffs; culture gets humans fast cumulative evolution on the cheap, but only if it also makes us vulnerable to selfish cultural variants. Four interrelated tradeoffs conspire to weaken the grip of genetically determined biases on cultural evolution. First, people other than parents are a crucial source of adaptive information. Second, content-biases cannot be made too restrictive without becoming too costly or sacrificing the adaptive flexibility that social learning provides. Third, fast and frugal adaptative heuristics have specific maladaptive side-effects. Fourthly, rogue cultural variants evolve devious strategies to evade the effects of content biases. The modern demographic transition may result from the evolution of selfish cultural variants. The demographic transition is at least partly caused by the increased nonparental cultural transmission associated with modernisation. Modern economies require professionals who earn lots and achieve high status; people who delay marriage and child rearing in order to invest time and energy in education and career advancement have an advantage in this competition. High-status people have a disproportionate influence in cultural transmission, so beliefs and values that lead to success in the professional sector will tend to spread. Because these beliefs will typically lead to lower fertility, family size will drop. The evolution of modern industrial societies embodies two linked but imperfectly correlated revolutions. One is a revolution in production due to industrialisation that boosts the material standard of living. The second is a revolution in the structure of the transmission of ideas of all sorts; the rise of mass media and universal education suddenly exposed people to much more nonparental cultural influence than had been experienced in more traditional societies. Proportionally, the scope for the spread of cultural variation in conflict with genetic fitness increased. The change in the relative importance of nonparental transmission in the modern period is progressive and became massive with the development of cheap mass media. And the more nonparental transmission, the greater the opportunity for maladaptive variants to spread. Rare subcultures manage to successfully ‘resist’ the demographic transition, because they have persistently higher birth-rates than other subcultures, becaus their values and beliefs cause them to have higher birth-rates. The Amish and the Hutterites are among those subcultures. Despite substantial wealth, Anabaptist customs block those same features of cultural evolution that make almost all modern societies susceptible to it. Cultural evolution explains the cultural complexity of the demographic transition: as industrial production and social modernisation began to spread from their heartlands in Britain and France, they met very different patterns of resistance and acceptance. The strength and effectiveness of resistance depended on how beliefs, values, and economic activities structured patterns of nonparental transmission of culture and generated forces that favoured or resisted modern ideas. Cultural maladaptations arise from a design tradeoff; culture allows rapid adaptation to a wide range of environments, but leads to systematic maladaptation as a result. Accurate teaching and imitation combined with relatively weak general-purpose learning mechanisms allow populations to accumulate adaptive information much more rapidly than selection could change gene frequencies.
- NOTHING ABOUT CULTURE MAKES SENSE EXCEPT IN LIGHT OF EVOLUTION; because evolution provides the ultimate explanation for why organisms are the way they are, it is the center of a web of biological explanation that links the work of all the other areas of biology into a single, satisfying, explanatory framework. The ultimate explanation for cultural phenomena lies in understanding the genetic and cultural evolutionary processes that generate them. A proper evolutionary theory of culture should make a major contribution to the unification of the social sciences. It allows a smooth integration of the human sciences with the rest of biology and links them all to one another. The social sciences have been bedevilled by a micro-macro problem; if you start with individual-based behaviour, then how can you scale up to understand society-wide phenomena, and vice versa? The basic biological theory includes genes, individuals, and populations. What happens to the individuals affects the population’s properties, even as indivduals are the prisoners of the gene pool they draw upon.
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