Boy eating cooked termites (Zimbabwe, 2016)

                                                        (credit: Cecil Dzwowa, via Wikimedia) 

                                      

7. The Society-Species Analogy

A better understanding of the Moral Realist model of society can be reached by considering an analogy between species with their genomes and societies with their cultures.

Every species is being tested by its environment all the time. Species gradually, over generations, undergo changes to their genomes so that they change their coloring or grow taller, etc. as they adapt to changes in their surroundings. Analogously, every tribe is being tested by its environment all the time. Tribes gradually, over generations, undergo changes to their cultures so that they change their beliefs and customs: they learn to eat a new kind of fruit or hunt with a new weapon, in response to changes in their environment.  

Sometimes a tribe’s way of getting food gets tested when a species of plant the tribe has gathered for generations gets wiped out by an invasive blight. Sometimes the tribe’s way of bunching into a tight circle to face predators gets tested when a new species of large predator migrates into the area. However, more often, the testing comes in subtle, nearly invisible ways over generations.

Like obsolete parts of a genome go silent when they no longer provide any useful physical traits for a species, so obsolete parts of a culture get cut, sometimes in a generation, when they no longer guide the tribe to any useful behaviors. For example, knowing how to handle horses was a basic part of many cultures all over the world for centuries. For men in particular, learning horse skills was just part of growing up. Today, however, horse knowledge is all but gone for the vast majority of people in all tribes. Why? Because, in this era, few need it.

                                                       Boy with horse (India, 2013)

                                              (credit: Sidheeq, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Note also that, as is the case with genes, each part of a cultural code is retained if and only if it works, i.e. it enables the people of the tribe who live by that culture to get food, raise kids, fight off invaders, handle epidemics, etc. High quality code enables a tribe to respond effectively to the challenges of life. 

Furthermore, it integrates the activities it teaches into a working package that enables the tribe that lives by that code package to survive and adapt at least as successfully as neighboring tribes against whom that tribe competes. 

Any major part of a cultural code that, perhaps quite suddenly, gets tested and fails to work – because of code decay over long periods of inactivity of that part, or because of changes in the environment, or because of the tribe being invaded – must be updated to handle the tribe’s new reality, or the tribe will die out.

“They kill us with those bow things that fire the little spears they call ‘arrows’. We must learn how to make those things, or we’re going to be wiped out.”

“I know these fruit are new to us, but I’ve seen the chimps eating them. I think they’re safe for us. Fruits that chimps eat usually are. And these are so tasty!”

Thus, by cultural variation and natural selection, instead of gene variation and natural selection, cultural evolution is going on all the time. And occasionally, a war, a famine, or an epidemic – a major challenge – culls a less fit tribe and its culture completely from the total set of human cultures on this planet.

This picture of tribes and their cultures is true almost all the time in all aspects of culture but for a few core beliefs which are universal. Note what I imply here: all tribes have a few core beliefs that keep being reaffirmed in every era. In English, these are called moral values. They are essential to a tribe’s survival. The rest of our programming changes and evolves over time.

What those essential core values are, what they look and sound like, is the point of this essay. We’re coming to them. Hang in there.  

                                 

                                          Chimp eating fruit (Serengeti Park, 2017) 

                                        (credit: Frank Schwichtenberg, via Wikimedia)