Chapter 15 – Cultural Evolution and Genetic Evolution: Parallels

                                

   

                                                             Earth seen from space (credit: Wikipedia) 

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, gestures, etc.) between fibres in the (human) strand to upload a nimbler 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 tiny bullets, even though that’s how they’re portrayed in high school physics texts.

                                              

   

        Sprinkled iron filings show magnetic field around a bar magnet (credit: Wikipedia) 

We now need to stress the view 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 not randomly, but in certain patterns. Just as electrons may inhabit only certain energy shells around a nucleus and iron filings scattered about a magnet orient along the lines of force the magnet’s field has created, so protoplasm moves forward through time only in those channels of energy flow that suit it and its ways of existing and enduring. Living creatures’ 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 ourselves and our homelands and to find/make new ones.

                            

      NASA artist’s imagining of first humans exploring Mars (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

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 behaviour 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.