Chapter 14 – Cultural Evolution and Genetic Evolution: Parallels

What makes the earth’s biomass—its living ecosystem—so different from any other entity we have discovered in the universe so far is the way the whole interconnected system tends to keep becoming more in its mass and in the space it occupies 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 fibres that somehow keep pulling in more matter and energy, trapping them, organizing them, and using that mass to keep making ever increasing amounts of living matter.

The kinds of forces that somehow create life, this anti-entropy pattern in the flows of matter, are still poorly understood—at least by us. 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 in the case of one living strand, namely, that which composes the human species, the main programming mechanism uses not copies of a code written in dna molecules, but small coded energy exchanges (words, looks, etc.) between fibers in the (human) strand to upload another, more nimble program, the one that we call culture. Note that this metaphor of threads and weaving tries, 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. 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, even though that’s how they’re portrayed in high school physics texts.

We now need to stress the fact implied by the cultural evolution model that says 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 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 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 life-suitable channels through the physical universe. Or in short, we learn from our parents and mentors the skills and knowledge we need to preserve our homelands and also to find new ones.

  

                                               NASA artist’s conception 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, testing them against history, then planning—jointly, as citizens of a democracy—how we may best use the knowledge gained to consciously shape our behavior patterns and those of our children, in ways that will maximize our courage, wisdom, freedom, and love and so lead to our making ever expanding biospheres, on earth and beyond.

However, 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 behaviors that steer them into the life-sustaining, Goldilocks zones of the energy streams (not too hot or too cold, not too fast or too slow, not too large or 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 we describe with the terms freedom, love, courage, and wisdom.

         

  

                                                Past, Present, Future, by Victor Bregeda

But let’s return to our main point. A kind of field underlies time. At least two different types of codes guide living matter across that field, out of the past, across the present, and into the future. These two types are the genetic and the cultural. Other life forms elsewhere in the universe may have found formulas for neatly balancing the momenta of these two codes, but in the human case, the relationships between genetic and cultural programming are not yet well understood. However, the point I emphasize in this book is that the cultural mode of evolution that has emerged in natural history so recently is able to respond to environmental changes and pressures in ways that are every bit as subtle, and as material in their consequences as the genetic mode is. Humans out-maneuver and outlast all other forms of life on this planet.

A digression on the analogies that exist between the genetic way of evolution and the cultural one is due here. The parallels have been noted before, by the Social Darwinists in particular. However, the conclusions of the Social Darwinists are considered by most people today to be disgusting, and rightly so. To put it bluntly, Social Darwinists conclude that rich people are rich because they are superior. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society, while the workers, who in many places in the world are still miserably poor, deserve to be so because they don’t know how to run much of anything.

A few decades ago (in 1789), some rich Frenchmen lived by this code and found to their sorrow that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade any who still want to live by that code, I offer the much harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, and many others. This evidence has taught some hard lessons to the nineteenth-century-style Social Darwinists in societies all over the world. If you want to live, be nice.

But how could it have been otherwise? The social milieu in which the Social Darwinists of earlier times lived was not very loving or free or wise or even brave. They saw cruel indifference, wastefulness, and arrogance as being necessities of not just their society, but any human society. Subsequent experience in countries all over the world has shown that, on the contrary, societies containing more compassion and justice can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today realize it. They will not accept misery, exploitation, and bare subsistence as necessities of social living anymore.

  

                                   Teamsters’ union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934

Let’s briefly consider an example that shows how values in real life must reach dynamic equilibrium in order for us simply to function. This particular example of how values shape human relations is relevant because it can be seen as a paradigm of how humans today really do relate with each other in all areas of their lives, professional and personal.

A captain of industry in the West today has times when he despises unions, but he has come to accept that if workers are not paid a fair percentage of the company’s earnings, they will work less and less efficiently. He may find ways of retaliating through punitive measures, but he knows those will simply cause the cycle to deepen and worsen. If the obstinacy on both sides becomes hardened enough, violence is inevitable. If those who own the means of production—farms, dams, mines, factories, etc.—become even more incorrigible in their attitudes, the whole society will eventually break down into revolution and chaos. To prevent such chaos and to preserve his way of life, the smart CEO must have ambition and drive (courage), but also wisdom. A smart owner or CEO works with, not against, his workers.

Thus, we have learned, by trial and painful error, to aim for balance. For example, workers in Western democracies have rights to safe working conditions and free collective bargaining in their unions. Smart business people negotiate with unions, and contracts are arrived at by debate and compromise. In fact, the most successful business people in the West today are those specifically trained to be skillful at labor-management negotiations.

  

                                       UAW Union and Ford management negotiators (2015)

For their part, most union leaders today know they have to respect a company’s ability to pay. They ask for reasonable wages and benefits for their members, but most of them don’t try to push the owners past the brink. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders must have drive and wisdom in balance as well. Furthermore, most business leaders in the West have accepted that as long as prices go up, workers will expect wages to go up accordingly. Making their business more efficient by smarter management and ongoing research and development rather than by union-busting is what the ethical, deserving business people do. Most attempts at strike-breaking are rooted in managerial incompetence.

There are some even more nuanced ways of seeing balance in this labor-management subsystem within our society. One truth is that while most smart business leaders secretly hope they can achieve a modest settlement with their workers, they also hope the rest of their society’s workers will get generous new contracts. That will mean more disposable income in the economy, money that workers, who are consumers in their time off, can spend on the smarter business leader’s goods and services.

The corollary is that while any one group of workers wants generous rates of pay in their new contracts, they don’t want to see generous pay packets being handed out in all the contracts signed in other sectors of their society. If settlements in general are modest, workers know that goods will be cheaper, relative to their wages, than those goods were just a few months ago. If they are honest, most workers will admit to wanting their own company to succeed above others. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding at times, but smart workers know that managers who watch the bottom line, as long as they also know how to adapt to innovations and to market their goods in creative ways, are the ones the company needs if it is to stay in business and keep workers employed.

In short, in the modern business world, smart business people don’t espouse the extreme called Social Darwinism any more than smart workers espouse Marxism. Democracy in all of its sectors has to run by maintaining interactions and tensions between complex, balanced systems of concepts and values.