Chapter 12                       The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution

 

               

             Customs: Geisha Dancers (credit: Joi Ito, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

In order to begin to build a universal moral code, we must now create a model of cultural evolution, one that is reasonable and testable, as theories in Science are supposed to be. In order to set up our model, first, we’ll describe some data, i.e. describe how a number of different beliefs and morés have worked in the real lives of the tribes/nations of the West, and how they changed over time. 

Second, we’ll infer from our observations of the data, a theory/model of how moral codes work: how a moral code shapes behavior, how new parts are sometimes added to that code, and how, sometimes, old parts are dropped.

Finally, to complete this part of our overall case, we’ll test the theory against more data.

 

                     

  A recent custom: dabbing (credit: Gokudabbing, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

The testing of our theory will have to be ex post facto. That is, we could never intentionally program a new code of behavior into a test population even of a few hundred people just to see how, over a dozen generations or so, that code would affect their survival rate. That would be morally forbidden under the code of ethics we now live by in the West. We can’t purposely, consciously usurp the freedom and dignity of other people for reasons of research or any other reasons. But we can examine the records we have of human tribes – their stated beliefs and values, the less well-explained, but vitally important acts people in those tribes performed in real life, and the social measures of what was going on in their culture. In short, via a study of History, we should be able to put together a model that tentatively explains why humans in groups do the things they do and what the material effects of their values are. 

Most of us are conditioned to be fiercely loyal to the way of life that we grew up with so we can expect that analyzing the roots of morality will be hard. Powerful programming steers us away from any such analyzing. Instead, we are steered toward affirming the values/morés we grew up with. On the other hand, we do have a lot of evidence in historical records of life as it has been lived by real people in many eras and lands from which to infer our tentative theory/model.

 To begin with, we can observe the everyday actions of the people around us. Why does this man rise when his clock radio beeps? Why does he even own a clock radio? Why do men in some cultures shave off their beards? Why have women in so many cultures been so oppressed? Why is honoring elders such a widespread custom?

 In similar ways, dozens of mundane questions may be posed about everyday life in our society or any society. While these actions and the motives behind them may seem obvious to people who live in the society where the customs are practiced, to people from other cultures, the reasons for foreigners’ ways aren’t so much confusing as inscrutable. All nations have at least some “ways” in their daily lives that visitors from other lands see as being not normal. Even bizarre.

 

 

          

          Dancers from West Africa (credit: Eric Draper, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

An interesting example of a custom that is commonplace in some societies but not in others is the one that trains men to shave their beards. In some cultures, clean-shaven men are seen as being presentable, neat, and attractive. Socially acceptable. In other cultures, a man without a beard is seen as being weak.  

The fascinating questions come when we ask “Why?” Why is shaving done? Is there a survival advantage in some environments for men who learned from their fathers to shave off their beards? For example, do men who shave daily appear more attractive to women? Do they reproduce more prolifically and thus pass their shaving behavior on to more progeny, i.e. sons who watch their fathers shave and then, when they grow up, do the same themselves?

Research on shaving is sparse and inconclusive. However, what’s important for now is to see that asking these kinds of questions about cultural morés and customs in terms of their possible advantages in the survival game entails thinking scientifically about morés. Under this view, no human customs are trivial. They all have significance in the larger design of a culture. Under this view, we also can compare cultures. Mundane customs become fascinating.

If we keep asking "Why?" about our "ways of life", the answers seem to spread further and further from one another into a variety of human morés and then whole cultures; human morés vary widely within any given society and then much more so from society to society. But if we persist in analyzing our observations, patterns begin to emerge. Based on these patterns, we can make some general statements about people and their ways, i.e. ways of life.

For the most part, people act in the ways that they do because they have been programmed to act in those ways – by parents, teachers, and the media (in very early times, storytellers) in their cultures. Humans don’t acquire most of their “ways” by genetic coding. We are not born to adopt shaving our beards or speaking English or spicing our food with curry because innate forces push us to do these things. The behaviors are learned from those around us as we develop in childhood. 

For example, close observation shows that the vast majority of humans early on in their development learn to urinate and defecate in ways considered socially acceptable in their particular culture. The urge to “go”, as we say in English, sometimes gets urgent to the point of being irrepressible. But where we “go” is very specifically defined by our cultural programming.

                 

                                        Balut (soft-boiled fetal duck, Vietnam)

                             (credit: Marshall Astor, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

In this category of mundane morés, we also find the morés that govern how we eat. I prefer to eat dishes I find familiar, ones I ate during my upbringing. And in my culture, I wash my hands before eating in order to remove disease-causing microbes that I might otherwise ingest with my food if I ate it with dirty hands. I have never seen these tiny animals, but I have been trained to be wary of them. Therefore, I take measures to neutralize the danger I believe they pose to my health. For similar reasons, if I possibly can, I try to urinate and defecate only in places deemed acceptable in my society, no matter how acute my natural urges may at times become.

It is useful to note here the profound way in which human behavior patterns differ from those of nearly all other animals. A turtle doesn’t need ever to see another turtle, from hatching to dying of old age, in order to be turtlish. A turtle that was the last of its species would be unable to perform its genetically driven reproductive behavior each mating season, but for a few days it would still try to find a mate. The rest of the time, it would live in ways normal for turtles, with all its behaviors being directed by its genetic code. 

Creatures like ants, crabs, and fish that came early in evolutionary history clearly are more fully programmed by their genetic codes than later ones like cats, dogs, apes, and humans. But even large mammals learn only some of their behaviors. Most of their behaviors are still acquired via their genetic programing. Kittens, in time, will stalk balls and then mice and birds, even if they are taken from their mothers still blind and helpless. Pups are genetically programmed to bury bones. As they mature, dogs mate, then have pups, even if they were taken from their mothers at one week old, blind and helpless, and raised entirely by human owners.

Humans, by contrast, if  they even survive, if raised without adults to model ourselves on, demonstrate few if any of our society’s “human” behaviors. We humans – unlike turtles, apes, and kittens – learn our society’s way of being human by “enculturation”, i.e. almost entirely from other, older humans.^{1. ,2.}

The knowledge base that you consult most of the time in order to respond to real-life situations is called your culture, and it is learned, not innate. Put a dead fish in the earth with each corn seed you plant; wear your tuxedo and black tie to the opera. These are customs, not innate ways.

 

                   A widespread custom: mom teaching daughter how to cook

                       (credit: Sgt. Sinthia Rosario, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

But if humans act as they do mostly because of social programming, then we must ask why or how some behavior patterns ever became established at all in the earliest human societies, and why many behaviors possible for humans died out or never got tried. Why don’t most people on this planet eat holly berries or make their children into slaves? The answer is clear: such practices would reduce the chances of our children surviving to have and raise children of their own and so reduce the chances of our culture surviving. We keep concepts, values, and morés that help us, and even more, our culture, to survive. We drop ones that don’t. In this picture, my loyalty to my “way of life” is programmed into me because that programming is my culture’s way of protecting itself. 

We keep alive concepts, values, and morés that, in the past, have kept us alive.

Behavior patterns get established in a society and passed on generation to generation if they enable the people who use them to live – as individuals and as tribes – to survive, reproduce, and then program the behaviors into their young. If new morés or behavior patterns are to last, then they must achieve these results at levels of efficiency at least as high as those the community knew before its people began to try out the new behavior patterns. When an old moré no longer serves any of its carrier society’s needs, or when it in fact is getting in the way of serving survival needs, over generations, it dies out. This is the theory around which the model of sociocultural evolution is built.^3.