Courage and wisdom are considered to be primary values everywhere. These values are so familiar as to be universally seen as perquisites of the human condition, but they aren’t that automatic at all. There is nothing in the genes of the human animal to predict that these values will occur in societies everywhere, as naturally as walking on two feet does. By contrast, bipedal motion arises almost automatically out of our genetic design. But 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 of these concepts is modeled in what evolutionary biologists call a fitness landscape, which is the model from which the concept of cultural convergence derives.¹ If we draw a graph showing 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 can find the place on the graph where the two traits combine to provide the optimal survival chances for that species in that environment. Next, we can plot 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 resulting picture 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 our three-dimensional graph’s environment.

Geneticists speak of fitness landscapes of ten, fifty, and two hundred dimensions as if what they are talking about is completely clear. No graph of any such landscape could be pictured by the human mind, of course, but with the mathematical models 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 how long it will take for the species in that ecosystem to settle into balance.

The concept of a fitness landscape—one that exists only 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 Richard Dawkins’ “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” chapter 10 in Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I for a basic explanation of the meme concept.²) But for now, if we take it as a given, the results of the thinking enabled by the meme concept support what this book is trying to show.

We can construct, in imaginary, mathematical space, a fitness landscape for memes—in other words, for unit-ideas—that humans use to build up systems of beliefs about what the universe is made of and what forces and fields give direction to the movements of the things in it. Those things include 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 terms apple or plum. My idea of beauty roughly coincides with that of other Canadians’ ideas of beauty. Even our definitions 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—that is, 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 who are capable of thinking with them and using them to design behaviour patterns to survive and flourish. They are almost never the only combinations of ideas or behaviour patterns that could work in that environment. People of other cultures with 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 fisherman, Sri Lanka

  

                                                                    Spearfishing, Hawaii

                           

                                                            Innu woman ice fishing, Canada

     

                                                            Yawalapiti bow fishing, Brazil

Whichever culture/society/tribe settles in a given ecosystem, 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 its people. But the chances are very good that if there are lots of fish in a lake, then any tribe that settles next to it will learn to fish by one method or another.

People in varied cultures in many parts of the world establish market squares in the middle of their towns for commerce like the selling of fish, and they hire police to patrol 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 and set up markets. Marketplaces, police officers, and currencies are efficient social constructs because they help societies maximize the usefulness of what their citizens produce; they allow capital to flow, in a timely way, to where it can do the most good in human terms.

Thus, certain meme complexes we call values or principles steer us toward creating institutions that are advantageous for the tribe and especially for those subgroups that believe in the effective values most devoutly. The values (meme complexes) survive in meme-space because they foster behavior patterns that work, and the members of the tribe who hold these values most passionately survive to pass the values on to their young.