Chapter 14.                             Part E 

People in varied cultures in many parts of the world also gradually come to establish and use a market square in the middle of town, and to hire police to patrol in the market to stop thieves. Getting fish out of the water and into human stomachs is healthy for those humans who learn to catch fish. Marketplaces, policemen, and currencies are efficient, practical social constructs because they help the society that has them to maximize the usefulness of what the citizens produce, i.e. to allow capital to flow, in a timely way, to where it can do the most good in human terms. 

Thus, certain meme-complexes that we call “values” or “principles” steer us toward creating institutions that are advantageous for the tribe and especially for those sub-groups in the tribe that believe in the effective values most devoutly. The values (meme complexes) survive in meme-space because they foster behavior patterns that work, and thus the members of the tribe who hold these values most passionately survive to pass the values on to their young.  

                                  

                                                         greeting American style 

                             

                                                                greeting Japanese style 

It is true that deep differences between the meme combinations and morés of the different societies of the real, hard world can be found and found in large numbers. But to say, as some moral relativists do (3.), that these cultures are therefore incommensurable is to abandon humanity to war for all time. And it simply isn't true.

                     

                                                   English poet-musician Gordon Sumner (Sting)

In the first place, though there are differences, there are a lot of similarities in our ways of life. At least some of the highest peaks in the "meme-scapes" of all cultures coincide. Everywhere on earth, people respect and value wisdom, courage, love, and freedom. We adhere to moral values and the patterns of behavior that they lead to, in varying degrees, and in varying ways and combinations, in our various cultures. But the areas of thinking that we have in common far outweigh our differences. As Gordon Sumner (Sting) said in the 1980's, "The Russians love their children too."   

In the second place, we can learn. We can learn to fish in four ways instead of just one. We can learn to talk in four or even more languages. We can learn to refrain from giving in to violent impulses that cause us to beat women or children who have displeased us. We can learn to imprison rather than execute convicted murderers. We can learn to eat vegan and stop using livestock completely. 

The values discussed in this book – values that derive from, and are tailored by and for, the physical universe – are pointing us toward a society that will place ever greater emphasis on imagination, self-discipline, education, citizenship, pluralism, and good will. Courage, widsom, freedom, and love. We want and need a global human society in a state of dynamic equilibrium of ever greater internal tensions, capable of responding successfully to an ever greater range of challenges, both short and long term. Then, we can spread our species out toward our destiny. Space.

Chapter 14.                       Part D 

Similarly, courage and wisdom are considered to be values everywhere. These values are so familiar as to be seen by almost all of the people in the world today to be perquisites of the human condition, but they aren't that automatic at all. There is nothing in the genes of the human animal that would make one predict these values occurring in societies everywhere, as naturally as walking on two feet. Bipedal motion arises almost automatically out of our genetic design. Respecting elders doesn't. Certain values are found in societies all over the world because they work. They enable a human society to survive and flourish. That is convergence in social evolution. Other concepts in the biological sciences also apply in analogous ways, as we should expect.

                            

                                                   graphic illustration of the fitness landscape concept 

One of the subtlest is modeled in what evolutionary biologists call a “fitness landscape”, which is the model from which the concept of convergence derives. (1.) If we imagine drawing a graph which shows how two genetic traits, say size and coloring, interact to give a size-color survival index for a given species in a given environment, we then can find on the graph the place where the coloring and the size combine to give the optimal survival chances for that species in that environment. Next we can imagine plotting a similar graph but in three dimensions, with an x axis, a y axis, and a z axis as we learned to do in high school Math class. The picture that would result in three dimensions would show a theoretical "landscape" with ridges and peaks and valleys. The “peaks” indicate where the best combination of coloring, size, and, let's say, coat density lie for that species' survival in the environment for which we have drawn the three dimensional graph.

Geneticists speak of fitness landscapes of ten, fifty, and two hundred dimensions as if what they are talking about is totally clear. No graph of any such landscape could be pictured by the human mind, of course, but with the mathematical models that we have now, and with computers to do the calculations, geneticists can usually predict what niches in an emerging environment will contain which kinds of species and in how long.

The concept of a fitness landscape – which is not a real landscape, remember, since it only exists in imaginary, mathematical space – can then be applied to the combinations of memes in human cultures, combinations that produce morés and patterns of behavior in the real people living real lives. The concept of a meme – a basic unit of human thinking – is a tenuous one, and it is still considered by some social scientists to be unproven and of uncertain value. (see Dawkins' "Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes" in "The Mind's I" for a basic explanation of the meme concept.) (2.) But for now, if we take it as a given and move on with it, the results of the thinking that the meme concept enables support what this book is trying to show.

We can construct, in imaginary, mathematical space, a fitness landscape for memes, or in other words, for unit-ideas that humans use to build up systems of beliefs about what the universe is made of, what forces and fields give direction to the movements of the things in it - including us, the thinking things - and what we can and should be doing in this mix. That fitness landscape, that multi-dimensional graph of human thought patterns, will be very similar for all individuals in a given culture. What I mean by "red" and "round" and "sweet" and "tangy" is pretty close to what other English speakers mean by these terms. So is what I mean by the term "apple" or “plum”. My idea of beauty roughly coincides with that of other Canadians' ideas of beauty. Even how we think of terms like "good", "wise" and "democracy" largely coincide. They enable us to communicate effectively most of the time. I am a son of my culture.

Useful concepts – i.e. meme combinations that correspond to peaks on the fitness landscape – are "found" by the people in a culture over generations of that culture's evolution because through trial and error, the concepts prove effective. They enable people in that culture who are capable of thinking with them, and then using them to design behavior patterns, to survive and flourish. They are almost never the only combinations of ideas or behavior patterns that could work in that environment. Other people of other cultures with other similar, but not identical morés, could survive there. Human societies are very capable and versatile, as are the various species in a living ecosystem.

                     

                                                            stilts fishermen (Sri Lanka) 

                        

                                                      spearfishing (Hawaii) 

 

                                                 Innu woman ice-fishing (Canada)   

                                                                    Yawalapiti bow-fishing (Brazil)

But the point to see is that whichever culture-society-tribe settles down there, it will come to think with memes, concepts, values, and morés that can be formed into combinations that enable them to achieve the requirements of survival. People can learn to fish with hooks or nets or spears or gaffs or baskets, depending on what materials are available in the region and what kinds of technical models are already familiar to the people of the given culture. But the chances are very good that if there are lots of fish in a body of water, then any tribe that settles down next to it will learn, by one method or another, to fish.

Chapter 14.                              Part C

Of course, there are also some even more nuanced ways of seeing this labor-management sub-system within our society. One truth is that each business leader is secretly hoping that s/he can achieve a modest settlement with her/his workers, but that the rest of the workers in their society will get generous new contracts. Then there will be more disposable income around in the economy, money that consumers, who are just workers in their off-work hours, can spend on that subtler business person's goods and services.

The complementary truth about any one group of workers, of course, is that while they want generous rates of pay in their new contract, they don’t really want to see these generous pay packets being handed out in all the contracts signed in other sectors of their society. Then - the workers know - goods will be cheaper, relative to their wages, than those goods were just a few months ago. Workers, if they are honest, will admit that they want the company they work for to do well. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding at times, but smart workers know that such men and women, the hardhearted watchers of the bottom line, as long as they also know how to adapt to innovations and to market their goods in creative ways, are the ones that the company has to have if it is to stay in business.

In short, in the modern business world, smart business people don't espouse the extreme called “Social Darwinism” any more than smart workers espouse Marxism. Democracy in all of its sectors has to run by maintaining interactions and tensions between complex, balanced systems of concepts and values.

                                                  wolves closing in to kill a caribou doe 

In this book, wisdom is seen as being a prime virtue. In the economic sector of our society's way of functioning, we all need to be wise enough to grasp a lesson. When there is a lesson as glaring as this one to be found in the history recorded by our forbears, refusing to learn that lesson would not just be unwise; it would be suicidal. Modern business leaders and modern union leaders, however much they may dislike each other, have by and large grown wise enough to see that they need each other. Dynamic balances make our society go. It is only the adjusting of the balance that we argue about. Over time, the wolf pack keeps the caribou herd strong, and vice-versa. 

Actually, this whole discussion of the ways in which social evolution driven by cultural changes can be compared to physiological/anatomical evolution driven by genetic variation is more fruitful by far than we have made clear up to this point. And this book builds its thesis on the assumption that the comparisons and analogies are not merely figures of speech. The idea that cultural adaptations are the key driving forces in human survival is assumed in this book because that idea fits the evidence.

                                                        prickly pear cactus (Utah, U.S.A.) 

                                                                   sedum spurium (Iran) 

Convergence, for example, is the name given in Biology to the phenomenon seen in species which are widely separated geographically, but that, after millennia of evolution, end up using strategies for survival that are practically identical. Desert plants of widely different species, in different, widely separated deserts, have waxy leaves. They also put off flowering and reproducing for years until that rare desert downpour arrives.   

                                                     Seminole elder with toddlers  

                            

                                                        Zulu woman with grandchild 

Similarly, nearly all human societies that have made it into the present age respect, value, and heed their elderly. For pre-literate tribes, an old person was a walking encyclopedia of the tribe's accumulated knowledge. What the old had stored up in their heads could save lives, even a whole tribe. This is convergence in the cultural realm.

Chapter 14.                   Part B 

But let’s return to our main point. A kind of field underlies time. At least two different types of codes guide living matter across that field, out of the past, across the present, and into the future. These two types are the genetic and the cultural. Other life-forms elsewhere in the universe may have found formulas for neatly balancing the momenta of these two codes, but in our case, the human case, the relationships between these two kinds of programming – genetic and cultural – are not yet well understood. However, the important point that we can still make, and that I emphasize in this book, is that the cultural mode of evolution, that has emerged in natural history so recently, is able to respond to environmental changes and pressures in ways that are every bit as subtle, and, more importantly, as material in their consequences, as the genetic mode is. Humans outsurvive, out-manoeuver, and outlast all other forms of life on this planet.

Thus, a digression on the analogies that exist between the genetic way of evolution and the cultural one is in order here. The parallels have been noted before, by the Social Darwinists in particular. However, the conclusions of the Social Darwinists are considered by most people today to be disgusting, and rightly so. Social Darwinists conclude that rich people are rich because they are superior, to put it bluntly. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society, while the workers, who in many places in the world even now are still miserably poor, deserve to be so because they don't know how to run much of anything.

Some rich Frenchmen a few decades ago lived by a similar code and found to their sorrow that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade those who still want to live by that code and who pretend that the French Revolution was only an "exception that proved the rule", I offer the much harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. All of this evidence has taught some hard lessons to the nineteenth century-style Social Darwinists in societies all over the world. If you want to live, be nice. 

But how could it have been otherwise? The whole social milieu in which the Social Darwinists of earlier times lived and carried on their daily activities was not very loving or free or wise or even brave. They saw cruel indifference, wastefulness, and arrogance as being necessities of human society. Subsequent experience in countries all over the world has shown that societies which contain more compassion and justice can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today know it. They will not accept exploitation, misery, and bare subsistence as necessities of social living anymore.

                                     Teamsters' Union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934

For a paragraph or two then, let’s consider an example which shows how values in real life must reach dynamic equilibrium in order for us simply to function. I want to consider this particular example of how values shape human relations partly because it fits neatly here and partly because it can be seen as a paradigm of how humans today really do relate in all areas of their lives, professional and personal.

The captain of industry in the West today has times when he hates and despises unions, but he has come to accept that if workers are not paid a fair percentage of what the company is taking in every year, they will work less and less efficiently. He may find ways of retaliating, but then the cycle will just deepen and worsen with every passing year. If the obstinacy on both sides becomes hardened enough, then violence is inevitable. If those who own the means of production – farms, dams, mines, factories, etc. – in this society, get ever meaner and more incorrigible in their attitudes, the whole country will, indeed, eventually break down into revolution and chaos. To prevent such chaos - to preserve his way of life, in other words - the smart industrialist must have ambition and drive (courage), but also wisdom. A smart owner and/or CEO works with, not against, his workers.  

Thus, we have learned, by trial and painful error, to aim for balance. Workers in the Western democracies have rights, for example, to safe working conditions and free, collective bargaining, and smart business people negotiate with unions. Contracts are arrived at by debate and compromise. In fact, the business people who are the most successful in the West today are the ones who train specifically to be skillful at labor-management negotiations.

                                       Boeing union-management bargaining - Seattle, 2008

On the other hand, in their hearts, most union leaders today know that they have to respect a company's ability to pay. They ask for wages and benefits for their members right up to that line, but most of them don't try to push the owners past that brink. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders must have drive and wisdom in balance as well. On the other hand again, most business leaders in the West have accepted that as long as prices go up, workers are going to expect wages to go up. Making her/his business or factory more efficient by smarter management, research and development, etc., rather than by union-busting, is what the ethical, deserving business person does. Thus, most attempts at strike-breaking indicate not managerial competence, but incompetence.

Chapter 14               Cultural Evolution And Genetic Evolution: Parallels                Part A

 

                                

What makes the biomass, the living ecosystem, of Earth so different from any other entity that we have discovered in the universe - so far - is the way that the whole interconnected system tends to keep getting more as we move forward in time. All other entities in the known universe shred and spindle out across the time axis. But life on this planet has formed a system of fibers that somehow keep pulling in more and more matter-energy, trapping it, organizing it, and using it to keep making ever increasing masses of that same, living matter, thus weaving the biomass of Earth.

The kinds of forces that somehow create life, this anti-entropy pattern in the flows of matter, are still – at least by us – poorly understood. There are programs written into the matter in the strands, codes that tell them how to make life expand instead of dwindle, shred, and fizzle out. We know that the main program for most of the species on Earth is the one written in DNA, the basic molecule in the genetic system of life's programming.

But the main point of this book is that in the case of one living strand, namely that which composes the human species, the main programming mechanism uses not replications of a code in physical molecules, but  small coded energy exchanges (words, looks, etc.) between fibers in the (human) strand to upload another, more nimble, responsive program, the one that we call “culture”. Note that this metaphor of threads and weaving tries, however inadequately, to portray a miracle. Life goes against the natural flow of entropy, the normal flow of the universe. Life shouldn’t be, but there it is, and, even though we can’t say precisely how or why it is, we have to get on with it.

            The model is an inadequate one, but then so are physicists’ models of matter and energy. All models used in the sciences prove limited. Electrons are not little bullets. 

            The important fact that we now need to stress, the fact which the cultural evolution model implies, is that values are designed, by the pressures of evolution, to respond to what is real. Living matter, with humanity as an ever growing strand within it, moves forward through time only in certain patterns, not randomly. Just as electrons may inhabit only certain energy shells around a nucleus and iron filings scatter about a magnet oriented along the lines of force in the magnet's field created, protoplasm moves forward through time only in those channels of energy flow that suit it and its way of existing. Living things' genetic programs - and, in the human species, cultural programs - make it possible for us to find and widen the physically and chemically favorable, optimally life-supporting, constantly shifting channels, on land, in the sea, and in the air.

                                                  NASA artist's imagining of first humans on Mars

            There are patterns here. We have decades of research in Evolutionary Sociology ahead of us, designing models of cultural evolution and testing them against History and then planning – jointly, as citizens of a democracy – how we may best use the knowledge gained to consciously shape the behavior patterns of all of us, and of all of our children, in ways that will maximize our courage, wisdom, freedom, and love and so lead to ever expanding biospheres, on Earth and beyond.

However, our accepting that there are patterns to human cultural evolution and that it is not random has enormous implications before we even begin our research. If this model of reality is roughly correct, time can be viewed from outside of time as a kind of field. In order to survive and flourish, all living things must practice patterns of behaviors which steer them into the life-sustaining, "Goldilocks" parts of the energy streams (not to hot, not too cold, not to fast, not to slow, not too large, not too small). The best values codes steer us into patterns of group movement that maximize our survival probabilities. At this early stage of our history, we don't understand, and don't see down, the path to survival very well. But we can see that the largest of these patterns are the ones that we describe with the terms "freedom", "love", "courage", and "wisdom".

                                                           "Past, Present, Future"   (Victor Bregeda) 

                 Chapter 13.                        Part H 

         Another interesting feature of the way in which values drive society's behavior patterns and morés is the paradoxical design or dynamic equilibrium values clusters seem to exhibit. Values are designed in matched pairs. As one value drives humans toward a particular set of behavior patterns, it is tempered with a complementary one which gives focus to, and attenuates the other, and cuts down on the excesses that the undiluted use of the first value might lead to. Our guide here is Nature. She creates endless arrays and clusters of relationships by balancing cooperating and competing forces. 

            If our young people were filled only with aggression (“daring/courage”, as they saw it), they would die off constantly, in large numbers, hurling themselves at cars, cliffs, oceans, outer space, and each other. But they are also encouraged to acquire judgment (“wisdom”, as their elders see it), which will direct them to practice courage in ways that (probably) will benefit, rather than harm, them and their society. Be aggressive, assertive, and ambitious, but aim to use your drive to become an entrepreneur, a scientist, a doctor, an athlete, an artist, or a musician, not a criminal or a highway casualty. And, in the end, bring a human society together out of savagery, i.e. what would have been there if there had been no human values at all.  

            Some societies, and some individuals don’t balance courage with intelligence very well; excesses result. But the overall movement, for our species, in spite of the pain, or more accurately, guided by the pain, over time, is toward a social ecosystem of ever greater vigor, wisdom, tolerance, and diversity. On this Earth, on Mars, and on outward. Nothing living sits still; we evolve or we die.

            Freedom, as a value programmed into kids, also is really useful to society. It drives us all, but the young especially, to develop talents and to live motivated lifestyles. But if it wasn't complemented and tempered with love, freedom as a social value would beget cliques and sub-cultures, then prejudice, then strife, then anarchy. Brotherly love solves this dilemma for society. Love seemed so crucial to Jesus that he exhorted his disciples to aim to live by love above all other virtues. Over and over, he said it was the one thing that he had taught them that they must not forget. Implicitly, he was saying that all other values – even courage and wisdom, and their benefits – accrue from love.       

             

            Thus humans sustain and spread their societies by testing and practicing lifestyles that seem paradoxical to anyone who looks for all phenomena to be reduced to simple parts. Our behaviors and the values that drive them mirror the balance principle of their prototype, i.e. the ecosystem of the Earth. A culture is a self-monitoring and self-regulating system that is designed to respond to reality within strategically set limits or parameters, i.e. the values that it teaches to its citizens. Our morés can seem to be built on logical contradicitons, but they are anything but. Rather, opposing forces, by their constant interactions, create dynamic equilibria. This is basic systems theory. We couldn’t survive long in this uncertain material reality, as individuals or societies, if our lives were otherwise.

            Furthermore, to pursue this line of thought, we know that the matter in the universe itself at levels of resolution far smaller than the simplest life forms is pulled into its shapes, in fact, into its existence, by balanced sets of opposing forces. The earth in its orbit is being pulled in toward the sun by gravity and flung away from the sun by centrifugal force. In this dynamic state, our planet orbits through a band of space fit for the thing we call “life”. The nuclear strong force and weak force alternately tend to crush matter out of existence or dissipate it into nothingness. In balance, they pull the nuclei of all the atoms around us into their shapes. Electrons are held in their orbits by a balance of forces, like the planets and stars. In finding ways of balancing courage with wisdom, and freedom with love, human societies only mirror the universe itself.

  We need internal tensions in our communities. Pluralism is an indicator of a dynamic, vigorous society. Societies that aim to be monolithic and homogenous in design and practice lack vigor and resourcefulness. A democracy may seem to its critics to be ennervated by the energies its people waste in endless arguing. But in the long haul, in a universe in which we cannot know what surprises may be coming in the next day, year, or century, diversity and debate are what make us strong. Indulging in self-deluding, wistful thoughts of ending uncertainty and its attached anxieties leads us away from real love for our neighbors. Therefore, love is not merely "nice"; it's vital. It has brought us this far, and it is all that may save us.

                                                                   homeless man in America 

A basic Buddhist truth is that life is hard. Another is that only love can drive out hate. Jesus' number one command to us all: love one another as I have loved you. These codes have not survived because a bunch of old men said they should; they have survived because they enable their human carriers to survive. In short, our oldest, most general values have survived because they work. 

   

                                                  Socrates talking with an Athenian woman

                                                                       (painting by Monsiaux) 

Courage is the human answer to entropy, the adversity of reality. Wisdom tempers courage. Freedom is the human response to (quantum) uncertainty. Love guides freedom. Diligence, responsibility, and humility and many other values are hybrids of the four prime ones. They show their real value only on a huge scale, as the daily actions of millions of people, over thousands of years, in social ecosystems of greater and greater internal dynamism, keep evolving and getting good results. But values are not merely nice theories or trivial preferences, like preferences for specific flavors of ice cream or brands of perfume. They are large scale, human responses to what is real.

And the largest purpose of philosophers is to give ordinary folk such clarity of understanding – by precept and example – of what "right" is that people feel renewed and inspired enough to keep getting up and trying again. 

                        Notes 

1.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0004; especially part XXXIV "Self-Surpassing".

2. https://archive.org/details/broadstoneofhono02digbiala

   

3.http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/34/

4. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/#SocPla

                        Chapter 13.               Part G                               

                                                           propaganda poster for the Cuban Revolution 

        Ultimately, all societies must exist in material reality, and if some of a society’s citizens are not experiencing adversity or uncertainty and so are feeling no need to practice courage, wisdom, love, and freedom, this fact only means that other citizens are handling more than their share, and buffering or insulating the lives of the spoiled and deluded few. In the past three centuries, complacency of a nation's elites has more and more frequently brought revolution and the overthrow of an old, corrupt order. (e.g. France, Russia, China, Cuba, etc.) Marx was right in this at least: as civilization grinds forward, literacy spreads, ideas spread, and more and more ordinary people, in larger and larger groups, become aware of their collective power. Arrogant, abusive aristocrats, bureaucrats, theocrats, and plutocrats are less and less likely to be tolerated, in societies all over this world, with each year that passes.  

But we also must not lose sight of the larger view: even revolutions are merely group behaviors that are contained within the cultural evolution model. They differ from social evolution in degree of chaos, but not in effect. Society's main mission is to find more and more dynamic balances among its values clusters and so to grow constantly more courageous, intelligent, venturesome, and loving. 

Some social changes contribute to the building of new values/morés clusters and others contribute to the destruction of old ones. Some do both at once. The important point to see for the purposes in this book is that this inclination towards unceasing positing and testing – an inclination which the evidence shows is programmed into us genetically, and which, thus, constantly puts some people in every society at odds with that society’s morés – is an unalterable part of our nature. And luckily so. It makes our cultures evolve. It gives us our statesmen, scientists, artists, and eccentrics, and they enable us to respond to this ever-changing physical reality and thus to evolve, economically and socially, in a timely way.

                    

                                    slums of Manila (evidence of a society not dealing well with change)

  Externally, of course, reality's uncertainty and adversity are always weathering, eroding, and jolting the body of any society, compelling it to deal with change. When a society no longer deals effectively with these jolts and pressures (e.g. drought, war, famine, plague, overpopulation, pollution, economic and technological advances, etc.), then by one process or another, it is sooner or later superseded by a society that does.

 

                      bee sipping nectar while pollinating a flower (mutualism in nature)   

                                                                    (note pollen-coated legs) 

                     Chapter 13.                           Part F                                     

                                                      

                                                    Thomas Hobbes, English political philosopher

            At minimum, citizens have to cooperate in large majority to create and use a process built into their society that will enable them to live, work, do business, and settle disputes without violence. For enlightened modern nations in this twenty-first century, this is the rule of law. The law is not perfect, but we do not live in a perfect world. However, people in the large majority sense that whatever the flaws in our legal system, it is infinitely preferable to anarchy. As Hobbes famously put the matter, life for humans with no system of social order in place is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".   

            We should note here that for the citizens living in a given society, the ways in which values and behaviors arise can seem very difficult to analyze. The values that a society lived by when it was first growing stronger can get lost for generations before the whole system starts to unravel. This is why trying to find constants in history can seem so frustrating. The consequences of a tribe's devising updates for its code of values, or its laziness in adhering blindly to its old programs, can take generations to show up, and the consequences can be obscured under mounds of irrelevant trivia.

            But then again, we should not be surprised at the apparent gradualness, from our limited perspectives, of history's processes. A thousand years is fifty human generations. In evolutionary terms, a span of fifty generations is trivial. In normal, genetic evolution, a thousand generations often have to pass before a new anatomical feature can prove itself. 

            The evidence of history indicates that a new value, with the cultural-behavioral morés that are implied by it, and attached to it, can prove itself much more rapidly than a new anatomical or physiological variation can. Science produced the cannon, for example, and it changed everything. This evidence, therefore, supports the view that the cultural-behavioral mode of evolution is superior to the genetic mode in a very basic sense. Cultural evolution responds to, and even causes, environmental changes in a more timely way and thus outruns genetic evolution. Cultural change seems slow in our limited view, but it is actually very quick compared to biological change. And most cultural experiments don't take a thousand years. Only the very profound ones do. 

            Some societies have worked out sets of values and behaviors that have led them to deal with their environments so effectively that for generations, even centuries, the citizens of such a society may come to believe that they have found the answers to life’s riddles (as was the case in Rome and in Victorian England and is presently the case in some nations of the West). These citizens may create sub-environments that are well insulated from harsh contact with the uncertainty and adversity of the material universe. People of wealth and indolence can get so insulated that they come to take their lifestyle for granted; values like love, courage, wisdom, and freedom then come to be thought of, by the nation’s elites, as being old-fashioned notions for peasants, notions that subtle, worldly adults no longer need. In reality, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality, and it will keep right on being hard and unpredictable, demanding courage and wisdom, love and freedom of us.