Evolutions, Biological and Cultural

                                 Olympic women's marathon competitors, 2012

                            (credit: Aurelien Guichard, via Wikimedia Commons)

In some recent posts, I have referred to the parallels between biological evolution, the process by which living species change over millennia, and the process of human cultural evolution. This is a useful, fruitful comparison, so I want to discuss it a bit further today.

The ways that living species and ecosystems change are shaped by two main general principles: genetic variation and natural selection.

Every living thing contains some core DNA that directs how that living thing will be built up from atoms and molecules, how it will interact with other things, living and non-living, in its environment, how it will reproduce itself, and how it will wear out and terminate. Die. The fate of all living things in the end.

Humans, like most living things of our type, i.e. mammals, are conceived in the uteruses of females of our species, born out of our mothers’ bodies, nurtured for fifteen to twenty years, and sent out into our physical environments, which usually contain a lot of others of our kind. These others are usually like us in anatomy, but also in cultural programming. We’re born, nurtured, educated, and sent out into our environments to live as independent members of the tribe. We usually find a partner to mate with, and the whole process begins again.

All living things follow a very similar pattern. Really simple organisms don’t use sexual reproduction. Each of them simply divides over and over again and their numbers grow in their locale for as long as they can do so. But otherwise, unicellular organisms are very similar in their life basics to complex organisms. Come into existence, feed, excrete, reproduce, die.

                                         Unicellular organism (paramecium)

                                (credit: Barfooz, via Wikimedia Commons)

But studied over time, life reveals that it contains much more. Living things don’t merely reproduce themselves and so survive in their offspring. They keep changing in ways that enable them to adapt to, and survive in, their changing physical surroundings.

Living things clearly fall into groups. Most of the group members look like each other and can only reproduce by mating with each other. But the groups, or “species”, as we call them, also change as they go forward. The members of the group gradually, over generations, take on new forms and behaviors till in 50 or 100 generations the members of the group look and act quite differently from their ancestors. The changes come by small steps, and in each generation, individuals whose special traits are not effective in enabling those individuals to survive die out before they can reproduce. They take their genes out of the pool of genes available to the whole species. Unusual coat markings, for example, attract predators that get their bearers killed. In desperate cases when environmental changes come rapidly, sometimes whole species become unfit and die out.

They die out because conditions in the environment around them change faster than the species can adapt. More often, however, some members of the species better suited to the changing conditions do survive, adapt, have offspring,  and pass their fitter genes on to a new generation of the species.

   

                                Artist's conception of the dodo bird (now extinct)

                          (credit: Bazza Da Rambler, via Wikimedia Commons)

Real environments change often and sometimes drastically. An ice age arrives, a drought sets in, a volcano erupts, blight wipes out a forest. One marvels at how living species manage to adapt and survive. What gives life such tenacity?

The answer is that members of a species may be very much alike in anatomy and behavior, and they may be capable of reproducing with the members of the opposite sex of their species, but no two of them are ever exactly the same. There are always small differences in intelligence, size, coloration, speed, strength, resistance to disease, heat, cold, hunger, and so on.

When an organism reproduces, it passes some of its attributes on to its young via the DNA that is implanted in the young one’s cell nuclei. But not all of a parent’s attributes get passed on to its young. Some inherited traits come from the other parent and some come through a parent from earlier ancestors. Some of a new individual’s traits, in other words, may have lain dormant in the DNA of one of its parents, and not shown up in the parent at all, only to turn up now, maybe generations since its last occurrence. Red hair, blue eyes, large stature, musical ability, reasoning ability, sprinting speed …lots of traits can skip one or several generations. Inherited DNA keeps getting stirred up. In fact, DNA sometimes even gets re-arranged by outside forces (like radiation, for example). New gene combinations, and living styles shaped by those new combinations, keep emerging. Thus, living species are always subtly morphing into new forms.  

So this is the first big point to get about all living things: they are experiments, every one of them, all the time. Life is always trying out new design ideas.

   

                                                 

                             leopard (credit: Srikaanth Sekar, via Wikimedia Commons)

   

                                      Black panther (a color variation of the leopard) 

                                   (credit: Bruce McAdam, via Wikimedia Commons)

This first big principle of biological evolution is termed “genetic variation”.

The second big idea to get when we try to understand evolution is that though nature is always being creative and inventive, and nature seems in this picture to be kind and generous, there is a dark side. The real world is harsh, uphill, deadly. Individual organisms are dying in thousands of ways in millions of places all the time. The best creative ideas that nature has each year – the individuals that are designed in anatomy and behavior so that they can feed themselves, reproduce, and successfully nurture their young – these transmit their genes forward through time in their young. The rest don’t. They starve, they get killed by predators, they freeze, they fail to protect enough of their young to ensure that at least some of those youngsters go on …whatever. They and their closest kin die out. In nature, this is not sad; it’s just over.

This second big principle of evolution is usually called “natural selection”.  

Gradually, over many generations, the living things that do survive have done so because they kept adapting as their environments changed. When a drought came, or an ice age, or a blight killed off the plants they ate, or a new predator came into their area – or whatever – the winners went on because they were well-suited to handling the new reality.

Genetic variation: all living species are changing subtly all the time. The genes in their cell nuclei keep getting re-arranged and the individuals that are built up as each one implements its genetic plan are always subtly different from their parents. Species constantly experiment and tinker with their programs.

Natural selection: of the billions of small experiments going on all the time, many don’t work. In nature, only individuals whose design is suited to current conditions go on to reproduce; over generations every species keeps turning into something else – smarter, faster, stronger, better camouflaged – because not all members in any given generation pass on their DNA gene codes. Many die before they can reproduce, because they are slow, weak, unintelligent, etc.  

Genetic variation and natural selection drive the living world.

Except that in the case of humans, we have stumbled upon a way of evolving and adapting that is daring and dangerous, but much quicker than the process used by other species. We train our young to survive. We program their brains, and we do it generation after generation with great care. We pass on knowledge about ways of getting food, healing injuries, curing diseases, reproducing, fighting off predators, and so on to our young, not by coded information in DNA molecules, but by parents training kids to do behaviors proven to work.

Humans evolve almost entirely by refining their cultures, not their gene code. Human DNA codes have had very little revising in the last 10,000 or so years. We don’t use genetic evolution much anymore.

For example, our ancestors learned long ago that some seeds or fruits that were edible, but that they did not eat when they stripped the tree or grass of its edible parts, got missed, dropped or excreted. These seeds grew new plants that made even more fruit or seeds. It occurred to one of our early, smart ancestors that she/he could purposely put some seeds into fertile soil in the spring – i.e. could intervene in events in reality – and likely get some food for herself, himself, their children or even their whole tribe before winter came. Agriculture began.

Probably, in similar ways, our ancestors learned that the deer came to drink at the water hole just after sunset. Or that places in the river where the water was bubbling and swirling were likely to contain lots of fish. Aloe juice healed cuts. Ash wood made tough spears. Fire can be controlled if you control its fuel. We learned tricks that fed or aided us. Most of all, we then taught them to our kids.

Once that process of building up and transmitting knowledge began, it made new ways of life happen without any DNA changes. Cultural evolution. Then, the most useful new ideas for surviving and flourishing spread as their carriers spread. Good survival ideas spread like new combinations of genes spread, but much faster. Smarter, healthier, better-fed tribes took over more and more territory. 

Sometimes the new territory was in lands that used to be marginal for human existence, but more often it was in lands that were already inhabited by other tribes. Sometimes the tribes traded, learned to live together, interacted, and got along. Till they were interbreeding and making even more creative ways of life. But more often, they fought a war, and the more vigorous tribe overran the others.

In the cultural system of evolution, weaker tribes were hardly ever wiped out. They did not all die. But their way of life, their culture, did. The old ways were gone. In the cold judgement of Science, the old ways died out because they did not deserve to go on. To the individuals involved, the extinction of their way of life was often very sad, very tragic. But not to nature. Nature doesn’t care.

All this only shows that our emotions are programmed by our cultures so that we feel fiercely, even irrationally, loyal to our “way of life”. We get mad when we think our nation has been insulted or shortchanged. This programming of our emotions is due, in part, to the cultural code simply protecting itself. It programs its carriers to protect their way of life. But our feelings, in a scientific analysis, are just pieces in the bigger game. Yes, you are programmed to fight hard for your way of life. No, the depth of your feeling does not indicate you or your way of life are somehow “right” or “natural”. You can be very heroic, you can fight very bravely, weep profusely, and still be simply wrong. Obsolete.  

Cultural evolution proceeds in ways similar to biological evolution, but with some crucial differences. The tribe that has a breakthrough in agriculture or medicine or warfare or navigation, or whatever – a breakthrough that gives the tribe a competitive edge in its struggles with its neighbors – often is outbreeding and outfighting those neighbors in five generations or less. Cultural evolution is very quick. Note that genetically, the members of the tribe do not change in such a short time frame. Biological evolution could never work this fast.

Cultural memes are analogous to genes in biological evolution. Human tribes have been trying out new ways of getting food, healing diseases, expanding their territory, making more babies, fighting wars, and so on for millennia. Every tribe always contains a variety of lifestyles being practiced, just as every species always has a variety of individuals in its population. Cultures need innovators in the same way that species need mutations. The ones that work well, that have useful new ideas in the cases of the successful innovators, enable their cultures to adapt to, or even exploit, changing conditions in the environment. Then, the people living in that culture don’t have to change in their genetic makeup. They adapt culturally and behaviorally. For the tribe that learns to make them, beaver pelt vests turn out to be more than just a fashion. Colder winters come.

And there are many other features of the two forms of evolution that are analogous. Fatal ideas and fatal genes. Really vigorous idea makers and really vigorous breeders. And so on. I will leave them for you to muse over.   

For many people, probably many of my readers, this picture may look very sad. Disheartening. Does it imply that war will always be with us? That it is our species way of staying strong? Adolf Hitler thought so. “In eternal warfare, mankind has become great. In eternal peace, mankind would be ruined.” (Mein Kampf)  

The pessimists say that this scenario will end in a forest of mushroom clouds circling our planet. We now have the weapons to exterminate ninety percent of humanity in one day. The rest would probably die of radiation poisoning, starvation, disease, and subsequent fighting within less than another year.

But this is not the only conclusion we can take from a logical analysis of human cultural evolution. It is far more rational to say that we can change. Change our ways, our cultures, in comparatively short periods of time. We simply have to persuade a significant segment of the humans in one or two areas of the world that war has become obsolete. We must come to see it that way if we are to go on. We must write a new culture that stays vigorous and evolving. We must write it by our conscious choice instead of by the tribalistic conflict mode we have used for so long. But there is nothing in this more optimistic picture that is impossible. We can change without war. We have before. We can again.   

Tribe after tribe in the past has recognized that its neighbors had a better way of getting food and learned to copy that way. Or a better way of making tools, or preventing diseases, or making drinking water safer …or whatever.

WE CAN CHANGE BY OUR CHOICE INSTEAD OF BY BLIND FATE.

Pessimistic critics say we will we lose our vigor or our ability to feed ourselves, if we set out on a path to peace. I reply what evidence says so? I say the evidence indicates the opposite.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its oppressive communist system is still the political miracle of my life. Monolithic superpower to gone in one lifetime. And it was defeated via economic, artistic, and scientific competition, not via war.

And Adolf Hitler with his vision of eternal warfare? He lost.  

We have it in us to get better and better at preventing disease, yes, but also at eating more intelligently, feeding our metabolisms, not our mouths. Exercising strategically. Designing better practices for preventing injuries and diseases.

Most of all, we have it in us to get better at teaching the kids to live together and get along. Competition will be at exam time or on the field or in the ring or on the hardwood court. Or in the marketplace. But it will be done without war and competitors who lose the race will come away with either a renewed dedication to training, or a more honest sense of where their talents lie, or both. 

Can we stand to be this free? Letting people pursue whatever recreation or work they want to, even if their ways seem strange to us. I believe we can. The markets of goods, services, and ideas in a democracy can sort these matters out as long as the competition is fair. No one should get advantages in competition except those earned by diligence, ingenuity, and teamwork. Then, yes, really open democracy, freedom in degrees that may scare us, nevertheless, can work.  

All we really need is to embark, at least a significant minority of us, on the path of reason. Study cultures all through history, spot the patterns of living that work, that get good results over the long haul, and teach the deepest principles embedded in these successful ways of living to our kids. Then they will outsmart and outcompete the warmongers, and yes, I really believe that.  

The purpose of this blog is to equip its readers with the ideas that they will need to build – at least a little in every humble life – toward that better future that could be ours. We can work very hard, strain for each new insight or innovation with unrelenting determination if …if …if we first have a vision to believe in.   

We will teach the kids the theory and practice of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love for their neighbors, all in balance in all their affairs, all the time. Strive for excellence, for success, but only while playing by rules that are fair for all. Courage and wisdom in balance. Under that vision, we don’t need war. It really will become obsolete.  

Will our species get it? In time? I think, yes. Why? Because most people want to live, and especially want their kids to live. When the whole case is shown to them, they will try to follow better values and better ways.  

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” (H. G. Wells)   

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have an optimistic day.  

   

                                  

                                            young scientists conference 

                 (credit: Official CTBTO Photostream, via Wikimedia Commons)