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 found in the universe (so far) is the way it tends, overall, to keep becoming more – more in its mass, in the space it occupies, and in its complexity – as it moves forward in time. All other entities known to us shred apart across the time axis. But life on this planet has formed complex entities that keep weaving in more matter and energy. Living things take bits of dead matter, plus already existing living fabric, then, using directions coded into their own parts, they weave these into more of themselves. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen woven on sunlight-powered looms, following directions coded into DNA, ultimately form one giant garment. Earth’s biosphere.  

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 balls, even though that’s how they’re portrayed in high school Science texts.

All the metaphor is meant to help make clear is that as this entity expands, there are patterns visible in that expanding. Those patterns can be seen repeating and also subtly evolving, ceaselessly. It is just logical for us to assume that they must be guided by some programming embedded somewhere in the fabric.

We have shown in the life sciences that most of the species in the system get the programming they use to regulate how each species member maintains its body, how it reproduces, and how the species as a whole adapts to changes in its surroundings, from microscopic bits of matter woven into each species member. That is, all that information is coded into these bits of matter we call “genes”.

Only one social species, the human, gets even more of the programming it uses for maintenance, reproduction, and adaptation from memes programmed – via language – by older members of the species into the brains of the young.   

Living by their cultural codes, i.e. by learned behaviors rather than genetically coded ones, humans outmanoeuvre all other species on this planet. But we must bear in mind always that, in the end, societies have to survive in the same universe run by the same laws as all living things do. Cultural programs must guide us to deal with gravity, light, entropy, uncertainty, pH ranges, moisture levels, and so on, just as genetic programs do. Culture enhances genetic codes. It does not replace genetic codes. And both aim at the same end: survival.

Thus, it is logical for us to digress on the analogy that can be drawn between the genetic mode of evolution and the cultural one. This analogy will help to deepen our understanding of cultural codes, and so of moral realism.

Parallels between biological evolution and cultural evolution have been noted before, by the Social Darwinists in particular. But most people today consider the Social Darwinists’ conclusions disgusting. And rightly so. To put it bluntly, Social Darwinists argue that 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 keep society stable and 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 misery because they don’t have the intelligence or discipline 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 a hard lesson for the nineteenth century-style Social Darwinists 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 will revolt. Living in misery, with daily starvation for themselves and their kids, they have nothing left to lose. Social Darwinism, left to its own ways, driven only by markets and their codes, will gradually tend more and more toward this exact picture. For whole societies, chaos, pain, blood, and death. And that description is not overly florid or dramatic. It’s just what the evidence shows.

  

                             

                      

                       Victorious North Vietnamese troops capture Saigon, 1975

                                                        (credit: Wikipedia) 

Experience in countries all over the world has shown that societies containing more compassion and social 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 love out of our picture of human society is not just cruel; it’s stupid. As unregulated, unrestrained capitalism just keeps doing its thing, manoeuvring for greater and greater profits, the exploitation gets worse and worse until, eventually, it costs its adherents their heads. Literally. This is becoming clearer and clearer as we have more and more historical records to study and find patterns in.  

                      

   

                         Teamsters’ union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934

                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Now let’s consider an example that shows how values can find equilibrium in a real democracy. This example is relevant and useful here because it can be seen as a paradigm of how sub-cultures of societies in the West, at their best, are guided by their values as they interact in all areas of their lives, professional and personal. (In English, we say our actions are informed by our values.)

Workers and management in Western economies can be thought of as “social species”. 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 to find other jobs. Other workers, fed up, will willfully sabotage the company. He may find ways of retaliating, 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 run the means of production – farms, mines, factories, etc. – become more incorrigible in their attitudes, society eventually breaks down into revolution. To prevent such chaos and preserve his way of life, the smart CEO has ambition/drive/diligence (courage), but also wisdom. A smart 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, some of the smartest businesspersons in the West today are those specifically trained in labour-management negotiations.

   

                       

                                               union leaders with Ford executives

     (contract signing 2007) (credit: Ford Motor Co., via 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 smart union bosses don’t push the employers to the brink of insolvency. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders need courage 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 efficient management, not by union-busting. Attempts at strike breaking are viewed today as signs of management incompetence. Overall, finding balance between all the parties trying to get the work done is the key to making the whole economic system of the nation 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 mirror the forces of the physical world are the ones that produce working compromises. Companies whose workers and management strive to balance enthusiasm with judgement (courage and wisdom) and innovation with respect (freedom and love) produce quality, sensibly-priced goods and their firms thrive. Those that don't – don't.

Thus, in the view of cultural evolution, two social species – management and labor – stay in balance by following their cultural programming.    

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 hope they can achieve a modest settlement with their workers, they also hold values that make them secretly hope the rest of their society’s workers will get generous new contracts. That will mean more disposable income in the economy, money that workers – who, during their time off, are just consumers – can spend on the smarter company’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 soon be cheaper relative to their wages than those goods were just a few months ago.

If they are honest, most workers will also 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, but smart workers know that managers who scrutinize every line in their books, 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 live by Marxism. Democracy in all its sectors runs by extremely complex interactions, tensions, and balances of all parties with all their concepts and values functioning vigorously.

         

   

                               A natural balance: wolves closing in to kill bison

                                (credit: Doug Smith, via Wikimedia Commons)

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. The negotiating costs emotion, but it’s effect over the long term is to prevent violence. The uplifting thing to notice here is that in democracy, we have learned to find balances almost always by non-violent means. Firms go bankrupt sometimes. Unions cease to exist if some kinds of work are made obsolete by technology. But managers and workers do not have to kill one another to enable cultural evolution to happen. We can live and evolve peacefully under the rule of law.  

This discussion of the ways in which social evolution can be compared to genetic evolution can be fruitfully pursued even further. Thus, the analogy between memes and genes is not a metaphor. Meme variation and selection drives cultural evolution as surely as genetic variation drives other species’ evolution. 

Another comparison between a meme that is found in many cultures and a set of genetically programmed features in several species of the living world will deepen our understanding of how cultural evolution works.

               

   

                                                  Prickly pear cactus, USA

                                (credit: mark byzewski, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                  

                                 

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

In Biology, convergence is the term for the phenomenon seen in species that are separated geographically, but that, after eons of evolution, are using similar strategies for survival. Desert plants of widely differing species, in widely separated deserts, have waxy leaves. They also put off reproducing – maybe, for years – until that rare desert rain arrives.

                           

   

                                    Native elder Agnes Pilgrim and grandchild

                                            (credit: José Murilo, 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. Why? Because 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 became a value in tribes all over the world. Tribes that honored the elders grew and thrived. Ones that didn’t …didn’t. This evidence demonstrates convergence in the cultural realm.

                

   

             Indonesian and grandson (Uwe Aranas, via Wikimedia Commons)

For even more general reasons, wisdom is a core values in cultures everywhere, so common that it’s seen as basic to human life. But I’ll stress again that it is not put into us by our genetics. Respect for wisdom is socially programmed.

The wisest lion in a pride is not necessarily its alpha leader. That position goes to the strongest, and the wisest old cat can readily be pushed aside by a strong young challenger. Humans, in their societies, have learned a better way.

There is nothing in the genes of the human animal to predict that valuing wisdom will occur in societies everywhere, as naturally as walking on two feet does. Bipedal motion arises automatically out of our genetic design. But morés 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 make a human society more likely to survive and flourish. This is convergence in social evolution. Our societies are analogues of cacti with waxy leaves.

     

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

Other concepts in Biology 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 coloring, interact to give a size-color 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 for three biological traits of a species 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, 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, but with the mathematical models we have now, and with computers to do the calculations, geneticists can predict what niches in an emerging environment will contain which kinds of species and how long it will take for species in that ecosystem to find balance.

The concept of a fitness landscape – one that exists only in 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 – for basic concepts, in other words – 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 human, thinking things.

That fitness landscape, that multi-dimensional graph of the ways 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 words like red and round and sweet and edible is very close to what other English speakers mean by these terms. So is what I mean by plum and apple. I recognize the things these words name. I like fruit. I eat it often. 

My ideas of beauty also roughly coincide with other Canadians’ ideas of beauty. Even our definitions of abstract terms like good, wise, just, and democracy roughly coincide. They enable us to communicate, work in teams, and live in community. Usually. Fairly 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 in physical reality. They enable people who think with them to design behavior patterns that get good results, and so, 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 varied, 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    (Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons)

    

   

                  

       Traditional fish trap fishing, Vietnam (Petr Ruzicka, Wikimedia Commons)

       

           

   

            

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

                   

   

            Bow fishing, Philippines  (James David Givens, 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 tribes that learn to catch fish and set up markets. They get stronger and out-multiply less vigorous neighboring tribes. 

Marketplaces, policing, and currencies are efficient social constructs because they help societies that create 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’s diet. Hence, marketplaces. 

Some large meme complexes we call values guide us toward forming institutions that are advantageous for the tribe and especially for the subgroups that believe most devoutly in those values. Some do not. Values survive if they enable people who follow them to create behavior patterns that work, behaviors that feed and shelter more people, and enable them to live and work together in peace. The tribes that believe and practice these values survive in greater numbers over the long haul of generations to pass the values on to their young.

        

   

              Learning a custom: Maori warrior hongi-greeting American soldier

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

        

  

   

                               A custom: 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 or create institutions for settling disputes between their tribes, and so get along – is to abandon humanity to war for all time. Furthermore, that idea – that cultures are incommensurable – simply isn’t true.

                                            

        

     

    A greeting custom: American handshake (Pres. Obama greets Pope Francis)

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

In the first place, though there are differences, there are many similarities in our various cultures. Some of the top peaks in the meme-scapes of all cultures coincide. Everywhere on earth, people respect and value courage, wisdom, love, 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.” (A universal value.)

   

                

        

                                  English poet-musician Sting (Gordon Sumner)

                              (credit: Helge Øverås, via Wikimedia Commons) 

In the second place, we can learn. We can learn to fish in four ways instead of just one. We can learn to speak several languages. We can learn to restrain 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 habits. People from many tribes, across History, have done these things many times.

In the third and most important place, we can educate the kids to do better than we do. They can learn work as a way of life. Push themselves. Train their bodies and minds. And they can learn to love their neighbors. Every day.

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

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, asking: How much character do you 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 code and a 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 ones to write into that code. To guide humanity to greater health and vigor in the future. We all must 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 in that universe over the long haul.

The courage-wisdom meme complex, along with the behavior patterns it entails, is our long-term response to entropy; the freedom-love 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 shifting. In this nuclear-armed, global-warming era, 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 feel confident that they had life figured out or feel 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 alert, resourceful, nimble, and sharp while remaining true to our largest values, the ones that we can see match reality. A fine balance. Grace. 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 pervasive and general 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. Our basic values will apply even on a planet to which we must bring our water because the planet is so dry.  

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

Human tribes, on the other hand, survive and adapt almost entirely by cultural variation and testing. This chapter’s analogy between genetic evolution and cultural evolution helps us to understand cultural evolution more deeply because the cultural mode mirrors the genetic one in so many ways. 

And to close this chapter, I need also to underline the most important way in which memes can be compared to genes and social species to biological species.

A society is an ecosystem. It can contain millions of individuals and hundreds of “social species”, all of which sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete, and switch from one role to the other even with the same neighbors, as evolution advances. Entrepreneurs. Professional doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Artists. Farmers. Tradesmen. Academics. Soldiers. These and many others can be seen as “species” within the social ecosystem. To those who seek a single, prescriptive set of beliefs and morés for all members of their tribe to live by, I will repeat that such thinking is, in the first place, a vestige of tribalism that we can no longer tolerate. In the past, it set tribe against tribe. Out of the wars that ensued, yes, our species got stronger. But today, either that way is done or we are. Our weapons have gotten too big, our climate problems, planet-threatening. Either, 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. Then, it can adjust its internal balances and interactions in many different ways, adapt to changes in its environment, and still remain stable and vigorous. As biodiversity is good for an ecosystem, cultural diversity is good for a human society, as long as citizens do not let themselves fall into mutually hostile factions. Which means, as long as they love each other, they will discover or devise ways to make their social ecosystem work. This is the purpose for which our species evolved the intelligence we now have. We are designed by evolution to take over managing evolution: the evolution of our species, our fellow species, and the biosphere of Earth. Then, to carry this incredible miracle to the stars.

Tolerance and diversity are the most telling hallmarks of freedom. Therefore, at least some daily anxiety comes with the human condition, especially as it is experienced in the most vigorous of societies – namely democracies. We are genetically hard-wired to feel nervous when we encounter other humans who look, talk, and act different from the ways we grew up with. That is why war comes so easily to us.

But Reason is the gift of our more recent evolution, and it tells us  that evidence shows socio-diversity is good for us in the long haul. So? Get used to it. Your neighbor’s ways that you find strange serve a higher purpose: in this real, physical world, those ways may one day save your life.

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.