I want today to re-emphasize an integral part of my theory of human cultural evolution. 

As is the case with genetic evolution, the meme constellations that humans pass from generation to generation culturally are always being re-arranged by our curious, subversive nature. Not all humans want to mix up the status quo, but in every culture there are always some who do. 

The curious ones try out new combinations of ideas and the behavior patterns attached to the new ideas. Some work, in the sense that they make the tasks of human living easier, faster, more fruitful, etc. Killing small game with arrows is just more "fruitful" than with stones or spears. Good experiment. Spreading manure on one's fields before planting gives higher yields a few months later. Writing things down obviates a lot of disputes. These are techniques of living that lasted because the people who used them outbred and outfought the competition.    

What some of my friends keep forgetting is that the experimenting is always going on and that most of the new tricks don't work. But - and here's the important step - if a new way of doing life really is more efficient than what came just before it, often the people who take up the new idea must do so in the face of tough resistance even inside of their own culture. Many people will cling to their old spears even when they're starving. And they'll resent, ostracize, and make war on those bow and error lovers. 

We've done war for centuries. Arrow lovers proved themselves in the harsh arena of survival, sometimes in head on combat. Bows and arrows work.   

Cultural evolution proceeds in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. Imagining history as a record of great men with will and smarts causing changes is seeing human cultural evolution in a Lamarckian way. An interesting, but mistaken model. The actual cultural mode of evolution is Darwinian, just like the genetic one is. It proceeds by variation and natural selection. Or at least it has for centuries. 

The giant insight in modern times is to see that we can't keep on evolving by this trial-and-error method. The next experiment, or more accurately, the next test of one system against another by war, may be our last. Reason has to be taken on as a way of life by the big majority of us or we're probably not going to survive as a species. Either the old way is obsolete or we are.

And let me also stress again that this fight for survival is just a fact of reality, or at least it has been for a very long time. But I believe that anything we can understand, we can change.  

The challenge for us in this twenty-first century then is to comprehend how and why we have evolved in the past and then use that knowledge to change. Re-write our cultural code. Keep the challenge element, the evolving, and the vigor, but drop the war option. 

Culture is made up of code. Algorithms and routines. It can be re-written.   

This model that I believe is the true model of human cultural evolution does not lose patience with the historians and political scientists arguing about the "great man theory", which is just a variation of Lamarckian thinking. My model simply goes right past "great man theory". 

We are culturally-driven animals, the only ones that we know of who really are. That is the first key point to see. How you see the world is largely a product of the culture in which you grew up. And cultures have competed to outfight and/or outlast each other for tens of thousands of years. This Darwinian mechanism of human evolution has made us vigorous.

But we have to get past this method of evolution. Yes, we must program our young people to feel driven to seek out challenge - in the exploration of space, the improving of technology, the fixing of Earth's ecosystems, art, music, film, and so on - but not in the killing of each other. 

Considering how long we have been using the war method of testing cultures against each other, the change I'm calling for is as profound as it is possible to imagine for our species. But it must be done. 

Over the long haul of millions of people and thousands of years, there is a mathematical certainty to the way that our models of our world work themselves out. The most basic one we have of how we relate to one another, individual to individual and culture to culture, is going to have to be re-written and it's prime precept is going to have to be very simple: love your neighbor. Then do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 

The guy that they nailed up had that part exactly right. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a nice day.