Chapter 15 – Cultural Evolution and Genetic Evolution: Parallels

                       

   

                    Earth seen from space (credit: NASA/Apollo 17 crew, via Wikimedia Commons)

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, in the space it occupies, and in its complexity 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 that somehow keeps pulling in more atoms and molecules of matter and energy, trapping them, organizing them, and using that mass and the programming in it to continue and expand the process.

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 the one that composes the human species, the main programming uses not copies of a code written in DNA molecules, but small coded energy exchanges (words, facial expressions, etc.) between individual units in the human strand to upload the program that we call culture. We teach the kids and we teach each other how to live so as to keep the process going on into the future. 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 is a true-blue miracle because it 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)

But the key point to see is that the largest general principles embedded in our programming are our values, and these have been designed, by the pressures of evolution, to respond to the real, material world. Living matter, with humanity as a small but 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 or iron filings scattered about a magnet come to rest along the lines of force in the magnet’s field, so protoplasm moves forward through time only in those channels of energy flow that suit it and its ways of existing and enduring. 

Genetic programs—and, in the human species, cultural programs—make it possible for living things to find and widen the life-suitable channels through the physical universe. In short, we learn from our parents/mentors the skills and knowledge we need to preserve ourselves and our homelands and to find or make new ones. All life is miraculous, but humans are the most of all. We pass our survival skills down to our progeny almost entirely by communication rather than by genetic replication and we flourish and spread like nothing else.  

                

   

                                        NASA artist’s imagining of first humans to explore Mars 

                           (credit: NASA/John Frassanito and Associates, via 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 shape our society, in ways that will lead to our finding or making more and more 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 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.

                          

               

                       Allegory of Prudence (Titian)  (credit: Titian, via Wikimedia Commons)