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)