cow on Delhi street 

                                  (credit: John Hill, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1. (continued) 

In the meantime, as we strive to survive in our own times, if Durkheim’s view is correct (I think it is) a whole wide-ranging model of human behavior becomes available to us.    

From what we can observe in the archeological evidence left by pre-historic and historic tribes, we can reasonably infer that in the early years of human pre-history, each tribe had its own culture – its own detailed view of the world, how it works, and how humans are supposed to act in it. Informed by their tribe’s culture – its set of morés and customs – tribe members lived in ways they had been programmed as children to see as “normal” and “appropriate”.

There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tribes, most of them of less than two hundred members. Tribes whose cultures were better tuned to the demands of their environments survived in greater numbers over many generations than did tribes whose morés were less well-tuned to their environments. A well-tuned way of life, a culture, reproduces itself because it enables tribe members who live by it to survive till they have their own young and successfully program the tribe’s culture/way of life into those youngsters, generation after generation.

Almost certainly, early tribes did not purposely write their cultures, i.e., choose their morés and customs. Tribes fell into ways of life by trial and error, luck, genius individuals, even whim. Cultures that worked lived on in their carriers – the members of the most successful tribes. The rest died out as they starved, caught plagues, or were absorbed after wars with more vigorous rival tribes.   

Thus, the first big principle that we get from Social Science says that a tribe’s morés and customs make up the programming that equips that tribe’s members to live in their environment: to get food, fight off invaders, maintain solidarity, choose mates, have young, and program their culture into those youngsters.

Note also, however, that culture as a tool for survival must still be thought of as an add-on to the human genome. Our forebears were apes: their anatomy and physiology were inherited genetically from their forbears. The programming we call culture came to them only after they’d been apes for a very long time and then finally evolved into homo sapiens, a species capable of accumulating knowledge, in the form of culture, over generations.

It is also worth noting that while the cultural mode of evolution does look a bit shaky when compared to the genetic mode – a small tribe that finds a useful custom can get wiped out by one rockslide or tsunami – cultural evolution has proven itself very nimble. Our species outmaneuvered nearly all competing species centuries ago. We outlasted ground sloths, cave bears, mammoths, and so many other species. Today, we’re even getting control of microorganisms. Sometimes, we wipe out other species, but none of them have been near to wiping us out for millennia. We’re tough because we work well in teams, and because we pass knowledge on through generations efficiently, thus enabling cultural evolution. Progress. 

How many morés with their attached customs could it be possible for human tribes to invent? That number is incalculable. But as we follow this train of thought, it soon occurs to us that some ways of thinking and acting wouldn’t be practiced by any tribe for long simply because some ways of thinking and acting are very likely to get those who practice them killed.

If you and your tribe somehow come to believe you must eat only beaver meat, you could run out of beaver in your area in two years. Even more improbably, if your tribe came to believe that this year you must find winter shelter in a cave now occupied by cave lions, your tribe would likely not be around next spring.

Similarly, there are many kinds of berries that no tribe today eats because the people that tried to eat them in the past died. Some customs are unlikely to have been practiced for very long by any tribe. Investigating each of these customs almost always tells us why this is so. Poison berry eaters die before they have kids and thus their cultures too die out.

Note, however, that real tribes and societies interact with their environments in much subtler ways than those portrayed in these simplified examples. Natives in parts of the Amazon rainforest approach Golden Dart Frogs cautiously; these frogs are extremely poisonous. But these tribesmen aren’t so frightened of the frogs that they avoid them entirely. The tribes’ hunters carefully gather the frogs’ poison to coat the tips of their blow darts. This trick increases their hunting success rate which then increases their survival odds and therefore, over generations, their numbers. (Here’s meat. Let’s eat.) They keep the custom of gathering frog poison going because it keeps them going.   

Of course, morés and customs that increase, rather than lessen, a tribe’s long term survival odds take time to prove themselves. But over generations, subtler and more vigorous morés and customs do prove themselves because tribes that live by them outlast other tribes that don’t. In short, cultural evolution is not driven by luck, nor by mysterious, inscrutable forces; it is driven by survival.

On the other hand, no moré or custom guarantees survival for a tribe that takes it up. There are too many other factors that may doom the tribe. But the idea that there are morés/customs which enhance survival odds and that hypotheses about these morés and customs can be drawn up and tested by applying reason to evidence observed in the lives of real tribes is basic to Anthropology.

Can other examples of such morés be cited? A famous one is documented in the 1974 book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris. He saw that cows in India became sacred for Hindus there ostensibly because they were precious living symbols of the fertility of Mother Earth. However, he argued, what was really going on at a subtler level was that over many generations, cows proved more useful to an early tribe of India for pulling plows and supplying milk and dung than when they were eaten as beef. Thus, over centuries, a tribe that held cows sacred survived in greater numbers, gained power over rival tribes, and eventually became the dominant tribe of India.  

The larger point is that morés/customs are not arbitrary. They obey nomothetic laws. They may first find their way into a tribe’s culture by luck or through the curiosity of one tribe member. But they have effects associated with them that have survival value, high or low, and if their survival value is high, they last and spread. At the very least, all morés/customs, even the strange ones, had survival value in some way when they were first incorporated into a tribe’s culture, even though they may have little to no survival value in modern times.

Cultural evolution proceeds in a way that is closely analogous to biological evolution, with genomes being analogous to cultures, and genes being analogous to memes. Even today, humans are constantly – sometimes by luck and more and more in our times by at least some human choice – mixing and re-mixing their morés. We trade, travel, invent, and intermarry. Over generations, species shuffle their genes. Over generations, tribes shuffle their morés. Early tribes fell into varied morés and customs because humans are curious, or, once in a while, lucky. But morés and customs only endure long term if they work.  

                           Golden Poison Dart Frog (world's most poisonous species)  

                                     (credit: Wilfried Berns, via Wikimedia Commons)