| What is human culture? We have sought the answer to this question for as long as there have been curious minds. What are we? Why are we the only beings like ourselves? Are our characteristics special? Our cultural capacities are unique in the history of life. There are many species that communicate, and even some species that have limited imitation capabilities and capacities for tradition, but no other species approaches the behavioral flexibility of the human cultural system. John Tyler Bonner wrote a good book on this called "The evolution of culture in animals." But how do we start to understand something so rare and unique in the context of the human adaptive condition? It is best to start with what we know. We know that our culture consists of rich information passing between individuals within a population. Humans pass information which modulates behavior. People pass information from parent to child, from peer to peer. We know that all sort of things are communicated, from survival information, to gossip, rumors and superstitions. We know that people create rich symbolic codes and languages in which the signifier (word or symbol) has arbitrary nature relative to the signified (meaning). We also know that people create modify and maintain insitutions based on their cultural characteristics as well as thier biological ones. Institutions, or cultural entities, are fascinating. Broadly speaking, some information is helpful to individuals for survival or reproduction (biologically adaptive), and other information might actually damage survival or reproduction chances (biologically maladaptive). Also any piece of cultural information may either spread in a population (being culturally adaptive) or dwindle (being culturally maladaptive). Obviously, this is an incomplete . Where does culture come from? In order to truly understand our cultural capacities we must understand the environments in which these capacities evolved. How might we have gained the fancy imitation, cognition, and vocal skills necessary for language and culture to become what it is today? Some have postulated that proto-language could have developed as a means of communication between related individuals. Kin selection would enable the honest sharing of information for mutural benefit because these individuals share some genetic material. If this is the case, then a private sign system might have developed in early homo lineages. Once such a system existed however, if it proved successful, it would have caused an invasion of the ability for language production in the population, thus essentially expanding the realm of the private language to the extent of the entire species. Once all individuals had this symbolic and imitative and vocal capacities, things took off from there. It is also likely that this sort of process occured first with a more basic level of altruism, which enabled groups to be more resourceful. Again like language, this process would need to be kick-started by a group-level selection. Unless it could happen in some other way... Why is it so common, so creative, so adaptive? Humanity spans nearly all reaches of the biosphere, diverts ecological productivity to its own uses, and is extremely creative, generating unique solutions to novel problems in environments ranging from arctic tundra to subequatorial desert. It is difficult to imagine how such amazing diversity and functionality can be generated from such a seemingly simple animal. The human genome project showed us that our genetic legacy alone cannot explain the complete biological human let alone its behavioral complexity. It seems that human culture is an adaptive character (or set thereof) which enable a population-level problem solving mechanism capable of generating unique behavioral adaptations many orders of magnitude faster that good old biological evolution. Explained in this way, such a cultural system is acts as a massive advantage to any species that posses it. However cultural evolution does not simply ensure adaptive outcomes. Instead, because it is decoupled from biological evolution human cultures have an ability to wander beyond simple concerns of health. However, there are side-effects of unleashing this powerful second layer of evolution, as we will see... How does it work, how does it change? Human culture is a behavioral system of non-genetic communication. By this I mean that the rich information exchanged between people is not genetic information; which is only exchanged during reproduction (sex and childbirth). This essential non-genetic, and non-physical, component allows for the decoupling of biologically adaptive (or maladaptive) information from individual organisms. Thus, obviously, the originator of a handy trick for picking fruit may spread it not only to his children, but also to completely unrelated individuals. While we are still largely in the dark about how various forces influence the spread of cultural traits through a popultion, there are a number of interesting mechanisms at work. First, our human capacity for imitation seems uniquely accute, and likely underlies our abilities to acquire behaviors from one another. We also often 'do what the romans do,' in other words, we have a bias for conformity. Under any conformist bias lies the evolutionary assumption that what most people are doing can't be wrong. This is of course just an evolutionary shortcut, which creates a behavior pattern which allows for run-away cultural traits that may or may not be healthy for those carrying them. Further we tend to use cues about the success of our peers to determine to what extent we should imitate them. For instance if Joe caught more fish that Zeek, I would likely decide to imitate Joe over Zeek, but may still imitate Zeek's behavior in other regards. How does culture interact with the ecological landscape? Human culture is a completely unique ecological phenomenon. One obviously striking characteristic about our culture is its ecological impact. Unlike other animals, the communication patterns and behavioral flexibility of humans allows us to utilize other species directly for our benefit, control the energy and mater flows in an ecosystem, alter the 'climax' state of any ecosystem, and utterly reorganize the landscape (see above picture for an extreme example). Perhaps one question we should ask is: Do all cultures tend to evolve towards greater and greater environmental domination and urban density? What would be the forces which drove these tendencies? It is perhaps correct to conceptualize ecosystems as split into two different types. Those controlled mainly by genetic evolutionary forces, and those controlled mainly by culture. How does culture fit into the 15 billion year history of the universe? Cultural evolution is of course only one type of evolution. Viewed as a series of continuous stages, the history of the universe takes on a strikingly cumulative shape, with cultural evolution as the most recent acceleration in the evolutionary process. Eric Chaisson does not do much speculation about the future or meaning of this trend within evolution. But I do. How does culture interact with biology and the environment? The search for an adequate description of the cultural mechanism has only recently generated theories capable of explaning cumulative cultural change over time. Since the mid 1970's a growing body of theoretical work called gene-culture coevolution, or dual-inheritance theory has developed formal mathematical models to address the interactions of genetics and cultural traits over evolutionary time. The discipline of cultural evolution seeks to both place human cultural capacity in its place as an evolved mechanism, and study the evolving flows of cultural information. What is to come? More... |
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| ~ Cultural Evolution ~ |
| Note: This little page on cultural evolution is for those new to the subject, yet my treatment is introductory. If you feel like you're ready to move faster, you should go straight here, or here, or anywhere. |
| Image borrowed from Robert Wright's book "Non-Zer0" |