Chapter 14           Part C 

  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. Adult caribou kick hard. 

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 to be a useful model because it fits the evidence.

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

             sedum spurium (Iran) 

Convergence, for example, is the name given to the phenomenon seen in widely varied species which, 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.   

     Arapaho elder with his grand-daughter 

       Samburu woman with grandchild 

All or nearly all human societies that have made it into the present age value and respect their elderly. For pre-literate tribes, an old person was a walking encyclopedia of the tribe's accumulated knowledge. What they old had stored up, could save lives, even the whole tribe. 

Similarly, courage and wisdom are considered to be values everywhere. These facts 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 the model of 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 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” would indicate where the best combination of coloring, size, and, let's say, coat density lay for that species' survival in the environment for which we had 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. (See Kaufman, "The Origins of Order") (2.) No graph of any such landscape could be pictured by the human mind, of course, but with the mathematical models of ecosystems 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 now 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 – an 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.) (3.) But for now, if we take it as a given and move on with it, the results of that thinking 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 units of 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 Canadians 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, these concepts show that they work. 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 here. Human societies are very capable and versatile.

          stilts fishermen (Sri Lanka) 

             spearfishing (Hawaii) 

  Yawalapiti bowfishing (Amazon jungle, Brazil)  

But the point to see is that whichever culture-society-tribe settles down here, it will come to think with memes, concepts, values, and morés that can be formed into combinations that do work 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 mechanical 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 the lake that a given tribe has settled down next to, then its folk will learn, by one method or another, to fish.

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. 

Thus, certain meme-complexes that we call “values” or “principles” steer us toward creating certain 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 in physical space that work, and thus the members of the tribe who hold these values most passionately pass the values on to their ever increasing numbers of young.