Chapter 14.                       Part D 

Similarly, courage and wisdom are considered to be values everywhere. These values 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 modeled in what evolutionary biologists call 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 size-color 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” indicate where the best combination of coloring, size, and, let's say, coat density lie for that species' survival in the environment for which we have 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. No graph of any such landscape could be pictured by the human mind, of course, but with the mathematical models 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 then 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 – a 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.) (2.) But for now, if we take it as a given and move on with it, the results of the thinking that the meme concept enables 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 unit-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 English speakers 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, the concepts prove effective. 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 there. Human societies are very capable and versatile, as are the various species in a living ecosystem.

                     

                                                            stilts fishermen (Sri Lanka) 

                        

                                                      spearfishing (Hawaii) 

 

                                                 Innu woman ice-fishing (Canada)   

                                                                    Yawalapiti bow-fishing (Brazil)

But the point to see is that whichever culture-society-tribe settles down there, it will come to think with memes, concepts, values, and morés that can be formed into combinations that enable them 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 technical 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 a body of water, then any tribe that settles down next to it will learn, by one method or another, to fish.