Chapter 18.                 (continued) 

This discussion of the ways in which social/cultural evolution can be compared to genetic evolution can be fruitfully pursued even further. We can provide more evidence that the analogy between memes and genes is not a metaphor. Meme variation and selection drive cultural evolution as surely as genetic variation and selection drive other species’ evolution in the biosphere. 

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 in similar habitats. Desert plants of widely differing species, in widely separated deserts, all have waxy leaves. They also delay 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, plants, 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 value in cultures everywhere, so common that it’s seen as basic to human life. But I stress again that this meme is not put into us by genes. 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 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 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. However, societies pass on the value that teaches the young to respect the wisdom/experience of their elders by cultural means rather than genetic ones.

 

 

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

 

Other concepts from Biology also apply to cultural evolution. 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 overall 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 which 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, because we must build a new moral code, we shall take the meme concept as a given, in order to see where it leads us.

 

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, 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 (at least within and between sub-cultures which generally tolerate each other), work in teams, and live in communities. Mostly 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 at least some very general 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 their region and what technologies are already familiar to the people. But the odds are high 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 their towns for commercial activities like the selling of vegetables and 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 a commodity (like gold) can work as currency and so as venture capital that can then 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. We can’t eat gold, but it can serve as a currency. 

 

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, work, and reproduce together in peace. The tribes that believe in 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)