Chapter 18        The Genetic Evolution – Cultural Evolution Analogy

                 

   

                                      Earth seen from space (Wikimedia Commons)

What makes Earth’s biosphere – its living ecosystem – so different from any other entity we have discovered in the universe (so far) is the way the whole  living, 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 universe known to us shred apart across the time axis. But life on this planet has formed a complex that keeps pulling in more matter and energy, weaving them into a larger entity, the biosphere, and using the fabric, and the programming coded into it, to expand that entity more and more.  

This weaving metaphor is an inadequate one, but then so are physicists’ models of matter. All models used in Science prove limited. Electrons are not tiny bullets, even though that’s how they’re portrayed in high school Science texts.

The point for us to see as we build a moral realism case is that the most general principles embedded in our cultural programs are our values, and these have been designed, by the pressures of evolution, to respond to the material world. Much more than our genes, we humans live by our values; values shape how we act and so determine our odds of maintaining and expanding our human species. Behaving in ways guided and informed by our values, we interface with reality. 

Living matter, with humanity as a small but growing strand within it, moves forward through time not randomly, but in patterns. Just as electrons 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 humans learn from our parents/mentors the skills and knowledge we need to preserve ourselves and our way of life. All life is miraculous, but humans the most of all. We pass our knowledge and skills on to our kids almost entirely by communication, verbal and non-verbal, rather than by genetic code; then, we humans flourish and spread like nothing else.  

There are patterns in the human expansions of the last two hundred thousand years. We have much research in Evolutionary Sociology ahead of us, designing models of cultural evolution, then testing them against History.

However, accepting that there are patterns to human cultural evolution, and that it is not random, has major 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 act in ways that steer them into the life-sustaining, Goldilocks zones of the energy streams (not too hot or too cold, not pulled by gravity too much or too little, not too acidic, nor too alkaline, etc.). The best values steer us into patterns of action that maximize our survival probabilities. At this stage of our history, we don’t understand this model very well. Like all living ecosystems, it contains so many elements, both living and non-living. There is so much research to do before we understand cultural evolution as well as we do biological evolution. 

But we can see this much: the most common patterns of human social life found in all cultures are the ones we call courage, wisdom, freedom, and love.

                                                         

Now let’s return to our main point. A kind of field underlies time. Two different types of codes guide living matter across that field, out of the past, across the present, into the future. These two types are the genetic and the cultural. Some beliefs and values appear to be installed genetically. Others, for sure, we learn as we develop. However, the point I emphasize in this book is that our recently discovered cultural mode of evolution responds to environmental changes far more quickly than the genetic mode does. Humans living by their cultural codes outmanoeuvre and, potentially, outlast all other species on this planet.

Thus, a digression on the analogies that exist between the genetic mode of evolution and the cultural one is in order here. This argument from analogy will deepen our understanding of, and strengthen the case for, moral realism.

The parallels have been noted before, by the Social Darwinists in particular. But most people today consider the conclusions of the Social Darwinists to be disgusting. And rightly so. To put it bluntly, Social Darwinists conclude rich people are rich because they deserve to be; they are superior. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society. They have both the intelligence and the discipline to get things done. In contrast, these rich people claim, the workers, who in many places in the world are still indigent and living in squalor, deserve to live in poverty because they don’t know how to run anything.

   

   

                                                 "The storming of the Bastille"

                                (credit: Jean-Pierre Houël, via Wikimedia Commons

A few generations ago, some rich Frenchmen lived by this code and found to their sorrow that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade any who still want to live by that oligarchic code, I offer the harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. And the very near miss in the US in the 1930s. This evidence contains some hard lessons for the nineteenth century-style Social Darwinists in societies all over the world: if you want to live, be nice. Share. Workers have to be paid enough to be able to care for their families. Otherwise, they revolt. At the brink of starvation for themselves and their kids, living in misery, they have nothing left to lose. Social Darwinisn, left to its own ways, will gradually tend more and more toward this exact picture.

                           

                      Victorious North Vietnamese troops capture Saigon, 1975

                                                                (credit: Wikipedia) 

Experience in countries all over the world has shown that societies containing more compassion and justice – unionization of workers, state-funded health care, etc. – can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today know this. They will not accept exploitation, bare subsistence living, and misery as their necessary parts in society anymore. The values code that guides society to its highest levels of efficiency is one that balances courage with wisdom and freedom with compassion. Leaving mercy out of our picture of human society is not just cruel; it’s stupid. The exploitation gets worse and worse until it costs its adherents their heads. Literally. This is becoming clearer and clearer as we have more and more records to study and find patterns in.  

   

         

                         Teamsters’ union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934

                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Now let’s return to our main case and consider an example that shows how values in reality find equilibrium. This example of how values shape human relations is relevant because it can be seen as a paradigm of how humans, especially in the West, are guided by their values as they interact with each other in all areas of their lives, professional and personal.

A captain of industry in the West today has times when he despises unions, but he accepts that if workers are not paid a fair percentage of the company’s earnings, they will work less and less efficiently. His best workers will leave his firm and find employment elsewhere. Other workers will willfully sabotage the company. He may find ways of retaliating through punitive measures, but he knows those will simply cause the cycle to deepen and worsen. If the obstinacy on both sides becomes hardened enough, violence is inevitable. If those who own the means of production – farms, mines, factories, etc. – become more incorrigible in their attitudes, society eventually breaks down into revolution and chaos. To prevent such chaos and to preserve his way of life, the smart CEO has ambition/drive (courage), but also wisdom. A smart owner or CEO works with, not against, his workers.

Thus, we have learned, by trial and painful error, to aim for balance. For example, workers in democracies have rights to safe working conditions and free collective bargaining via their unions. Smart businesspeople negotiate with unions, and contracts are arrived at by debate and compromise. In fact, the most successful businesspersons in the West today are those specifically trained in labour-management negotiations.

   

                                    union leaders with Ford executives

                              (contract signing 2007) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

For their part, most union leaders today know they have to respect a company’s ability to pay. They ask for reasonable wages and benefits for their members, but most of them don’t try to push the owners to the brink of insolvency. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders must have drive and wisdom in balance as well.

Furthermore, most business leaders in the West have accepted that as long as prices go up, workers will expect wages to go up accordingly. Ethical business leaders make businesses more efficient by funding research and by smarter management, rather than by union-busting. Attempts at strike breaking are viewed today as being signs of management incompetence. Overall, finding balance between all the parties trying to get the work done is the key to making the whole corporate, economic system vigorous.  

And clearly, the system is not random. It does not find a working balance by lucky chance, nor by one individual's choice. Many parties, guided by their concepts and values, interact, give a bit, demand a bit in return, and reach agreements that are viable in the real world. Values drive behavior, and, in turn, behavior must interface with reality. Values that respond to the physical forces that drive the world are the values that produce the best working compromises of all. Companies whose workers and management strive to balance enthusiasm with judgement and innovation with respect produce useful, top-quality goods and their enterprises thrive. Those that don't – don't.   

There are also some even more nuanced ways of seeing balance in this labor-management subsystem within our society. One truth is that while most smart business leaders secretly hope they can achieve a modest settlement with their workers, they also hope the rest of their society’s workers will get generous new contracts. That will mean more disposable income in the economy, money that well-paid workers, who, during their time off, are just consumers, can spend on the smarter business leader’s goods and services.

The corollary is that while workers in any company want generous rates of pay in their new contracts, they don’t want to see too generous pay packets being handed out in all the contracts signed in all sectors of their society. If settlements in general are modest, workers know that goods will be cheaper relative to their wages than those goods were just a few months ago. If they are honest, most workers will admit that they want their company to succeed. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding at times, but smart workers know that managers who scrutinize every expense, as long as they also know how to adapt to innovations and to market their goods in creative ways, are the ones the company needs if it is to stay in business and keep workers employed.

In short, in the modern business world, smart business people don’t live by Social Darwinism and smart workers don’t espouse Marxism. Democracy in all its sectors runs by interactions and tensions between complex, balanced systems of concepts and values, or, to put the matter more exactly, between groups of people who carry those values in their heads and then live by them.

   

                               A natural balance: wolves closing in to kill bison

                                (credit: Doug Smith, via Wikimedia Commons)

In this book, wisdom is seen as being a prime virtue. For example, in the economies of our societies, we need to be wise enough to grasp a lesson. When there is a lesson as glaring as the one just described to be found in the history recorded by our forebears, refusing to learn it would not just be unwise; it would be suicidal. Modern business leaders and union leaders, however much they may dislike one another, have by and large grown wise enough to see that they need one another. Dynamic balances make our society work. It is only over where the balance should lie that we argue. Over time, the wolf pack keeps the bison herd strong, and vice versa. Over time, management and union leaders, tough but smart, keep each other and their whole country economically and socially strong. 

This discussion of the ways in which social evolution can be compared to genetic evolution can be pursued further. The discussion is worth the trouble because it reiterates a main claim of this book, namely that the analogy between memes and genes is not a figure of speech. Cultural variation drives human evolution just surely as genetic variation drives all other species’ evolution. 

   

                                                     Prickly pear cactus, USA

                                (credit: mark byzewski, via Wikimedia Commons)

                           

                                    
                                 
                                                                        Cactus flowers, Jordan 

                                   (credit: Freedom's Falcon, via Wikimedia Commons)




For example, in biology, convergence is the term describing the phenomenon seen in species that are widely separated geographically, but that, after eons of evolution, are using nearly identical strategies for survival. Desert plants of widely differing species, in widely separated deserts, have waxy leaves. They also put off reproducing for years until that rare desert downpour arrives.

   

  Native elder Agnes Pilgrim and grandchild(credit: José Murilo, via Wikimedia)

                       


             

    Old Man and Grandson (credit: Domenico Ghirlandaio, via Wikimedia)

Similarly, nearly all human societies that have made it into the present age, with vastly disparate cultures and from widespread geographic areas, respect, value, and heed their elderly. In pre-literate tribes, an old person was a walking encyclopedia of the tribe’s knowledge – of hunts, crops, diseases, etc. What the old had stored in their heads could save lives, even save a whole tribe. Thus, honoring one’s father and mother being a value in so many tribes all over the world demonstrates convergence in the cultural realm.

For even larger reasons, courage and wisdom are core values everywhere, so common that they're seen as basic parts of the human condition. But we should stress that they aren’t put in genetically. They’re learned. Socially programmed.

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’ve proven over generations that they enable a human society to survive and flourish. This is convergence in social evolution. Our societies are analogues of cacti with waxy leaves.

     

                                 Graphic of fitness landscape concept

                           (credit: Randy Olson, via Wikimedia Commons)

Other concepts in the biological sciences also apply in analogous ways. One of the subtlest 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 hit the spot that yields the best survival odds for that species in that environment. 

Next, we can plot a similar graph in three dimensions, with an x axis, a y axis, and a z axis. The resulting picture would show in three dimensions 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 its 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 real people’s 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 Dawkins’s “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” in Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I for a basic explanation of the meme concept.²) But for now, if we take the meme concept as a given, the thinking enabled by it supports this book's thesis.

We can construct, in imaginary, mathematical space, a fitness landscape for memes – in other words, for basic concepts – that humans use to build systems of beliefs about what the universe is made of and what forces drive and steer the movements of the things in it, including us, the humans, the thinking things.

That fitness landscape, that multi-dimensional graph of the way of thinking underlying a culture, will be very similar for all individuals in that culture. I tend to reason my way to 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 words apple and plum. I recognize the things these words name. I like fruit. I eat it often. 

My ideas of beauty also coincide with other Canadians’ ideas of beauty. Even our definitions of terms like good, wise, just, and democratic largely coincide. They enable us to communicate, work in teams, and live in community most of the time. Very successfully, in fact. 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 behavior patterns to survive and flourish.

No single culture is ever the only combination of concepts or behavior patterns that could work in a given environment. People of other cultures could use their own concepts and morés to survive there. Human societies are tough, capable, and versatile, similar to the various species in a living ecosystem.

                                              

But any society or tribe that settles in a given ecosystem will come to think with memes, concepts, and values that enable the tribe to survive. For example, people can learn to fish with hooks, nets, spears, or baskets, depending on what materials are available in the region and what technologies are already familiar to the people. But the odds 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.

   
             

                                                    Stilts fishermen, Sri Lanka

                              (credit: Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons)

      




   

                                Fishermen with traditional fish traps, Vietnam

                       (credit: Petr Ruzicka from Prague, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                        

            

            

             Ice fishing, Canada (credit: mattcatpurple, via Wikimedia Commons)

    



   

                                               Bow fishing, Philippines

                       (credit: James David Givens, via Wikimedia Commons)  

People in varied cultures all over the world also establish markets in the middle of their towns for commercial activities 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. They get stronger and out-multiply less vigorous neighboring tribes. 

Marketplaces, police officers, and currencies are efficient social constructs because they help societies that invent them to maximize the usefulness of what their citizens produce; they allow venture capital to form and flow. If the people have no currency yet, even surplus goods can work as barter capital, to flow, in a timely way, to where it can do the most good. Fresh fish are a healthy source of protein. Rotten fish benefit no one. Hence, marketplaces. 

Some meme complexes we call values or principles steer us toward institutions that are advantageous for the tribe and especially for those subgroups that believe most devoutly in values that work. Values survive if they enable people who follow them to create behavior patterns that work, that feed and shelter people. The tribe members that hold these values and practice them conscientiously survive to pass the values on to their young.

   

                        Maori warrior hongi-greeting American soldier

  (credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Sgt. Shane A. Cuomo, via Wikimedia Commons)

  

  

                                                 Traditional Indian Namaste greeting

                              (credit: Saptarshi Biswas, via Wikimedia Commons) 

It is true that many differences between the cultures – the memes, concepts, and morés of different societies – can be found. 

But to say, as some moral relativists do³, that cultures are incommensurable – that they can never learn from each other and so get along – is to abandon humanity to war for all time. And that idea – that we can't learn to live together – simply isn’t true.

                                            

   

                         American handshake (Pres. Obama greets Pope Francis)

                   (credit: Tech. Sgt. Robert Cloys, via Wikimedia Commons) 

  
        

                                  English poet-musician Sting (Gordon Sumner)

                              (credit: Helge Øverås, via Wikimedia Commons) 

In the first place, though there are differences, there are many similarities in our ways of life. Some of the top peaks in the meme-scapes of all cultures coincide. Everywhere on earth, people respect and value wisdom, love, courage, and freedom. Different cultures adhere to moral values, and the patterns of behavior that they lead to, in varying ways, degrees, and combinations. But the areas of thinking we have in common far outweigh our differences. As Sting said in the 1980s, “The Russians love their children too.”

In the second place, we can learn. We can learn to fish in four ways instead of just one. We can learn to speak in several languages. We can learn to refrain from giving in to violent impulses that cause men to beat women or each other or engage in war. We can learn to imprison rather than execute murderers. We can learn regular exercise and moderate eating as habits of all rational adults. People already have done these things. Many times.

In the third and most important place, we can teach the kids to do better than we were taught. They can learn to work as a way of life. To push themselves. To train their bodies and minds. And to love their neighbors. Actively. Daily.

The values discussed in this book – values that derive from the physical universe in which we all live – point us toward a society that will place ever greater emphasis on self-discipline, good will, imagination, education, and citizenship. 

We can make a society in a state of dynamic equilibrium, capable of responding effectively to an ever-greater range of challenges, both short and long term. We can become tougher and smarter, overall, than we are now. Without war.

Then we can spread our species out to our destiny – the stars. The potential is there; all it needs in order to be made real is us. Our grand destiny is calling to each of us now and asking: How much character do you really have?  

It is true that when it comes to our values, morés, and patterns of behavior, we tend to change slowly and grudgingly. But we can change. Thus, we could learn a balanced mode of cultural evolution that is vigorous, but not militaristic.

Only certain values, ones derived from our best world view – that is, Science – will be rational choices to guide humanity to greater health and vigor in the future. We all must live and survive in this same physical universe. It is only reasonable for us to seek out and follow the values that Reason says will give us the best odds of surviving over the long haul.

The courage-wisdom meme complex, along with the behavior patterns it entails, is the long-term human response to entropy; the love-freedom meme complex is our long-term response to quantum uncertainty. The optimal balance of them all is called virtue or the Tao. The Way. It is always subtly shifting. Especially in these nuclear-armed, climate-threatened times, we must see the shifts and respond wisely. Or die.

   
        

                   Statue of Lao Tzu (credit: Tom@HK, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Tao Te Ching says: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” Lao Tsu was telling his disciples never to become confident that they have life figured out or become complacent about their capacity to handle its challenges; complacency is the harbinger of disaster. The way of all ways, the Tao, is always shifting. To live as individuals, but far more importantly as nations, we must stay resourceful, alert, nimble, and sharp while remaining true to our largest values, the ones that we can see match reality. A fine balance. The Tao. 

Our most general basic values are not tied to how we fish or cut our hair or talk or dress or make bread. They are far more general, that is, more abstract than that. But they are found in all cultures in varying degrees, combinations, and styles because they work. They are our tested, tried, and true best guides to where the shifting path of long-term survival lies.  

So what do all these analogies between the biological and cultural modes of surviving tell us? Non-human species are programmed mostly by their genes to behave in ways that are well-suited to life in their environments. They adjust to changes in their environments by testing variations of their gene programs in the physical world and keeping the ones that work. 

Humans, on the other hand, live and adapt almost entirely by cultural variation and testing. An analogy between genetic evolution and cultural evolution helps us to understand cultural evolution more deeply because the first mirrors the second in so many ways. 

And to close this chapter, I need also to say again that a living ecosystem, which is what a society is, contains hundreds of species and millions of individuals, all of which sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete, and switch from one role to the other even with the same neighbors, as evolution advances. To those who long to find a single set of concepts, beliefs, and morés for all members of their tribe to live by, I can only say that such thinking is, in the first place, a vestige of the tribalism that we can no longer tolerate. It set tribe against tribe in the past and out of the endless wars that ensued, our species got stronger via this cultural evolution mechanism. But today either that way of thinking is done or we are. Our weapons have gotten too big, and our climate problems too lethal. We take over our own evolution – rationally – or we die. It’s that simple.

In the second place, such thinking just is not consistent with what we know from Biology about how ecosystems work. A society, like any living ecosystem, to stay healthy, does better and better the more diversity it contains. As long as the citizens do not let themselves fall into mutually suspicious and hostile factions. Which means, as long as they love each other.

Tolerance, eccentrics, and diversity are hallmarks of freedom. They come with the territory. Get used to it.

Notes

1. “Convergent Evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 30, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution.

2. Richard Dawkins, “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 123–144.

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 78.