Courage and wisdom are core values everywhere. These values are so common that they are seen as basic parts 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 human societies everywhere, as naturally as walking on two feet does. Bipedal motion arises automatically out of our genetic design. But values like, for example, respecting elders don’t. Certain values are found in societies all over the world because they work—they enable a human society to survive and flourish. This is convergence in social evolution. We are analogues of cactus flowers. Other concepts in the biological sciences also apply in analogous ways. 

                            

   

          Graphic of fitness landscape concept (credit: Randy Olson, via Wikimedia Commons)

One of the subtlest of these concepts is 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 colouring, interact to give a size-colour 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 best 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. 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 colouring, 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’s “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” ch. 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 thinking enabled by the meme concept supports this book's thesis.

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 give direction to the movements of the things in it. Those things include the thinking things, us, and what we can 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. I will reason my way to accepting and adopting the same patterns of behavior as my parents lived by. 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. I like fruit and eat it all the time. 

My idea of beauty also coincides with other Canadians’ ideas of beauty. Even our definitions of terms like good, wise, justice, and democracy largely coincide. They enable us to communicate effectively, work in teams, and live in community most of the time. I am a son of my culture.