Cultural Resources
Cultural Evolution
At no point in our history has it been as necessary as now to learn how to use our cultures so that they serve, more and more, the welfare of life, and damage it less and less. I believe this makes understanding how culture works muy importante.
— Michael Johnson
Editor’s Note
For decades I agreed with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And I loved Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind when I read it and was generally supportive of the cultural evolutionists, who seemed to concur with King. Then Hannah Arendt’s On Violence shook me to the core with her claims that Progress is a myth and applying biology to culture is mistaken. (The Trouble with Cultural Evolution by Massimo Pigliucci captures some of these issues.) I no longer agree with King.
Then a rich online dialog on the subject with Michael Johnson posted here prompted me to clarify my thinking somewhat and ask Michael, who’s very knowledgeable on the subject, to serve as Topic Leader and submit resources for this topic (see below) so readers can explore a diversity of opinion and come to their own conclusions.
As I see it, if it’s valid, cultural evolution is amoral. Proponents posit that it is a morally neutral, automatic natural process like breathing. They picture an “unselfish” struggle to align self-interest with group interest to the benefit of both. But an unselfish community can be dedicated to dominating another community. Populists, for instance, can collaborate to defeat elites.
My question is: what is the mission? We have a top-down System dedicated to self-interest, sometimes couched within a group interest. I believe an alternative is a bottom-up social system dedicated to justice and compassion which transcends self-interest.
As defined in Webster, evolution is “a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state," as reflected in “a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political, and economic advance” rooted in natural selection and adaptation. It seems to me that with their attempts to apply this Darwinian framework to cultural change, cultural evolutionists redefine terms in ways that confuse the situation.
Heredity is the passing on of physical or mental characteristics genetically from one generation to another. But socialization is primarily social learning, passing on or persuading individuals to adopt certain ideas and values and then modify their behavior accordingly. This altered behavior may or may not be "better adapted." It may in fact be immoral conformity or maladapted rebellions. Revolutions are examples of such contrary non-conformity.
So-called "cultural evolution," it seems to me, is merely social change. There's no need to use Darwinian terms, which distract attention from social dynamics, especially power dynamics. Our social system — the System — concentrates power upwardly. Those with more power shape the ideas held by the general population, which shapes behavior, often by inflaming fear that suppresses compassion. I don't see how this top-down socialization produces individuals who are better adapted to moral values.
Being “better adapted” is not necessarily a positive value. It depends on the moral objective. Darwinian thinking doesn't seem to be helpful with regard to moral issues. It’s not a matter of Left and Right, but Top and Bottom.
"Evolve" is commonly understood to imply progress. And I don't see that humanity has evolved morally to a significant degree over the course of the last 10,000 years. We developed the ability to cooperate, for instance, prior to the birth of agriculture. Certain liberal democratic advances are relatively minor.
The attention paid by cultural evolutionists to cooperation is valuable. But selfish cooperation is not compassionate cooperation and the whole cultural evolution framework to my mind gets lost in too many complicated abstractions.
Others disagree, however, so I think it's valuable for this site to present Michael’s resources so readers can form their own conclusions. His Introduction to Cultural Evolution is presented first. Most of the resources that follow were suggested by him.
Resource:
The Growing Democracy Project, Michael Johnson.
“The Growing Democracy Project (GDP) is a cultural and political program for developing a legion of everyday citizens who can generate enough collective power to make democracy the dominant political force in our country. The strategy is to produce abundant, persistent, and effective citizen action to solve shared problems at all levels of our society.
The means is the continuous development of participants’ “habits of the heart” and skillful democratic means.” [read more]
--Wade Lee Hudson, Editor
4/1/22
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Introduction to Cultural Evolution
By Michael Johnson
History and evolution are continuous. It is a very complex system, the most complex. Once we understand how the system is stabilized, understand the feedback interactions, then we can also understand how one can change it.
—Eva Jablonka
A New Way of Seeing Culture
In his opening to his interview with Eva Jablonka, David Sloan Wilson, a leading figure in evolutionary science, framed the interview in a way that situates the place of cultural evolution in the history of our species:
One of the most mind-expanding books that you’ll ever read is Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. They remind us that evolution is about variation, selection, and heredity, not genes. Genes provide one mechanism of heredity but there are others, including epigenetic mechanisms, forms of social learning found in many species, and forms of symbolic thought that are distinctively human. They provide a concise history of why evolutionary theory became so gene-centric during the 20th Century and how it needs to be expanded to include the other three dimensions. (Emphasis added.)
“Not genes!” What kind of evolution is that!
Like everything else in human life, evolutionary thinking evolves. A key development since the late 20th century is the deeper understanding that genes is only one mechanism for human evolution. In the quote above “symbolic thought” refers to culture. That is, culture is a form of heredity as is epigenetics, social learning and genes. For many of us this is a paradigm shift. I for one grew up embodying and understanding that evolution is all about passing on and changing genes.
That it’s being far more than that, I have come to realize, is quite liberating and empowering. The meaning of culture becomes far more than something we are stuck with after our first five years. It also becomes far more than art, music, literature, etc. Rather, we become able to see it having a major hand in shaping everything human, as the source of the survival of every single human being as well as their thriving, and as the producer of the most scaled and powerful form of social cooperation and that is still evolving. It is at the core of everything human, the worst and the best of us.
I want the world to change in ways that can enable it to work better in support of life, joy, love, and creativity. At the same time we have taken ourselves to precipice of doing enormous damage to every form of life across our Earth, including ourselves. At no point in our history has it been as necessary as now to learn how to use our cultures so that they serve, more and more, the welfare of life, and damage it less and less. I believe this makes understanding how culture works muy importante. So I am quite grateful to help provide the information about cultural evolution in this section of the Americans for Humanity website. READ MORE
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED WORKS
MJ: I am giving Part III of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion the top place in this section because it was through his summary of cultural evolution thinking that I was able to synthesize a great deal of my research into the subject. It is an excellent starting point for grappling with this new and powerful way of thinking about our species and the role of culture in our struggles in living and relating.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt.
In The Righteous Mind Haidt presents and elaborates on the core thinking of Moral Foundation Theory, which is grounded in cultural evolutionary thinking. He organizes the book around three principles, and throughout the long discussion of the third one he provides an excellent summation of cultural evolutionary thinking.
The principles are:
Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.
Morality binds and blinds.
Haidt’s treatment of the third principle is in Part III of the book, chapters 9-11. The first part of his thesis here is that morality is a major force in human life that binds humans together in groups and groups of groups on up the scale to society. He draws on cultural evolution theory to develop this aspect of his thesis. At the end of chapter 9—"Why Are We So Groupish?”—he summarizes his argument. It is excerpted below from pages 244-45.
Darwin believed that morality was an adaptation that evolved by natural selection operating at the individual level and at the group level. Tribes with more virtuous members replaced tribes with more selfish members. But Darwin’s idea was banished from the academic world when Williams and Dawkins argued that the free-rider problem dooms group selection. The sciences then entered a three-decade period during which competition between groups was downplayed and everyone focused on competition among individuals within groups. Seemingly altruistic acts had to be explained as covert forms of selfishness.
But in recent years new scholarship has emerged that elevates the role of groups in evolutionary thinking. Natural selection works at multiple levels simultaneously, sometimes including groups of organisms. I can’t say for sure that human nature was shaped by group selection—there are scientists whose views I respect on both sides of the debate. But as a psychologist studying morality, I can say that multilevel selection would go a long way toward explaining why people are simultaneously so selfish and so groupish.91
There is a great deal of new scholarship since the 1970s that compels us to think anew about group selection (as a part of multilevel selection). I organized that scholarship into four “exhibits” that collectively amount to a defense92 of group selection.
Exhibit A: Major transitions produce superorganisms. The history of life on Earth shows repeated examples of “major transitions.” When the free-rider problem is muted at one level of the biological hierarchy, larger and more powerful vehicles (superorganisms) arise at the next level up in the hierarchy, with new properties such as a division of labor, cooperation, and altruism within the group.
Exhibit B: Shared intentionality generates moral matrices. The Rubicon crossing that let our ancestors function so well in their groups was the emergence of the uniquely human ability to share intentions and other mental representations. This ability enabled early humans to collaborate, divide labor, and develop shared norms for judging each other’s behavior. These shared norms were the beginning of the moral matrices that govern our social lives today.
Exhibit C: Genes and cultures coevolve. Once our ancestors crossed the Rubicon and began to share intentions, our evolution became a two-stranded affair. People created new customs, norms, and institutions that altered the degree to which many groupish traits were adaptive. In particular, gene-culture coevolution gave us a set of tribal instincts: we love to mark group membership, and then we cooperate preferentially with members of our group.
Exhibit D: Evolution can be fast. Human evolution did not stop or slow down 50,000 years ago. It sped up. Gene-culture coevolution reached a fever pitch during the last 12,000 years. We can’t just examine modern-day hunter-gatherers and assume that they represent universal human nature as it was locked into place 50,000 years ago. Periods of massive environmental change (as occurred between 70,000 and 140,000 years ago) and cultural change (as occurred during the Holocene era) should figure more prominently in our attempts to understand who we are, and how we got our righteous minds.
Most of human nature was shaped by natural selection operating at the level of the individual. Most, but not all. We have a few group-related adaptations too, as many Americans discovered in the days after 9/11. We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.93 If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It’s almost as though there’s a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
The False Allure of Group Selection, An EDGE Original Essay, Steven Pinker.
“I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not. After all, group selection sounds like a reasonable extension of evolutionary theory and a plausible explanation of the social nature of humans. Also, the group selectionists tend to declare victory, and write as if their theory has already superseded a narrow, reductionist dogma that selection acts only at the level of genes. In this essay, I'll explain why I think that this reasonableness is an illusion. The more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it fits the facts of human psychology and history..”
The Reality Club, MJ: Responders to Pinker’s essays: Stewart Brand, Daniel Everett, David C. Queller, Daniel C. Dennett, Herbert Gintis, Harvey Whitehouse & Ryan McKay, Peter J. Richerson, Jerry Coyne, Michael Hochberg, Robert Boyd & Sarah Mathew, Max Krasnow & Andrew Delton,Nicolas Baumard, Jonathan Haidt, David Sloan Wilson, Michael E. Price, Joseph Henrich, Randolph M. Nesse, Richard Dawkins, Helena Cronin, John Tooby.
MJ: Pinker’s essay is an attempt to refute group selection thinking. A wide range of scholars—referred to as “The Reality Club” in the Edge publication—respond, mostly rebutting Pinker’s claim. The exchange brings the primary issues into sharp focus. See also Peter Richerson, et al.’s “Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: A Sketch of the Evidence” for another full exchange. It is in the “important Works” section. The excerpt below succinctly provides context for place of “group selection” in evolutionary theory, which plays a substantial role in cultural evolution thinking. I don’t remember where it came from.
Multi-level selection is the evolutionary theory that selection can act on genes organised into different levels of aggregation which include phenotypes, individuals, kin-groups, groups, species and even entire ecosystems. Individual level and kin-group selection are universally accepted, however group level selection is hotly contested.
Group selection was originally argued on the grounds that groups can compete with each other. A good example of this is between the British and French empires. The British successfully secured the best colonies, and as a consequence, were able to massively increased their bio mass at the expense of the French.
Group selection is now argued to occur even in the absence of intergroup competition since groups with higher levels of altruism can disproportionately increase their bio mass due to the returns on superior levels of cooperation.
In a popular article, Pinker has argued that there's a false allure to group selection, that multilevel selection deviates from Darwin's original theory of individual level selection, and that no one would sacrifice themselves for the good of the group.
Rapid cultural adaptation can facilitate the evolution of large-scale cooperation, Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, Joseph Henrich.
MJ: This article focuses on the relationship between culture and large-scale cooperation. This has been the basic focus of their work for more than three decades. Its scope has been the key empirical questions regarding cultural adaptation as it relates to human learning, cultural diffusion, cultural variation, and human cooperation?
Their core claims in this article:
Human cooperation depends on systems of norms maintained by punishment, reputation, conformist cultural transmission, and other learning biases.
Because cultural adaptation can be much more rapid than genetic adaptation, cultural evolution generates more stable behavioral variation among large groups, even very large groups.
Like most models of this kind, our work reveals conditions both favorable and unfavorable to the spread of larger-scale cooperation via cultural evolution.
We would never have become such a cooperative species at the scale of small groups without democratic governance, in which all members take part and protect each other from self-serving bullying behaviors. Our instincts for democratic governance are literally embedded in our DNA. The necessity of democratic governance doesn’t change as societies increase in scale, but cultural mechanisms are required to interface with our genetically evolved mechanisms. The evidence is unequivocal that inclusive societies work better than societies controlled by elites for their benefit. Governance at all scales must be democratic to achieve a society that works for the common good.
Table of Contents
3 Authors
4 Preamble
6 On the Origin of Socialist Darwinism
8 More Perfect UNIONS Must Regulate Their Parts
10 The Human Social Organism and a Parliament of Genes
14 Morality Regulates Our Social Physiology
16 The Darwinian ‘Struggle for Existence’ is Really About Balance
18 Self-Interest, Rightly Understood, is Social
19 Why Socialism Fails
21 Why Capitalism Fails
23 We Are All Socialists, Globalists, Democrats, Capitalists, Environmentalists, Technologists, and
Scientists
26 Epilogue
Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems, Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm.
MJ: Below is an excellent summary of the whole story they tell.
We provide the most up-to-date evidence available in various behavioral fields in support of the hypothesis that the emergence of bipedalism and cooperative breeding in the hominin line—together with environmental developments that made a diet of meat from large animals adaptive as well as cultural innovation in the form of fire and cooking—created a niche for hominins in which there was a high return for coordinated, cooperative scavenging and hunting of large mammals. This was accompanied by an increasing use of wooden spears and lithic points as lethal hunting weapons that transformed human sociopolitical life. The combination of social interdependence and the availability of such weapons in early hominin society undermined the standard social dominance hierarchy of multimale/multifemale primate groups. The successful sociopolitical structure that ultimately replaced the ancestral social dominance hierarchy was an egalitarian political system in which lethal weapons made possible group control of leaders, and group success depended on the ability of leaders to persuade and of followers to contribute to a consensual decision process. The heightened social value of nonauthoritarian leadership entailed enhanced biological fitness for such leadership traits as linguistic facility, ability to form and influence coalitions, and, indeed, hypercognition in general.
Books
Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, David Sloan Wilson.
With stories that entertain as much as they inform, renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, when properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion.
What is the biological reason for gossip? For laughter? For the creation of art? Why do dogs have curly tails? What can microbes tell us about morality?
These and many other questions are tackled by Wilson in this witty and groundbreaking new book. Now everyone can move beyond the sterile debates about creationism and intelligent design to share Darwin’s panoramic view of animal and human life, seamlessly connected to each other.
Evolution, as Wilson explains, is not just about dinosaurs and human origins, but about why all species behave as they do—from beetles that devour their own young, to bees that function as a collective brain, to dogs that are smarter in some respects than our closest ape relatives. And basic evolutionary principles are also the foundation for humanity’s capacity for symbolic thought, culture, and morality.
In example after example, Wilson sheds new light on Darwin’ s grand theory and how it can be applied to daily life. By turns thoughtful, provocative, and daringly funny, Evolution for Everyone addresses some of the deepest philosophical and social issues of this or any age. In helping us come to a deeper understanding of human beings and our place in the world, it might also help us to improve that world.PROSOCIAL: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups, Paul W.B. Atkins, PhD, David Sloan Wilson, PhD, and Steven C. Hayes, PhD,
A groundbreaking, comprehensive program for designing effective and socially equitable groups of all sizes—from businesses and social justice groups to global organizations.
Whether you work in business or schools, volunteer in neighborhoods or church organizations, or are involved in social justice and activism, you understand the enormous power of groups to enact powerful and lasting change in the world. But how exactly do you design, build, and sustain effective groups?
Based on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom and grounded in contextual behavioral science, evolutionary science, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Prosocial presents a practical, step-by-step approach to help you energize and strengthen your business or organization. Using the Prosocial model, you’ll learn to design groups that are more harmonious, have better member or employee retention, have better relationships with other groups or business partners, and have more success and longevity.
Most importantly, you’ll learn to target the characteristics that foster cooperation and collaboration—key ingredients for any effective group.
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution,domesticating our species, and making us smart, Joseph Henrich.
In the natural world, humans are unique in using fancy technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions. These cultural products have permitted us to expand across the globe, and thrive in nearly every terrestrial environment. How is it that our species manages all this and more, but other species cannot?
Drawing insights from lost European Explorers, clever chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers, cultural neuroscience, ancient bones and the human genome, Henrich shows that it’s not our general intelligence, innate brain power, or specialized mental abilities that explain our success. Instead, it’s our collective brains, which arise from a combination of our ability to learn selectively from each and our sociality. Our collective brains, which often operate outside of any individual’s conscious awareness, gradually produce increasingly complex, nuanced and subtle technological, linguistic and social products over generations.
Tracking this back into the mist of our evolutionary past, and to the remote corners of the globe, Henrich shows how this non-genetic system of cultural inheritance has long driven human genetic evolution. By producing fire, cooking, water containers, tracking know-how, plant knowledge, words, hunting strategies and projectiles, culture-driven genetic evolution expanded our brains, shaped our anatomy and physiology, and influenced our psychology, making us into the world’s only living cultural species. Only by understanding cultural evolution, can we understand human genetic evolution.
Individuals
David Sloan Wilson:
https://davidsloanwilson.world/ ; ;
David S. Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. His most recent book is Does Altruism Exist? Twitter: @David_S_Wilson
Periodicals
THIS VIEW OF LIFE covers anything and everything from an evolutionary perspective. Founded in 2014 by David Sloan Wilson and Robert Kadar, it is the only online magazine representing the evolutionary worldview by scientists for scientists and the scientifically curious general readership. TVOL is written primarily by evolutionary biologists and scholars that expand upon, as well as critique, evolutionary thought and its implications for contemporary life.
Our preferred authors are scientists or scholars who have extensive first-hand knowledge of the field that they describe and, preferably, have made significant contributions to it, or science journalists with the experience and background to deeply explore the topics they propose covering. The model we strive for is between that of Nature News and Scientific American in which complex scientific ideas are explained simply, concisely, and with a minimum of jargon.
IMPORTANT W0RKS
Definitions of Culture
MJ: Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions. Apte (1994: 2001), writing in the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, summarized the problem as follows: ‘Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there was in the early 1990s no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature.’
The following extract from Avruch provides a historical perspective to some of the ways in which the term has been interpreted:
Much of the difficulty [of understanding the concept of culture] stems from the different usages of the term as it was increasingly employed in the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, it was used in three ways (all of which can be found today as well). First, as exemplified in Matthew Arnolds’ Culture and Anarchy (1867), culture referred to special intellectual or artistic endeavors or products, what today we might call “high culture” as opposed to “popular culture” (or “folkways” in an earlier usage). By this definition, only a portion – typically a small one – of any social group “has” culture. (The rest are potential sources of anarchy!) This sense of culture is more closely related to aesthetics than to social science.
Partly in reaction to this usage, the second, as pioneered by Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870), referred to a quality possessed by all people in all social groups, who nevertheless could be arrayed on a development (evolutionary) continuum (in Lewis Henry Morgan’s scheme) from “savagery” through “barbarism” to “civilization”. It is worth quoting Tylor’s definition in its entirety; first because it became the foundational one for anthropology; and second because it partly explains why Kroeber and Kluckhohn found definitional fecundity by the early 1950s. Tylor’s definition of culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. In contrast to Arnold’s view, all folks “have” culture, which they acquire by virtue of membership in some social group – society. And a whole grab bag of things, from knowledge to habits to capabilities, makes up culture.
The extreme inclusivity of Tylor’s definition stayed with anthropology a long time; it is one reason political scientists who became interested in cultural questions in the late 1950s felt it necessary to delimit their relevant cultural domain to “political culture”. But the greatest legacy of Tylor’s definition lay in his “complex whole” formulation. This was accepted even by those later anthropologists who forcefully rejected his evolutionism. They took it to mean that cultures were wholes – integrated systems. Although this assertion has great heuristic value, it also, as we shall argue below, simplifies the world considerably.
The third and last usage of culture developed in anthropology in the twentieth-century work of Franz Boas and his students, though with roots in the eighteenth-century writings of Johann von Herder. As Tylor reacted to Arnold to establish a scientific (rather than aesthetic) basis for culture, so Boas reacted against Tylor and other social evolutionists. Whereas the evolutionists stressed the universal character of a single culture, with different societies arrayed from savage to civilized, Boas emphasized the uniqueness of the many and varied cultures of different peoples or societies. Moreover he dismissed the value judgments he found inherent in both the Arnoldian and Tylorean views of culture; for Boas, one should never differentiate high from low culture, and one ought not differentially valorize cultures as savage or civilized.
Here, then, are three very different understandings of culture. Part of the difficulty in the term lies in its multiple meanings. But to compound matters, the difficulties are not merely conceptual or semantic. All of the usages and understandings come attached to, or can be attached to, different political or ideological agendas that, in one form or another, still resonate today. (Avruch, K. (1998) Culture and Conflict Resolution. Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press: 6–7)
Essays/Articles/Op-eds
What is Culture? A Compilation of Quotations, Compiled by Helen Spencer-Oatey
Cultural Evolution, Tim Lewens, First published Sun Dec 23, 2007; substantive revision Tue May 1, 2018. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
In the broadest terms, theories of evolution seek to explain why species are the ways they are. For many evolutionists, this means explaining the possession by species of characteristic adaptations. It also means explaining diversity within species. The general mark of modern theories of cultural evolution is their insistence on the significance of cultural inheritance—particularly various forms of learning from others—for both of these questions. The prima-facie case for cultural evolutionary theories is irresistible. Members of our own species are able to survive and reproduce in part because of habits, know-how and technology that are not only maintained by learning from others, they are initially generated as part of a cumulative project that builds on discoveries made by others. And our own species also contains sub-groups with different habits, know-how and technologies, which are once again generated and maintained through social learning. Social learning is also an important agent of adaptation, and perhaps of speciation, in animals. The question is not so much whether cultural evolution is important, but how theories of cultural evolution should be fashioned, and how they should be related to more traditional understandings of organic evolution.
1. What is Cultural Evolution?
2. Natural Selection and Cultural Inheritance
3. Historical Pedigree
4. Memes
5. Problems with Memes
6. Cultural Evolution without Memes
7. The Explanatory Role of Cultural Evolutionary Theories
8. Population Thinking
9. Cultural Attraction
10. Cumulative Culture
11. Evolvability
12. Cultural Phylogenies
13. The Culture Concept in Cultural Evolution
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: A Sketch of the Evidence, Pete Richerson, et al.
MJ: In compiling this recommended reading list, I ran across several items I hadn’t yet read. This is one of them, but I will read it soon. I have looked through it fairly thoroughly. It comes in four parts: a sketch of the key issues regarding cultural evolution; a number of responses from informed people in the field to that presentation; and the authors’ responses to those reactions. A section with data charts is included as well. It is also worth noting that here 12 authors who come from a cross-section of disciplines and a range of institutions.
Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation.
Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion?
Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted?
Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process?
Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection?
If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation.
Human Nature, Human Culture: The Case of Cultural Evolution, Tim Lewens.
(Tim Lewens is reader in philosophy of the sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Clare College. His previous publications include Darwin (Routledge, 2007) and Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere (The MIT Press, 2004).)
In recent years, far from arguing that evolutionary approaches to our own species permit us to describe the fundamental character of human nature, a prominent group of cultural evolutionary theorists has instead argued that the very idea of ‘human nature’ is one we should reject. It makes no sense, they argue, to speak of human nature in opposition to human culture. The very same sceptical arguments have also led some thinkers—usually from social anthropology—to dismiss the intimately related idea that we can talk of human culture in opposition to human nature. How, then, are we supposed to understand the cultural evolutionary project itself, whose proponents seem to deny the distinction between human nature and human culture, while simultaneously relying on a closely allied distinction between ‘genetic’ (or sometimes ‘organic’) evolution and ‘cultural’ evolution? This paper defends the cultural evolutionary project against the charge that, in refusing to endorse the concept of human nature, it has inadvertently sabotaged itself.
Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence, Peter Richerson, et. al.
Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation.
Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion?
Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted?
Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process?
Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation?
Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection?
If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation.
Multilevel Selection Theory and Major Evolutionary Transitions: Implications for Psychological Science, David Sloan Wilson, Mark Van Vugt, and Rick O’Gorman.
Abstract: “The concept of a group as comparable to a single organism has had a long and turbulent history. Currently methodological individualism dominates in many areas of psychology and evolution, but natural selection is now known to operate at multiple levels of the biological hierarchy. When between-group selection dominates within-group selection, a major evolutionary transition occurs and the group becomes a new, higher-level organism. It is likely that human evolution represents a major transition, and this has wide-ranging implications for the psychological study of group behavior, cognition, and culture.
Books
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd.
Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal’s. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics.
Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics—and building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them—Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature.
In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come.
The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd.