Chapter 12.                        (conclusion) 

A side note is in order here.

This train of thought on the long-term purposes that morés serve for human tribes also brings us to an implication deeply embedded in our argument. Close analysis of individual human behaviors reveals that some of them can’t be explained by our looking only at their advantages for the tribe.

We can’t reason our way to a moral code for all humans until we accept that humans are capable, at least some of the time, of recognizing patterns in the events in their environments. Re-occurring patterns. We call our labels/words for patterns concepts. In short, we have to incorporate into our model the idea that humans are capable of conceptual thought, what we call “reason”.

Our ways of life are not just the results of us reacting to the forces in physical reality. Rather, human ways of life also contain carefully reasoned responses to types of stimuli in reality. Often discerned by someone decades or centuries before. But no model of cultural evolution will prove adequate to explain it if the model does not see humans as thinking beings, capable of learning concepts – and being able to use them to react effectively to challenging situations.   

Forming mental models of patterns of things is what we do when we think. When I think of cats, I mentally form a concept of “cat”. But I never have a cat inside my head. Or a tree, a nail, or swimming, or any of the things I think about. I think with concepts.

In fact, in reality, there are no trees. There are living things that exist by photosynthesis that I find it convenient to call “trees”. But each is an individual living thing. And they differ widely from each other. Deciduous, conifer, bushes, banyan, etc. We make up the terms we need in order to sort memories of real-world things for purposes useful to us. But reality contains no trees. On the other hand, even a caveman can use the concept of a tree, for example, to check for fruit on strange (to him) tree-like plants in a new environment that he is venturing into. Sometimes, he may urgently need that concept.

Thus, I think with concepts, and I am capable of reaching conclusions by a process that can’t be explained in strictly mechanical ways. The “I” that is most “I” does not contain any fruit or trees. But I can think about concepts of those things (and many others) and reach useful conclusions.

We humans act much of the time in ways that our cultures have programmed us to act, but we also can figure some situations out for ourselves and try new responses to them. We can learn on our own. Sometimes, creative individuals even devise new concepts that get accepted into their tribe’s culture. They win a lot of others over to drinking tea or washing their hands before eating. The subculture that the converts form then out-survives those who don’t accept the new concept or custom, and in a few generations, the custom is customary.

The school of Psychology called "Behaviorism" comes into direct opposition to our model of human cultural evolution at this point. Behaviorism says that all human behaviors are learned one at a time when the individual gets a reward or a punishment for doing an action. Those actions that consistently get me a reward when I do them, I will do more. Those that cause me pain in some way when I do them, I will scrupulously avoid in future. Stimulus and response – these two concepts can be used to explain all that we do from the simplest to the most complex of behaviors say the Behaviorists.

In our overall argument, Behaviorism’s model of how humans act is left behind at this point because it does not consider how we think. It pictures stimuli and responses as being connected in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then uses mechanical terms to explain individual human behaviors. But in the real world of real human beings, this model doesn’t work very well.

The behaviorist reports that “The organism sees specific colours and shapes (or hears certain sounds), pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward”. For example, a rat sees a light go on in its cage, presses the bar it has learned by trial and error and curiosity to press, and gets a food pellet. Behaviorists say people do the same: go to work at the factory, punch a timecard at the clock beside the door, put bolts on widgets for eight hours, punch out, collect their pay, and go home. This picture of activity, Behaviorists say, portrays how all learning and doing works for all living things – including humans – all the time.

 

 

                             Bull Moose (credit: Ryan Hagerty, Wikimedia Commons)

 

But a human can confront situations that are not, by sensory evidence, like anything that human has ever encountered before, and still react effectively. The English hunter who had never seen a moose, kangaroo, or rhinoceros in muskeg, outback, or veldt still knew where to shoot to kill one.  

Polynesian sailors navigated well by the stars of a new hemisphere when they first came to Hawaii as did European sailors when they first began to explore the seas south of the equator. In each of these situations, they were guided by a set of concepts – ideas based on patterns found in large numbers of experiences. For example, a mammal’s heart lies at the bottom of its ribcage, just to the left of center; a heart shot is fatal for every mammal on this planet.

Furthermore, a man may react one way to a new stimulus in his first encounter with it and quite differently in his next encounter, after he has thought about the stimulus situation for a bit longer. He sees a deeper, more general pattern that he recognizes, and then, using concepts stored in his memory, he plans and executes a better response to it. Behaviorism can’t explain such phenomena.

Nearly every human past the age of 10 is capable of forming generalizations based on what he/she learned by experience and, to an even greater degree, what has been taught by the adults of his tribe. Conceptual thinking is as human as having 46 chromosomes. It comes naturally to a child at about 7 years of age when, for example, he realizes that the short, wide cup holds more soda than the tall, slim one. Volume is a concept. (I take Piaget as my guide here.⁶)

The programmers of society – parents, teachers, shamans, and others – make use of this faculty in their young subjects, greatly increasing these children’s chances of surviving by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to common, recognizable sense-data patterns in the tribe’s territory. The young subject is programmed with concepts and then, at higher levels of generality, with principles, beliefs, and values. These enable that young subject to respond to, and handle, new situations, for example recognizing that a new animal or plant can be used for food or recognizing that a new animal is likely harmful. (“This snake may be small, but it likely has a poisonous bite; snakes nearly always do”.)

Our capacity to reason – to mentally manipulate concepts – gives us an advantage over most species on this planet. And to be fair, some members of research has shown that some members of some other species can do some less sophisticated reasoning. Some members of other species can, at a vestigial level, think. They just aren’t as many in number or as quick at acquiring effective new concepts and behaviors or as efficient at teaching them to other members of their species. This human capacity to think in concepts, combined with our capacity to communicate, is what enables us to devise and try new behaviors and morés much more easily and rapidly than can the species and, thus, enables cultural evolution.

A thinking individual can imagine a new way of getting food, chipping flint, or curing a disease, then test it, and then teach it to her/his fellows. A few try the new way. If it works and is not threatening some other moré that is “sacred” for the tribe, the new moré gets taken up by the tribe. The tribe evolves, not by genetic variations, but by cultural ones, i.e. by the tribe acquiring a new idea that gets good results when it is put into practice.

             

               

                                              Reindeer with herdsmen

                      (credit: Detroit Publishing Co., via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Every tribe has labels (words) for large groups of similar things or events in the tribe’s environment. These category terms are taught to the young because they are useful in the quest for survival. The Sami (Laplanders) have many words for reindeer because they often need to differentiate between them. A single word to designate a blond, pregnant doe is useful if she is in labor and needs immediate aid. And for Neolithic tribes, it probably was useful to have many terms for rocks – like “flint” – because only certain types of rocks, i.e. flint, could be used to make effective weapons and tools.  

By contrast, most visitors to Lapland speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, and some may have no words for reindeer at all. Compared to our ancestors, most of us today also know little to nothing about types of flint.

The word principle is a term for patterns that are common in larger groups of things. Terms like danger and edible name general principles that a tribe has spotted in many experiences of many members. Terms for principles are harder to learn than ones like tiger or apple, but worth learning because they are very useful in the real world. The term danger enables tribe members to tell one another quickly to get away from something. It covers crocodiles, tigers, snakes, bears, unstable cliffs, quicksand, poison ivy, etc. It’s an efficient term so it is worth learning and keeping. I avoid dangerous things on principle.

The term edible covers nuts, berries, maggots, eggs, frogs, fish, most lizards, mammals, most mushrooms, and many more things one may come upon within the tribe’s environment. It enables one tribe member to tell another a thing they’re looking at is worth gathering because it can be safely eaten.

 

                

                    

                                      Weird-looking, but edible: California spiny lobster

                         (credit: Dr. Kjaergaard [assumed], via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                       “Poverty” is a word for a very general concept

                Migrant Mother (credit: Dorothea Lange, via Wikimedia Commons)

Early tribes gradually learned that more general terms – if they accurately described larger classes of things in reality – could be very useful because more general terms help us to more accurately and quickly design and implement behaviors that will more often be effective in our struggle to survive. Surviving is easier for things that can think with larger, more general concepts.  

Thus, finally, by this process of greater and greater generalizing, we come to values, the most general of concepts; they apply to very large stores of memories of sense data. We are taught to care deeply about them – about understanding a term like right – ultimately, because we want to survive in greater numbers over the long run. So we are taught to “do the right thing”.

Terms for values are used to name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within our brains. We use values terms learned from our mentors and teachers to form judgments about what we are seeing all the time. Values enable us to prioritize and enable not just actions, but whole ways of life. Values enable us to decide, second by second, about all we see: Important or trivial? Hazard or opportunity? Act or not? Now? Soon? Later? Ever? How?  

Note also that most of the time we don’t take any action when an experience is making us think with one of our value-concepts. Often, we recognize a thing is trivial, so we cease to think about it. Noting details in our surroundings does not always mean we respond to them in any way that shows on the outside. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which of them have been getting good results lately, is internal activity. To the frustration of the Behaviorists, who aim to study only what is objectively observable, what shows outwardly when we are thinking is often nothing at all. Conceptual thought is as human as having 46 chromosomes. It is the single biggest reason why we dominate our planet as we do. But it is often not reducible to a series of observable, measurable behaviors.

     

                      

                  Modern medical theory(concepts) handling reality: vaccination

                           (credit: Andrew McGalliard, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Some ways of thinking enhance our chances of finding health and survival. Tribes are always seeking those ways. Ways of thinking that work effectively over generations are the ones we keep and teach to our kids. Conversely, people who live by principles and values that don’t work, or that once worked but no longer do, don’t survive and, thus, don’t have descendants.

Values help us to organize our sense data and memories of sense data. Over generations, they help tribe members, individually and jointly, to formulate effective plans of action in timely ways. In modern terms, we say values "inform" our thinking. Since reality is always changing, our values must evolve also, though as I said above, it is sometimes only by the pain of famine, plague, or war that we amend or re-write our largest values/moral codes. 

So, now let’s consider more data/evidence: the ways in which early humans probably formed and used early examples of principles and values. Let’s test the theory further.

 

 

Notes

 

1.  http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151012-feral-the-children-raised-by-wolves.

2. “Enculturation,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enculturation.

3. “Sociocultural evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 20, 2015.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution#Contemporary_discourse_about_sociocultural_evolution.

4. Pearson Higher Education, “Anthropology and the Study of Culture”

Chapter 1, p. 17. 

http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205949509.pdf.

5. Alice Dreger, “When Taking Multiple Husbands Makes Sense,” The Atlantic, February 1, 2013.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/when-taking-multiple-husbands-makes-sense/272726/.

6. “Piaget’s theory of cognitive development,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

 Accessed April 20, 2015.                                                                                         

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget’s_theory_of_cognitive_development.