Chapter XII
Gene-Culture Co-evolution
Socio-biology and Cultural Selection in the Human Biotic Climax
Human beings constitute a biological presence on the earth today that has been unprecedented in either natural or human history. Human biomass, as a single animal species, is probably the greatest biomass ever achieved by any single species on earth. That a single species could achieve such reproductive success and eco-systemic dominance over all other life forms in the biosphere is in one sense miraculous, and in another sense a function of the structure of the evolutionary patterning of the long run. To ignore or deny this human biological presence on earth today is to commit a fatal error of scientific judgment. It has come to constitute its own unique system of informational patterning, one that is both a part of biological information patterning in which it is rooted, and one that is separate by virtue of some fundamental and synergistic cultural differences.
Of course, the ultimate questions to be answered in this regard are what the prospects are both for long-term human survival and for the continuance of life on earth. To ask this question is not to be a fatalistic dooms-day crier or end of the world cultist. But neither is it to feign a naive and in many senses evil kind of scientific positivism that blindly believes that human beings can always work out of their own predicaments. Of course, it is a central contention of this entire work that it is entirely possible that we can work ourselves out of our own dilemmas if and when we have collectively chosen to do so. But it is also a point to be made in this chapter that we are not only the products of our nature and culture, but we are also its victims. The same natural drives and biological foundations that have made us what we are today have put us into the very predicament that we must now work ourselves out of. It appears that we must accomplish this feat not so much because of ourselves, but in spite of ourselves. This makes it rather improbable that in the long run we will be able to work it out in a satisfactory manner.
The object of this initial chapter on human information systems is to treat the special case of human biology and human evolution in order to revisit the question of the impact of human biology upon natural biological systems. Sociobiology as this is applied in anthropology would like to construe all relevant human information patterning as but an elaborate extension of evolutionary and biological theory, and therefore as a subclass of this larger theory. There is a great rage for order in doing this, in borrowing the synthetic comprehensiveness found in the biological sciences and applying it to the human social sciences where there seems to be only theoretical chaos of thought and method.
There is a sense that human beings are natural biological creatures, from which nature originates many of their basic drives, impulses, and behaviors. There is a critical sense also that to submit all our understanding of human nature and behavior to a biological model, especially in social contexts, is to be over-reductionist in our conceptioning, and to commit an error of misplaced concretization about what it is we are talking about.
It is not necessary to overrate the great danger that this kind of reductionist thinking entails for social ideologies that are based on genetic arguments. It is easy to point to instances that such arguments were used as scientific evidence to justify policies that result in racial and class discrimination against out-groups. It is easy to misappropriate "scientism" in the name of ideology, when it has been based on the over extension of reference and reductionism. But this also highlights the sensitivity and critical importance these issues play in the background of our lives.
Human beings are of course social animals. They are by nature both sexual and competitive creatures. They have an innate aggressiveness and attachment to kin-groups that leads often to violence and warfare. They have an innate drive to adapt and to survive, and there is a marked characteristic that they in general have responded predictably in equilibrium theory to maximize their reproductive rates until they have saturated the entire earth to its carrying capacity. And, in deed, in consideration of the special case of human biology, this is exactly the point.
In writing the chapters on biological information systems, I cannot but help apply as an anthropologist these same models and many of their implications to human populations that can be expected to behave in very similar ways as any other mammalian population. We have a natural instinct for survival and, I would say, an instinct to procreate and reproduce that goes beyond mere sexual impulse. These basic drives have been critically shaped by cultural patterns and institutions but in their essential and original sense they remain the products of our shared nature. I can even see a great deal of modern human motivational structure, the drive for success, the need for status, dominance, sociability, even the need for affection and human touch, as elaborated and perverted as it may often become, as being essentially rooted in the same biological drives that served our primordial predecessors in their quest for survival in the heartland of the African continent. Much that is cultural derives its strength of emotional attachment, feeling, and even "sense" from this same biological imperative.
We can also refer to human social fitness in society, and differential trait configurations of various individuals that lead to alternate forms of social selection. We might say that taller, healthier and better looking, more aggressive and selfish types approximate alpha individuals and therefore have greater reproductive advantage. "Sex" symbols are culturally fashioned and shaped in all kinds of ways, but at the basis of their attraction and allure is a very basic and crude sense of id that remains the same for all people.
It is worthwhile to attempt to understand what constitute the foundations of a genuine and non-ideological socio-biology of humankind. Applying models adopted from the study of insect societies to the issues of human societies, without taking into account, either biologically or culturally, the vast disparity between such organisms, is to commit a error of critical judgment.
At the heart of the question of fundamental and panhuman nature is the nature-nurture type of argument that has long been a central issue in many philosophies and social sciences. At our stage of evolutionary development, it is virtually impossible to clearly separate where nature begins and culture takes over. The two sets of patterns have been blended together and amalgamated in the human being such that to separate one from the other is to fundamentally destroy what it means to be human. Thus it is to state the case correctly that we cannot define what are purely natural facets of human identity or behavior that has not been molded to some degree by cultural influences. It is impossible as well to construe almost any cultural institution or pattern in any scientific way that has not some fundamental basis in human biology.
From the standpoint of evolutionary theory, we are rooted to biology by our being and our reproductive continuation. To get at a genuine sociobiology is to understand the impact that basic and universal drives for human adaptation, physical survival and reproductive success have entailed for the patterning of our history, our social organization, and our civilization.
Perhaps sociobiology is an unfortunate compound, and it might be more appropriate to simply talk of human biology. It is also, I believe, imperative that we get at the biological substrate of a general symbolic mechanism that has appeared to have critically shaped our cultural patterning and given dynamic expression to our natural behaviors for at least the last 50,000 years or more. Through such a mechanism we have accomplished a basic transformation of expression and operation of our natural character in every way. This is especially important to the extent that it has influenced distinctive patterns of expression in social and cultural life.
To tend to the basic biological drives and mechanisms that underlie human nature is to have a reformed sense of sociobiology that remains on a human plane of understanding and does not reduce everything to a level of insect ethics. I would assert that cultural and social patterning can be found rooted to the human elaboration of basic patterns of feeding and breeding that beget adaptive and reproductive fitness and positive selective success. On a very basic and primary level these patterns are transmitted lineally through kin structures, but the principle mode of this transmission is no longer simply hereditary, but necessarily by means of basic culture as well. Thus, loaded counter-evidence of rare twin studies to the contrary, it is common and easy to find numerous examples of children being adopted and raised by non-hereditary parents and who achieve success in life within the parameters basically defined by the fictive parents.
That cultural and social institutions have developed around feeding and breeding patterns in human societies that are so culturally divergent and variable is indication that these patterns are not directly linked in any causal manner to heredity or genetic information patterning. If they were more directly tied to hereditary structure, we would expect a great deal more uniformity of patterning and sense of regularity than we actually find. That true human universals have proven so elusive and rare to discover and generalize in our social sciences is a clear indication of the extent to which culture and nature have become inextricably and inexplicable tied together in our basic identity as human beings. But in this case, once again, it is a matter of mistaking effect for cause and chaotic patterning from the underlying principles of order that define that pattern. A genuine "sociobiology" must seek to get at this underlying sense of order.
Even with the Great Apes, we can find significant patterns of differential social organization between species and sub-species, for instance between Highland and lowland Gorillas, or between Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes. This suggests that adaptive variation of social structure is widely divergent even in spite of being explained in terms of hereditary structures and trait differentials alone. If we take any of the Great Apes, and put them as infants into the care and custody of human beings, they become basically humanized to such a degree that they cannot simply rejoin their feral cousins.
For human beings at least, we are to understand basic drives underlying feeding and breeding patterns as being manipulatable through symbolic transformation of character into any number of alternative socio-cultural patterns, within "limits" that define the basic constraints of such systems as cultural and biological systems. The limits of such systems are that they lead both to adaptive and reproductive success, or at least avoid failure.
It is possible to construe warfare and even genocide between two competing societies in terms of natural"competitive exclusion in the most basic of senses. Obviously, the Carthraginians presented a permanent threat to the early Roman Republic bent as it was even then on empire building, that it could not simply ignore with impunity. That the Romans were set on a course of imperial expansionism might be interpreted in a vague way as a pattern of socio-cultural organization that begat great reproductive and adaptive success, even if this is symbolically interpreted in terms that were characteristically Roman civilization.
If they turned much of the rest of humanity within its sphere of power and control into human cattle and beasts of burden and they then adopted the ethnocentric terms to justify this to themselves and the rest of the world, it can be seen as a form of natural competition that leads to parasitism and predation of one group upon another. This is really not too different from what modern people do today with real cattle, and even indirectly, with other human beings.
It is also the case that if the Romans were feeling pressure from the proximity of the Carthraginians, this form of "pressure" was not strictly speaking population or selection in models found with almost any other species on earth. It is doubtful that the Mediterranean world that they both contemporaneously occupied was "saturated" in any sense that we understand it in evolutionary theory or that it had reached "carrying-capacity."
A case can be made that if it was any kind of pressure at all, it was that rooted in basic competitive orientations of the two cultures that was symbolically translated into the need for action. It had little directly to do with the reproductive and adaptational success of either the Romans or the Carthraginians as simply human beings. Both groups would have been much better off in the long run if they had remained to till the fertile lands at home than to adventure abroad with arms if it had simply been a matter of biological success.
Obviously, each posed a kind of threat to the other that was primarily symbolic and had little directly to do with their respective control over their own biotic regimes. This threat was to be seen at a rarefied level of the state that in fact had little directly to do with the daily concerns of any individual in feeding or breeding. But undoubtedly the symbolic sense of threat could be made to seem real enough and "natural" enough to the citizens of both states, that war between them became a foregone conclusion, and for both it became, de facto, a struggle for survival.
Thus, it is important to attempt to understand how basic drives tied to patterns of feeding and breeding success in the daily lives of individuals and families within the context of a common population, become symbolically translated and transformed in those people's lives. This symbolic transformation gains expression and action in indirect ways that have little to do with the actual biological predicaments of those individuals, but with the same force and power as if they were fundamental biological predicaments. And in such contexts, symbolically shaped actions and behavior patterns come to assume the aspect of being natural and as if a matter of survival, and lead to similar results.
We therefore cannot attempt to explain the transformation of breeding and feeding patterns in human society or history on the basis of genetic endowment and their phenotypic expression without invoking the basic sense of their symbolic transformation, or what I would call "culturation" of human nature. To attempt to explain such symbolic patterns purely in terms of genetic informational transmission and the trait configurations derivable from these is to miss the entire point altogether.
Of course, the symbolic transformation of these innate patterns is itself on some level innate as well, and this begs explanation that will be more fully taken up in the third part on human systems theory. The natural evolution of human culture and symbolic capacity is a very important subject and involves an entire suite of trait complexes that serve to characterize the human species as unique on earth. The dilemma of this related question is that it is hard to step outside of the circle of our own symbolic reasoning to be able to construe it in itself in a scientifically objective manner. This leads us back to the hen and egg problem as the nature versus nurture dilemma. Any synthesis of human nature must generally transcend this dilemma in such a way as to take both nature and nurture in interaction into account.
I would say therefore that basic drives related to feeding and breeding especially and the basic symbolic transformations that accompany these patterns constitute the genuine socio-biological primes for understanding human patterning in terms relatable to natural evolution. But at every point, the mechanism of symbolic transformation of these drives and patterns must be taken up as central to their resulting expression in human life and social patterning.
A typical example of the ideological misappropriation of sociobiological thinking is the interpretation of complex social patterns characteristic of some endemically poor populations that link "cads" with patterns of r-selection and "dads" with patterns of K-selection. Analogically this makes sense, and that poor people experience higher rates of infant mortality, higher rates of mortality generally, and higher birth rates, are well known facts. That they are more r-selected genetically than the rich who are show greater K-fitness is a kind of socio-biological suggestion that leaves much to be desired.
We can say that in a social and mostly symbolic sense, the rich people are inclined to follow a more "K-like" pattern than the poor because it is to their best advantage to do so, not because it directly enhances their biological survivorship or genetic reproducibility, which is probably about the same as for other "r-like" people, but because it is the symbolically defined way of achieving social success. It may have achieved the same impetus that natural selection and fitness entails for organisms and populations, but it is symbolically defined, not naturally expressed. We can compare this K-patterning to the poor people who are more inclined towards an "r-type" pattern, but this has nothing to do with their genetic profiles and everything to do with their socio-structural positioning in a larger society. The real danger is to take the next step, because if we correlate being black with being poor, we are liable to come out with a genetic-based racial argument that does not favor being black in the world.
What is critically missing from such arguments is an understanding of the basic linkages of the mother to the child in the transmission of cultural and symbolic patterning, and how these can be disrupted on a very basic level. Also important to construe is the role that father can play in that patterning, especially in industrial based societies. We do not then talk so much about "r-selected" poor people who cannot hold down jobs, are prone to drugs and promiscuous relationships, and make cads rather than dads. Instead we can talk more realistically about "unfulfilled" human beings who have suffered socio-cultural deprivation on very basic levels of their identity and being, especially in complex class stratified state societies. We can extend this kind of argument to claims made about alcoholism, mental illness, and homosexuality. In fact, almost any kind of social deviance can be explained away in terms of socio-biological ideology that conflates and confuses genes and culture.
To take the other end of this kind of problem, we can consider the social patterning of "K-selected" rich people. Such people usually set the standards for symbolic legitimization in their societies. They set standards for beauty, for success, for achievement and adaptation, and for fashion. These are by and large fictive symbolic and sumptuary standards that lead to the channeling of basic natural drives in their society. They are the standards by which all poor people must define themselves by as participants within the larger society.
It is a common pattern among rich people to erect symbolic barriers between themselves and others. This can be understood in terms of attempting to retain and monopolize exclusive control of social resources to their own private advantage, even at the expense of the society as a whole or of other members within it. This comes to bear especially on the problems of marriagability, occupational specialization and control, and inheritance (not strictly speaking biological inheritance, but inheritance of movable wealth and fixed assets tied to land ownership and territoriality patterns.)
That such retention and control of resources comes to focus on issues of marriage, occupational monopolization and inheritance has a great deal to do with social ideologies of innate superiority and natural fitness. It has much to do with structural patternings of the society in which they occur, for instance with the problem of hoarding wealth, both of which tie back to symbolic translation of basic patterns of breeding and feeding. But they in fact have little directly to do with actual issues of biological evolutionary success.
The richest people appear to naturally seek class closure about their own kind such that they can set themselves apart as a separate caste not unlike the queen bees of a beehive. Of course, traditional societies can be found that link the redistribution of wealth to status in a society, making such hoarding patterns inimical. And this is the trick, as the rich are not hoarding wealth and power and control because it confers greater reproductive advantage of biological fitness, but because it confers greater symbolic status in society. It is not hard to find numerous examples of inbred European royalty who would have been selected out in any natural cut of the deck, but by virtue of their privileged status enjoyed the best their worlds had to offer as long as they lived.
We can see patterns of caste-like closure of the rich as a form of competitive exclusion of all other elements of society. As such it is a kind of endgame, a logical outcome of the fact of competitive survival in human society in the first place. But it is a game that has been symbolic transformed in its fundamental primes, and does not happen without the fact of its symbolic transformation. It has all the force and power of natural selection, and frequently takes on naturalized symbolic meanings and frames of reference, but it remains fundamentally symbolic in its derivation and form. We might find that eating Chitlins and collard greens is healthier on average than dining on fine wine and humming bird tongues, and in a strictly biological model this should confer greater adaptive and reproductive fitness to the former feeding patterns compared to the latter. But we might be hard pressed to convince either the poor or the rich of this notion.
This digression does little to help us explicate the primes of a more genuine science of socio-biology, or more appropriately, of human biology in society, except that it does point the way beyond the fallacies of misplaced concretization, overemphasis and reductionism that our socio-biological ideologies are prone to.
I will state the following principles:
1. Human biology is exactly like any other form of biology in that it is evolutionarily concerned primarily with the issues of adaptive and reproductive success. These constitute basic drives in human existence, in the same way as it constitutes the biological and evolutionary imperatives for any other organism or population. Human genes, like all genes, are selfish.
2. These drives come to express themselves socially especially in terms of feeding and breeding patterns that occur within the society.
3. These drives and their resulting patterns are fundamentally transformed through basic and innate mechanisms of human symbolization that are socially and culturally shaped, such that there is no pure instance of natural human evolutionary drives that are not symbolically transformed by the society that they occur within.
4. Because human societies have achieved evolutionary success in basic ways of survival and reproduction, generally speaking social interactions and relations between human beings tend to occur in saturated systems where populations tend toward an endemic equilibrium. In such conditions, social competition can be expected to characterize most social interactions in a way that is symbolically organized and expressed, and comes to take on patterned forms of selection and fitness that are homologous to natural evolutionary patterns. Even social organizations and examples of inclusive fitness must be construed from the standpoint of potentially innate competitive relations, especially in external, inter-social and out-group contexts.
5. Patterns of social organization, interaction and competition often has the character of being natural, but this is due to the symbolic appropriation of innate drives and to their symbolic internalization as if natural.
6. Human beings are therefore socially prone or predisposed in their character to behave in ways that are symbolically justified as being "natural" but are not necessarily connected to the actual circumstances of adaptive survival and reproductive success of the individual beings involved. This can be called cultural displacement as a result of symbolic displacement.
7. Whereas all other forms of life known to us have no choice but to follow the biological and evolutionary imperatives set down for them genetically, the symbolic transformation of human biological drives and mechanisms of their social expression has given us a choice. We do not "have" to behave in ways that nature originally constrained us to behave in.
8. Nevertheless, the innate foundations of our character dispositions and drives and even of our symbolic mechanisms entails that probably we will choose by habit to behave in ways that are most naturalized. We will seek the maximization of our own symbolic sense of social fitness and social selection in the world.
9. Therefore, human beings as social animals are prone to repeat certain patterns of competitive behavior that emphasize exclusive fitness at most levels of society and that lead logically to competitive exclusion that takes expression, among other things, in forms of human violence and conflict. Even acts of altruism, as for example blind patriotism in war or fanaticism to a religious dogma, must be construed by way of contrast to excluded and alternate orientations with which people must compete as members of some social group.
10. Our symbolic systems, including our sciences, will tend to take forms of rationalization that serve to ideologically legitimize and justify our actions as if these were natural, and that serve to integrate our subjective experience with our collectively shared worldview and common basis of knowledge of the world.
Whereas almost every other form of life behaves in ways dictated by their nature, out of the necessity of achieving biological success, only humans are capable and prone to behaving in ways that are symbolically naturalized. Human behavior is never necessarily natural as being dictated by their fundamental nature, except of course and paradoxically, in as much as symbolization is a part of their nature. Thus, most of what humans do, beyond the most basic of reflexes and natural needs like defecation or breathing, is in a fundamental sense symbolically arbitrary and therefore also naturally unnecessary.
With these postulates in mind, it is to be seen that a revised and genuinely scientific and human sociobiology is upon a human creature with a fundamentally unfinished and therefore different nature than those described in unrevised ideologies that implicitly justify Hitlerian policies of genocide in the world. This is not merely an unfortunate rhetorical claim. It is an accurate and objective statement and estimate of the ideological and rational status of an unreflexive sociobiology as a system of natural information theory.
It does leave room for sociobiology as a meaningful scientific contribution to the understanding of human nature and humankind in our world. We are prone to being competitive creatures by our nature, and this competitiveness frequently leads us to very unnatural forms of violence being perpetrated in our shared history as if this were natural. Much of this violence takes a homologous patterning to that of "natural selection" in life. We must seek to objectively understand this endemic patterning of violence that seems to be such an innate part of our character if we are to discover or invent means of controlling its expression in our common future. And this is the role that sociobiology can serve for us in the world, or fail. And it should serve as a warning to all those who would adopt an uncritical and naive faith in sociobiologism as the ultimate explanation for human behavior.
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At the heart therefore of a revised sociobiology would be what I call the social competition hypothesis, which in its basic form was outlined above. I am not claiming that social competition explains human evolution, but human evolution eventuated in patterns of endemic human social competition. Neither would I say that long term patterns of social competition among human beings has resulted in any significant patterns of human biological evolution or even in patterns of social selection leading to greater human biological fitness. If anything, I think, it has mitigated against this kind of thing, unless we can use a kind of competition hypothesis to explain the apparent relations between Homo saipiens and Homo Neanderthalensus.
I would claim that most human historical and many archaeological patterns can be understood and explained in terms of this basic hypothesis, and this pattern of human social competition has driven the rise and development of human civilization as a trans-culturative process. Indirectly, this has resulted in tremendous evolutionary success for the human species in terms of simple adaptive and reproductive success, in spite of a lot of blood loss and surfeit of love lost along the way.
In the model of social competition, I would not invoke selection mechanisms like "kin-selection" as anything naturally meaningful, as for instance in its application to insect societies. Human symbolic altruism is not equitable or reducible to hypothetical genetic altruism used to explain patterns of inclusive fitness found in nature, unless it is an example of a mother jumping in a fire or a lake to save her children. It is easy enough to point to cases of young mothers abandoning or even killing their offspring as counter-examples to any such natural instinct.
Human social competition best characterizes the general predicament of human beings, as biological organisms, in the symbolic framework of their societies that are almost by historical definition saturated to their biological carrying capacity through human adaptive and reproductive success. It tends to situations where human social organization has generally resulted in periodic surpluses and shortages, especially of food, that result in cycles of feast or famine.
The history of traditional China as the great agrarian state is the perfect laboratory test case for the competition hypothesis. Warfare was endemic to such a state, and rarely has the state known an extended period of either domestic tranquility or of successful imperialistic expansionism beyond its own natural geo-physical realm. This has been in spite of the fact that it has greatly influenced the societies around it both by trans-culturational processes and by means of natural human immigration. But also characteristic of the history of the Chinese state have been periodic 15 to 25 year cycles of endemic famine, that has led to recurrence of human starvation, mass death and even endemic forms of cannibalism. This would suggest a breaking down of even very basic constraints concerning human social relations and "inclusive fitness." We can account for these cycles by the agrarian character of this civilization that leads to local overpopulation with each generation.
In the competition hypothesis, the appropriation of surplus created by a state organization or a society must be given great importance as a material mechanism that has great symbolic implication. Surplus wealth or exclusive access to resources translates into enhanced adaptive-reproductive success, not only for the individual, but for the kin-group of which the individual is a part, and by extension, to the population as a whole.
It has underlaid materialist theories of human history and cultural patterning. In general, where there are expectations of future failure, which can be considered to be endemic to all human societies, and that can be linked to a chronic insecurity of death and reproductive failure, there is great symbolic attachment placed on the accumulation and control of surplus wealth (i.e., the products of work). Material surplus and control of wealth comes to acquire tremendous symbolic status and importance in human society.
Related to this symbolic valuation of material surplus is a notion derivative of an emphasis upon human competition in social interaction and organization. It is the notion that the expectation of future success or failure will only be achieved as the result of other people's relative gain or loss. In other words, a competitive framework of human social relations inherently fosters a worldview and model of limited good that is a reflection of the competitive saturation that characterizes most human societies. This conception of limited good drives social relations even when in fact there is a net surplus. It is a symbolic sense that surplus can only be achieved by means of competition in a framework of limited good.
Thus, the notions of surplus and limited good form a kind of symbolic feedback system by which human society comes to organize itself in ways that on one hand retains internal equilibrium within a structured manner of human social relations. On the other hand, it would govern the course of relations between different societies. For instance, understanding of human exploitation recurrent in human interactions is logically forthcoming from such a model, as it follows that surplus gained by means of others would be a rational expectation of such a model to working relationships, one that can be symbolically justified in many ways.
It is not my purpose at this point to fully elaborate a model of competitive dynamics in human social evolution. I will leave this project for another work. Suffice it to state here that we can see competitive dynamics recurrent throughout human history in most social contexts that we can observe.
E elaboration of human competition theory relates it to competition theory as this has so far been explicated in evolutionary biology. In particular, it is the use of this model of competitive dynamics to explain processes of cultural differentiation and diffusion that appear to be a natural long-term process of extended histories of cultural development. In traditional cultural settings, cultural patternings appear to split off and differentiate in a divergent pattern much as species do. The process of cultural divergence appears to be much more rapid than that of biological divergence, and appears to be basically independent of the later form of divergence.
In other words, a culture can evolve in a sympatric manner in relation to other cultures in a phyletic manner without necessarily invoking the genetic development of the population involved. Also, historically speaking, while evolutionary divergence is a one way process, and convergence in evolution is only superficial and apparent similarities of phenotypic traits disguising basic morphological incongruities, there is ample evidence of "back borrowing," cultural loss and re-convergence in human history that suggests cultural transmission processes are much more dynamic and fluid than normal human genetic processes.
Related to this issue of cultural divergence is a notion of the process of cultural integration, internal differentiation and stratification that is quit common in human societies, and reflects a pattern that is homologous with the iso-clinal stratification and trophic-taxonomic stratification of natural eco-systems. Subgroups particularly isolate themselves within societies, usually based on differential patterns of resource allocation, such that there are thresholds and boundaries to crossing and passing into and out of such groups. These groups serve to maintain a separate functional and symbolic identity compared to other groups or the society as a whole.
How cultural divergence and cultural differentiation and integration can be explained in terms of a social competition hypothesis is to be taken up later. It is important to emphasize that these kinds of patterns appear to be very analogous, or homologous to natural patterns governing speciation and intra-specific variations within genetic populations.
The common sociobiological framework for understanding these similarities of pattern is two-fold:
First, they arise from the same biological source that is the dynamics of reproductive and adaptive survival in saturated social contexts.
Secondly, they follow the same competitive patterns in areal distribution and social organization by creatures that are both social and natural at the same time.
Thus they are behaving naturally to similar basic contexts as any social animal might be expected to behave. And many of the outcomes are essentially the same in both contexts.
At the same time, the basic differences between purely biological social systems and human social systems must be understood clearly and concisely. Human social systems are symbolically and culturally organized. Other animal social systems are naturally organized by evolution. If lions prey upon cattle, they do so primarily for food. If people hunt game, they are doing the same, unless it is done for sport. When one human preys on another, even if it is rapacious or cannibalistic, it is not so much for food or even agonistic sexual advantage, as it is for other symbolic reasons. Whereas processes of natural selection underlie the latter forms of pattern, processes of cultural selection underlie the former and distinguish it. The concept of cultural selection will be taken up shortly. Suffice it to say here that these processes are synergistic patterns that have been the outcome of special trait-configurations of human evolution, and are unique to the human species. They therefore cannot be sufficiently explained in general terms of natural selection and human genetics alone.
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The most useful and insightful aspects of conventional sociobiological thinking do not involve ideas of altruistic genes or twin studies and bell curves of intelligence or one-to-one genetic personality traits or even gene-meme models. Rather it concerns gene-culture coevolutionary models of cultural transmission as these are held to be closely linked to models of biological transmission. The greatest elaboration of this has been by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza.
A good case can be made that for major part of human evolution, cultural patterning was held tightly to the ground and was close to human evolution itself. Indeed, so close were these that we cannot explain culture derived from language, big-brains, manual dexterity, and long human developmental cycles, and all the rest, unless we invoke genetic and evolutionary models of natural selection. At the same time, it is probably the case that we are relatively so hairless because we have evolved trait-configurations that favor wearing garments. The ability to make and use well fine tools may have proven to be a self-selective kind of mechanism that helped to promote bigger brains, hand-eye coordination, manual dexterity, etc. Thus, nature is deeply implicated in all of human culture, and culture has from the beginning implicated itself in the evolution of human nature. This is the central biological paradox of being human in a natural world.
As long as we can hypothesize a close linkage between biological lineage structure and the traditional cultural contexts in which these are found, and also a kind of cultural and trait orientation that would have permitted some place for natural selection to operate on human fitness values and differential trait-configurations, we can claim some degree of linkage between cultural and genetic transmission.
To the extent that we can find patterns of warfare and institutions like slavery, where individuals are removed forcibly from their own lineage structures and transplanted to other frameworks, we must accept that the cultural-genetic linkage began diverging somewhat in its patterning.
The foundation for understanding both the linkages and divergence of gene-culture co-evolutionary structures of information patterning is to understand that they are inherently and by design complementary structures, but not isomorphic. In general, they co-occur in a manner of indirect correlation, but it is virtually impossible to pin down direct causal relationships especially in a point by point manner of direct gene trait-cultural trait correspondence.
Culture is by definition exclusively environmental and phenotypic in expression, even though the human capacity for culture has been the product of innate evolutionary development. Thus, to strictly apply genetic arguments to cultural transmission is like applying Larmarckian solutions to genetic transmission.
The co-evolutionary character of gene-culture development has been an intrinsic feedback process between the conditioning of the human environment which has favored certain trait-configurations, in resonance with the internal trait configuration and genetic patterning of the human species, such that it has resulted in its own unique resonance patterning.
So closely tied in fact are gene-culture development process that if a human being is born bereft of a cultural context, it is not complete as a human being. Rare examples of feral children and common examples of extreme cultural deprivation illustrate the results of a "half-baked" human being shorn of any "naturalistic" cultural contexts for development. By the same token, cultural development has required the evolution of genetic trait-complexes that are uniquely and characteristically human. These have little to do with homosexuality and alcoholism, but a great deal to do with big brains, deft fingers and long-term post-natal development periods. Human nature has evolved to make culture possible, and we cannot simply substitute a Chimpanzee or monkey and raise it in a human world and have it turn out exactly like a human being. A humanized monkey is almost as half-baked as a primatized human being.
Again, it is not the point of this chapter to fully elucidate the aspects of human anthropogenesis in our natural history. The point is to emphasize the degree and special character of the complementary and interdependent relationship between human culture and human nature. We cannot fully understand the one without the other, and both are necessary for a complete human being.
This relationship evolved in the framework of a naturalistic cultural context, one that was fundamentally social in character. It makes sense to speak of the externalization of human biology and nature as culture and the internalization of culture as if it were natural. Humans obviously came to devise for themselves some minimal habitat that served as the basic cultural context driving subsequent human evolutionary development. The general features of this context are vaguely identifiable in outline, though the exact character of the determinations it involved remain a mystery.
The externalization of human nature had the consequence of loosening the bonds that genetic and natural processes had upon human behavior and subsequent selection. To some extent, it led to the substitution of human cultural traits, and a dependency upon these traits, for an exclusive dependency upon genetically determined traits. The clearest example of this is to distinguish the strict limitations that instinct imposes on most animals, compared to the lack of obvious instinctual patterns among human beings. This is not a clear-cut issue, as cultural patterning and some post-natal learning is evident in many animals, albeit in a very restricted and ungeneralized ways.
The resonance patterning between human nature and culture therefore is a very basic and important system that must be understood as a dynamic mechanism underlying gene-culture co-evolutionary development. It is the basis for what I would call the anthropological dialectic that has resulted in the long-term synthesis of human civilization. It was an achievement of humankind that did not come over night in a single act of creation. It was hard won over millions of years of evolutionary development, trial and error, and chance discoveries like that of fire and tool making and clothing.
At the heart of gene-culture co-evolution rests several concepts about culture that from an ecosystemic and larger evolutionary perspective, must be elucidated out of context to a discussion of human information systems. Cultural patterning constitutes a kind of coherent informational system on several levels and this has been elucidated by several anthropologists through the years. The point here is to emphasize the remarkable degree to which this patterning is homologous with and in many instances has similar consequences as does the evolutionary patterning of species and ecosystems. Functionally there is convergence in the two patterns, as much as one has substituted for the other in human evolutionary development, one has come to serve the same set of purposes as the other. The aspects of divergence and differentiation of cultural groupings has already been mentioned.
At this point, I would like to mention as well the internalized coherence and symbolic integration of any cultural patterning that is based on its material and adaptive functioning and survival in the world, as well as upon its reproductive continuation through time.
Comparable to natural ecosystems, cultural systems exhibit a certain kind of equilibrium and stability in their patterning that usually renders them quite conservative and yet adaptive to change. This sense of dynamic and homeostatic equilibrium of cultural patterning confers a sense of direction, momentum, inertia and resistance to cultural development and patterning that maintains its stability over the long term. Just as with populations and gene flow, individuals and sub-groupings may regularly pass between cultural boundaries. These populations bring not only new genetic information into the framework of a culture, but new ideas, information, "memes" and "cultural traits" that can influence and be adopted by the recipient culture. Each culture exacts its own price of admission from the individual. This price is usually one of alternation and reform of the individual to the symbolic framework of the host culture.
Just as two sets of inter-specifically DNA are fundamentally incompatible, and lead to zygotic reproductive isolation, so also symbolic systems of integration of one culture are generally incompatible with the integration of another, especially radically divergent or distant cultural orientation. The two symbolic cultural orientations will clash and cause dissonance between them, resulting in either displacement, annihilation or some form of amalgamation between them.
People in general have strong ethnocentric commitments to their parent cultural system, and it provides a degree of symbolic coherence and stability in their lives and worlds that they do not easily forsake. While cultural orientations can tolerate a wide range of deviance of patterning within them, this range is usually strictly bounded by sets of constraints operating on many levels.
The point of this digression is to emphasize the degree of correspondence existing between cultural and genetic systems, as informational systems, such that many of the principles applied to the understanding of ecosystems and evolutionary systems, can be applied as well, albeit in modified form, to cultural systems. This is in part due to the fact that in both systems, the central agency is the human being, and in both cases, the principal purpose of each system is the reproductive survival and well being of the individual human being as a biological organism. This is more than coincidence, as it implies both homology of identity of basic structures underlying each system, and it implies a common origin and fundamental interdependency of both systems.
The argument here, unlike that found in most sociobiological theories, is that the principal of equilibrium of cultural systems is not genetic, at least not directly. It is more the mechanism of symbolic integration of reality that achieves a transformation of genetic-based trait configurations and their related functions to a higher level of productive and problem-solving information patterning. Symbolic integration of cultural reality is in terms of cultural development an achievement that did not come overnight. As stated previously, it was worked out from years of evolutionary experience and natural experimentation.
At the heart of understanding the mechanism of symbolic integration underlying cultural equilibrium is the ability of symbolisms not only to provide a sense of certainty and unity about human reality and worldview, but to give concerted and organized direction to human action, such that human beings can behave in rational and purposively deliberate ways. It allows people to behave in ways not fully governed by their instincts, but often with the same strength and power that instinctual action patterns appear to exhibit in nature. Of course this action is usually directed towards the issues of adaptive survival of the group, and within the framework of the group some form of a concept of inclusive fitness of its members will be articulated in symbolic form.
I would say that symbolisms in culture not only provide a passive call and framework for action, but they are in themselves a form of action, and by their presence as transformational operators, make action necessary and even naturally compulsive. In other words, they come to take the place of instinct in human behavior patterning, and we cannot easily violate their implicit sanctions and constraints for our behavior even if we wanted to. They thus can be seen to serve as intrinsic, embodied or internalized mechanisms that channel our behavior on subconscious levels and over which we have only partial control. Thus, they have a powerful hold on human nature, and conformity to their mandate in our lives for most people appears quite normal and even natural.
We therefore behave in ways that are transparent to ourselves and invisible in our daily lives. We do things not because we say to ourselves, "this is what I want to do" but because even our wants and needs are symbolically circumscribed and channeled by our culture. Thus such a statement as "I want to" becomes after the fact a tautology, a rationalization, and the beginning of a course of action that was already set in motion.
Of course, just as genetic predetermination appears as incomplete in human behavior, so also is symbolic transformation basically an underdetermined system. It has been a system evolved by evolution, and it has been remarkably successful in permitting human adaptation. But because, I believe, it is a system built upon biological informational patterning, deriving much of its force from it, it remains essentially incomplete and partial. This entails that it can and does change, in a form of cultural speciation and selectionism that is remarkably similar in form and even function to natural speciation and selection, but it also is both very flexible and susceptible to failure. Cultural systems do suffer loss and extermination.
The incompleteness of this system accounts for what I believe to be the fundamental insecurity or antinomality of human nature, a sublime sense of being unfinished, that plagues people to their graves. There is a sense that a herd of bison does not greatly suffer the loss of one of their numbers, and that a bison does not question greatly its place in the natural scheme of things. If one bison slips beneath the ice into a freezing river of death, the other bison look on, not only helpless, but without fundamental concern. Human beings for the most part do not have this luxury of being well within the lap of nature. Human nature is an eternally unhappy thing. One of the results is the ever present and tragic possibility of our own deliberate suicide.
The materialism implicit to a competition hypothesis presents the other side of the coin of the symbolic mechanism. Not only does it allow the internalization of symbolic constructs in the life of the individual, such that these take the force of human nature, but it also permits simultaneously, and necessarily, the externalization of these same feelings, emotions and sense of nature upon a physical and material world. Thus human beings become, by means of their cultural symbolisms, context bound to a world of their own making.
The world of external relations and interactions that they do develop, especially in a social sense, comes to assume the character of a naturalized order. This sense of externalized order also tends to exhibit patterns that are characteristically genetic, not just because they are symbolically naturalized. It is also because they serve the same purposes as genetic patterning in human adaptation and survival as these are exhibited in structural-functional ways in social organization and patterning of behavior of the human social animal.
The close linkage between gene-culture co-evolution arises from the deep origins of anthropogenesis. Through most of human natural history, there has been an essential complementariness and unity of pattern between human biological organization as a population and human cultural organization. This has come to express itself especially in patterns of human heredity and kinship, migration and eco-systemic adaptation. For the most part, the same mechanisms of transmission of genetic information have also served as the primary mechanisms for the transmission of cultural information. This has been tied to lineage structure and kinship, and the regulation of reproduction through marriage institutions. For most of natural human history, genes and cultural pattern have been closely bound to one another at the level of the family, and most traditional cultural orientations, indeed, all cultures, incorporate some model of a family at its core.
The form of human genetic transmission is always considered to be generationally vertical in that genes must always be passed from parent to child. A case can be made that migration that introduces new genes to a population is a form of "diagonal" transmission, but strictly speaking, sexual union or coitus and reproduction must take place before transmission can be achieved. The transmission of cultural information on a very basic level, in terms of the early development of children, is mostly always vertical as well, achieved principally by the mother or primary care giver of an infant. That there is near complete gene-culture isomorphism of identity at this early stage is given. The only difference is in the case of fictitious relations of adoption of young infants by surrogate parents that represent a true form of diagonal cultural transmission.
A large part of the essential conservatism of culture and its resistance to change comes from the fact of this primary unity of gene-culture at the early stages. It entails that basic culture is deeply ingrained in our character, and that it is isomorphic for the most part with our genetic identity within a lineage structure. A great deal about secondary cultural institutions represent an investment of limited and critical resources to the symbolic and behavioral elaboration, reinforcement and protection of this central core at the heart of culture.
Gene-culture co-evolution splits apart after the early stages, and the fundamental differences between the two forms of development become more apparent when it is considered that culture can be transmitted, not in tact, but in part, unlike genetic transmission which is always intrinsically whole. Culture can be transmitted by means that are fundamentally horizontal and diagonal as well as being vertical. This means that other care-givers and society in general begins increasingly to play a part in the symbolic socialization of the infant and in the redirection of the basic drives of the infant, even before the first day of birth. It also means that when migration takes place, and a person enters a different society, that individual carries symbolisms, ideas, habits, knowledge and even feelings, that can be transferred in part to the host society without genetic transmission being required.
In formal and formulaic models of gene-culture transmission, diagonal transmission is recognized as the degree of cultural transmission achieved cross-generationally by means other than through the parents and principal lineage structure. It is accomplished through the intervention of other care-givers in the life and development of the child, and continues throughout the life of the individual, in effect and secondary reinforcement. Schooling and the instruction of age cohorts and classes by teachers is effectively a form of diagonal transmission. In general, diagonal transmission is a much more rapid process than vertical transmission, and can effect therefore much more rapid rates of symbolic transformation, but it does not reach as deeply into the nature of the human being as does purely vertical transmission.
Horizontal transmission is even more rapid and at times instantaneous than diagonal transmission, as broadcast transmission can reach very wide mass audiences at the same time. Horizontal transmission is effectively the transmission of cultural information intra-generationally but also, in a sense, it transcends all generational boundaries. It can be the source of greatest change and mobilization of socio-cultural resources, and, at the same time, it can have the most disruptive consequences upon a society. It can lead to changes so rapid, that the traditional modes of vertical and diagonal transmission are effectively abnegated or reversed in their consequences. In such contexts of revolutionary change, as noted by Margaret Mead, it is often the children who teach the parents.
Thus cultural systems are fundamentally more open than genetic systems, which means, among other things, that they tend to change at rates much more rapid than genetic systems even if only vertical transmission is achieved or predominant and the culture is extremely isolated and conservative. Cultural drift is much more marked and dramatic in its effects than genetic drift. It also entails systemically that cultures can undergo periodic oscillatory cycles, much as evolutionary ecosystems do, in much more rapid and dramatic ways.
Unlike patterns of speciation that are always divergent, cultural systems can be convergent as well. While in genetic theory we talk about gene flow and migration, in cultural theory we can also talk about cultural diffusion and acculturation. Thus, processes of acculturation and transculturation of information, people and material resources, recurs frequently across cultural boundaries, both ways at once, and can result in the rapid emergence of new systems from the amalgamation and integration of old ones, even within a single generation.
A consequence of this in part is that the larger historical patterning across cultural groupings exhibits some disparity with that of purely genetic populations, such that the wider the area and longer the time in question, the greater the gulf and magnitude of disparity between gene-culture co-evolution. One important kind of disparity is that intercultural systems of information transmission can often be as destabilizing and a potent agency for change as they are a source of integration. In genetic systems, gene flow across population boundaries is usually considered a great homogenizing force unless there is relative isolation and the gene flow is intermittent and one-way.
Also unlike patterns of genetic transmission, which is always a one-way process and always historically irreversible, patterns of cultural transmission are always two-way and reversible. Thus cultural transmission can have an inherent historical resonance affect that is absent for genetic transmission systems. Again, this form of resonance leads to a more dynamic and inherently less stable system.
Comparison of patterns of cultural and genetic transmission leads to a critical understanding of the principle mechanism of transmission of culture. This mechanism of cultural transmission is different than the mechanism of genetic transmission. Cultural transmission as a two-way process leads to the understanding of such information systems as communication. It is my contention that this mechanism is essentially that of language and its structural patterning is essentially linguistic. We can say that in anthropogenesis, the mother "coo-cooing" the young infant was probable the single biggest and most important agency of gene-culture co-evolution.
We cannot safely consider culture as an information system without recognizing the mechanism of language as the central vehicle and medium of this system and its dynamic articulation. It is again beyond the purview of this digression, which is about human sociobiology, to fully explicate the linguistic aspects of human evolutionary development. Suffice it to say that we cannot properly consider the evolution of human culture without imposing some form of language as at the core of this development. Proto-language may have not only been aural-oral, but may have included hand-signing and even body language and posturing.
From a theoretical standpoint, if language is a the principle medium of culture, then language as linguistics must be construed from the standpoint of the role it plays in the symbolic transformation of the human organism from an unfinished feral state of nature to an equally unfinished domestic state of civilization. I make the case for a full-fledged symbolic linguistics, but this must wait its own work.
There has been a great deal of speculation upon a language acquisition device and a language bio-gram hypothesis. Without a doubt, the development of the natural capacity for language was the single greatest accomplishment of human evolution. I would say that human intelligence, seen in the conventional problem-solving manner, and even the developmental organization of the modern human brain itself, cannot be understood apart from the central role it has played in the articulation and use of language. At the same time, if we are to seek a symbolic structure of language, we must also look to a linguistic structure of human symbolization. Thus, if we are to consider the universal design principles of a true system of language, we must also consider their relationship as principles of symbolic design.
A fascinating issue is the consideration of the sociobiological implications of human language as the equivalent of genetic coding of information. This is the foundation of historical linguistics and comparative linguistics, which has been the scientific basis for linguistics. Words take on a function not unlike that of genes or more specifically alleles and the structural patterning of words in language is the cultural equivalent to the genetic patterning of DNA in the genome. Words are little symbolic devices, or molecules of meaning, that are transmittable between people within the framework of a common, shared linguistic code. The structural and historical patterning of words, and their change, like genetic mutation, is surprisingly regular and consistent enough to be studied in a predictive and scientific manner.
Thus, taxonomic trees for language families have been constructed that are not unlike taxonomic trees found in the natural history record. Rates of change have been recorded and considered to be relatively constant, like a linguistic clock, under ideal conditions of linguistic-cultural transmission, that are not unlike the molecular RNA clock found to occur in genetic transmission. In fact, so closely tied are these aspects of linguistic and genetic historical reconstruction, that linguistic evidence is often directly compared to genetic evidence in the reconstruction of human history. It is assumed that the rise and development of language, say the family of Indo-European languages, is closely attached to the rise and development of genetic distributions of humanity that can be essentially referred to as Indo-European. It comes as no surprise that the principle proponents of gene-culture co-evolution have also been the some of the primary scholars of Indo-European migration. What was found in studies by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza was that even among early Indo-European pioneering communities, there must have been some degree of miscegenation and gene flow from the original predecessors and the invading tribes of Indo-European ancestry. If there was genetic transmission across cultural boundaries of human populations, then there was definitely also cultural transmission occurring as well.
Understanding the central role played by language in cultural transmission processes, leads naturally to a speculation of pre-oral cultural systems that are both very closely tied to genetic transmission structures, and that can be considered to be therefore both proto-linguistic in character and to probably be extremely conservative. To understand such a pre-oral system of information, we must grasp what an oral system is, as this has been explicated especially by linguists who have been interested in the so-called noetic transformation of humankind. It must have constituted an early and prolonged "information revolution" which gradually but with increasing rapidity spread throughout the primitive human world.
Proto-language had to have something to attach itself to. Young children, long before they speak, take notice of things in their world. They point, touch, grab and squeeze, and attempt to manipulate everything they can get hold of. They often try to put these things into their mouth, as if to eat them or at least taste them. Soon they begin emitting sounds that at least from an adult standpoint appear to be incoherent and at best in mimicry of the adult sounds they hear from birth. Children at this point come to recognize objects in their environments, and shapes and basic forms that they come to transfer onto other similar kinds of objects and forms. They do this passively even without naming or linguistic articulation. They gesticulate linguistically rather than articulate.
Whatever the original form of the things that constituted human proto-language, I believe that it had to attach itself to things that were common in the shared environment and that moved with the people as they traveled about. This can be certain material objects like stones and bones and sticks and leaves. It can be other life forms that commonly crossed their paths, not unlike the calling systems of other primates. It can also be things like the moon, the sun, the stars and clouds or their shadows, that seemed to always be over their shoulders wherever they went. Pointing fingers or things and waving seem like good things to do. Gesticulating would give emphasis to these gestures, especially if the gesticulation were consonant or in mimicry of another's gesticulations connected to the same association. Thus gesture-gesticulation attached to environmental cues appears to be a good candidate for an early word symbol.
Oral cultures are distinct in human history as they are generally considered to be very conservative. Oral cultures cultivate a form of language and repetition that permits great mimetic capacity for storing information. Oral cultures typically exhibit a form of reasoning that is analogical and strictly speaking pre-logical or even at times very illogical unless we perhaps enter within the symbolic systems they embody. Poetry and song arise out of oral traditions, as do dance and music. All oral cultures have very well developed religious systems that include magic, some form of animism and mythico-ritual process that regulate human social relationships. These religious symbolic systems typically enshrine the traditional values and lore of the people in ways that are made naturally coherent and consistent for the people, and often also regulate human adaptive functioning and the material world of the people.
Oral cultures are by definition preliterate societies. In general, they lack any form of written record or literate transcription of their language. Of course, there are proto-literate societies that mark a boundary line of transition between a purely oral and literate mode of communication. Typically, these societies in fact have some form of pictographic system that, though inflexible and context-bound, can be fairly uniformly interpreted by members of the cultural system, or at least by specialists. The interesting things about many early petroglyphic designs is that they are very inscrutable and mysterious from a modern and literate perspective, by a person who is not a member of the culture that created them. That they exhibit repetition and delimitation of abstract form entails that they were undoubtedly symbolic systems of some meaning and value. The iconographic function of such pictographs however abstruse they may be now are frequently associated in a very deliberate way with natural phenomena that the makers observed, studied and considered important in their symbology.
The rise of literacy accompanies the rise of writing systems. The rise of writing systems accompanies both the rise of a distinctive form of state civilization, and is associated with record keeping that transcends the limitations of human memory, and also the rise of historical knowledge and a rational noetic consciousness of humankind. It also anticipates the rise of science and a view of the world that is fundamentally secular and non-religious, or at least post-religious in important ways.
With the rise of writing there is an accumulation of knowledge through systems of storage. This accumulation of knowledge entails that people do not have to rely upon the same mimetic devices that they utilized in a purely oral manner. Thus long standing and traditional oral systems often break down as systems of esoteric transmission, and schooling takes a form that it is conventionally understood today, not so much as an apprentice to a singer of tales, but as a student to a purveyor of recorded knowledge. Sacred lore is often then transcribed, and this sacred lore, assuming material form in non-ritual social process, develops a bureaucracy and even a priest-hood around it to protect it and manage its transmission.
Consideration of literate society and the rise of historical civilization brings to bear another interesting and related subject of the history of writing and the evolutionary development of writing systems. I believe this history is important to understanding the symbolic manner of cultural transmission, and for illustrating the probable pathway of phylogenic development that human cultural evolution undertook, particularly in the form of language. Writing systems proceed in clear stages from iconographic and pictographic systems that, as sign systems, were inherently inflexible and context bound, through rebus and syllabary systems that range from being pictographic in character to fully phonetic systems. They finally emerge as fully abstracted phonetic alphabets that are very streamlined and exhibit the full range of human language potential. It is also worthwhile considering this historical pattern to note that new writing systems generally emerged not directly within the context in which older systems operated. They tended to emerge upon the introduction of these older systems to new societies and their adoption and modification to new cultural systems, or else in the peripheries of pre-established systems. These kinds of changes had the consequence eventually of rebounding upon the older system to involve the progressive revision of the older system to "keep up with the times."
The move from an oral society to a literate society marks a shifting transition from reliance on primarily vertical-horizontal modes of cultural transmission, hence relative conservativeness of tradition, toward predominant reliance on diagonal-horizontal modes transmission. This created new possibility for widespread state organization and control and management of resources. It also entailed that the pace of change in cultural patterning could be stepped up by a whole order of magnitude.
The rise of printing technologies in the 15th century, that marked the beginning of the Renaissance, the rise of electronic communications media in the last century, and the rise of new digital technologies in the last couple of decades, have all marked an important noetic transformation of human symbolic reality based on a mode of communication that is primarily horizontal in form and function. This has had a great effect in the rapid dissemination of new ideas and information, and a "liberating" effect for both the human mind and the human body. It accompanies the rise of a new form of state that at least has some pretensions toward democracy around the idea of "rights" and equality and "freedom" that, as far as I can tell, are ideas that were rooted and closely associated historically to horizontal communications media like newspapers.
This brings to bear the notion of the importance of ideas and their transmission in human culture. Ideas have had important consequences in human history. To think that zero or the wheel was an important invention, that was an idea lacking in some cultures, and had to be carried there, and may have had profound revolutionary consequences for human civilization, is usually overlooked. Some sociobiological theorists would like to credit memes as being equal to genes and even implicitly to posit a direct relationship between the genetic transmission of ideas and information and their transmission in cultures. A meme would of course be a symbolic construct, and would be a minimal definition of a symbol. Internally it would have only intuitive form, that is implicit, vague and without distinct outline. Symbols require external material form to attach themselves to--this provides the frame of reference for the definition of their ideational patterns. We cannot really therefore talk of ideas as such outside of their material form, except perhaps in some ideal, noumenal way.
In general, it can be said that cultural processes and patterns of information transmission are related to genetic information transmission patterns, but are also fundamentally different and separate from it. Cultural transmission takes more modes and leads to different consequences than genetic transmission. In general, it can be said that cultural transmission allows for the effects of cultural diffusion of information independent of genetic structure, and thus for the occurrence of patterns of change and development that are essentially non-evolutionary.
In general, I refer to these processes as transculturational and this refers to any transmission of information across cultural boundaries that may have the effect of changing a society. In general, the non-evolutionary patterns that are the result of transculturation have been the rise of human technological and historical civilization as we understand these things to be today. This form of "civilization" is rooted to the notion of traditional cultural patterning but transcends this patterning by virtue of the effects of diagonal and horizontal transmission processes.
Transculturation is closely tied to what is known as acculturation, which is defined in minimal form as culture contact that results in change. Acculturation theory has its own presuppositions of "progress" and "modernization" that need to be taken into account anthropologically. Transculturation better describes in more general and less biased fashion the overall process involved in the rise of human civilization. Basically, a good idea sticks around and is traded like gold. Fire, once discovered and its utility value harnessed and extended, became an idea whose time had come. It must have spread like "wildfire" throughout the primitive world. Firecrackers and silk may have been state secrets kept by China, but even an efficient Chinese bureaucracy couldn't forever stop leakage of these ideas to the west.
I have come a long way around, almost full circle, from beginning with a digression on sociobiology and gene-culture evolution, ending with a highlight on human civilization as something or some set of things that is essentially non-biological in form and function. Somewhere along the circuit, a full sense of sociobiology as a driving force of human society was lost. Of course, the primary point of departure on my revised form of sociobiology from what has been conventionally promulgated as such, is that I have taken human symbolization as a basic mechanism that is central to its understanding and expression in human cultural patterning. This pattern is universal to and distinctive of the human species.
In general, sociobiological theory wants to surreptitiously sidestep and circumvent the entire problematic of symbolization in the patterning of human culture. Thus it wants to make this patterning predominantly accountable for on the basis of genetic information transmission alone. We can see broad sociobiological parameters vaguely and deeply rooted in early gene-culture co-evolution, but we must also see that the developmental outcome of the evolution of human culture has been something much more than mere genetic enumeration.
It is now time to reunite our thinking in coming full circle to the point where we departed. In this, I will hypothesize what I claim to be the unique features of the human condition on planet earth. That is, from a strictly sociobiological point of view, the patterning of cultural fitness and cultural selection that has come to play a critical role in evolutionary development of life on earth.
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Like fitness and selection in biological theory, cultural fitness and cultural selection must be understood as fundamentally complementary concepts. They are in a sense the measure of one another. I would define cultural fitness as the measure of the degree to which cultural traits and adaptive patterns have conferred basic adaptive and reproductive fitness upon the human organism. In a basic sense, this deals with the human relationship with its natural environment, but there is a derivative sense of cultural fitness that includes the degree to which any individual human being is fit within the parameters of the culture of which that person is a member. Each cultural pattern, being integrated about some line of optimal adjustment, defines at least implicitly what it is to be a fit member of the society. Most societies make rather explicit and manifest their symbolic definitions of achievement and success. I would claim that in our market-based system, money is the "bottom line" measure of an individual's fitness. Behind this monetary fitness of the modern human being, there is some sense of symbolic status that accrues from the acquisition and control of money and that leads to a sense of well being and security within a social system.
From a sociobiological standpoint, it is evident that cultural fitness had its origins in the trait configurations that were uniquely human and that were from the beginning closely associated with the raise of basic human cultural patternings. It can be considered the degree to which human genetic change conferred adaptive fitness of human beings in cultural contexts, and which permitted human beings to carry their cultures and to transmit them. In the beginning, the principal reference point of this cultural patterning would have been the central issue of biological survival and reproductive success, especially in a social framework. Gradually, as is evident on the development of gene-culture co-evolution, cultural fitness began to take on increasingly cultural and derivative frames of reference that were no longer directly or strictly tied to the issue of biological survival and success in a natural world.
It is obvious that at an early point, cultural fitness began to take a lead compared to alternative forms of trait-fitness that human beings may have been selected for. Modern humans are not known for their large canines, their physical strength, their large carriage or their specialized hypertrophisms. They are known for their generalized adaptation to a wide range of possible environments, for their large brain, bipedalism, sexual and violent nature, and for their great hand-eye coordination and lingual dexterity. While these are not altogether flattering traits of the human species, it is clear that they went along way in conferring cultural fitness of human beings within a natural world--a form of fitness that proved extremely adaptable and successful.
The derivative forms of cultural fitness take increasingly divergent forms from what we can consider as strictly sociobiological. For a long time now, cultural fitness has had to have been defined in contexts that were primarily man made, or artificial, rather than being strictly natural. Even the fitness of other life forms within a cultural framework of adaptation has to be taken into account, for instance the domestication of canines or of common farm animals and plants. We have evolved by means of cultural standards of fitness alone entire breeds of dogs that are completely domesticated and from a species point of view unique from anything occurring in the wild. Even in an indirect sense, many species of animal has coevolved in the context of human cultural environments. I would give the rat special status in this regard.
This consideration brings up the complementary notion of cultural selection. Humans have from an early point, as an outcome of their successful cultural adaptations and its external manifestation, imposed upon their natural worlds their own influence over the selective forces of nature, to the point of introducing their own unique form of cultural selection.
Cultural selection, like its complement fitness, can be seen to take two alternate forms depending on our frame of reference. At its early stage, we can consider it to have been the form of natural selection that led to trait selection promoting cultural adaptation. Once this basic trait configuration evolved, which it appeared to do by the time of Homo habilis, it set up a resonance effect between this trait configuration and the natural environment. This eventually led to the increasing cultural control and manipulation of natural selective forces and factors that affects the selection of other forms of life. We can say that it even led finally to the cultural selection of humankind itself, albeit in a derivative manner as described in cultural fitness above. The paradox of this is that Darwin's original theory of natural selection was largely based upon examples of human cultural selection in animal and plant breeding. The term selection itself derives from this example.
We can see cultural selection operating at a fairly early point in human evolutionary history. These early humans obviously hunted herds of big game, and probably accomplished driving many such populations into extinction. At a later point in time, human beings managed to push back the primeval forests that covered most of Europe, Asia and eventually North America. In North America it is evident that early big game hunters drove mammoths to extinction, and at a later historical period tried to do the same with bison, wolves and bear.
Indeed, Darwin framed most of his theory of natural selection using primarily examples that were technically speaking, a form of cultural selection. He mostly regarded natural selection process and their outcomes to be so gradualist and elusive, as to be essentially unobservable. He argued mostly by analogy from easily observable examples of animal breeding, of pigeons, dogs, sheep and other domestic plants and animals. The term "selection" was in fact borrowed from this breeding lore, the picking and culling of specimens for reproductive alteration.
A prolonged dawn of humanity characterized by a hunting-gathering and foraging way of life led ultimately to an incipient form of horticulture and harvesting and to a pattern of sedentism that was characterized by several noteworthy examples of cultural selectionism.
This was the transformation of domestic environments and domesticated environs by means of cultural selectionism, the domestication of many plants and animals primarily for purposes of food, work and for other symbolic reasons. It was the rise of environments on earth that can be considered in an extensive sense to be exclusively human--i.e., urban humanity. It is not necessary to go into detail about this process, but to note in passing the sociobiological connection of increasing cultural selectionism in conferring basic adaptive and reproductive success on human beings, albeit in cultural rather than in completely natural ways.
Technological civilization can be considered to be the outcome of this developmental pattern of cultural selectionism, and we can see from the beginning the role that tools played in advancing cultural selectionism. Tools allowed effective hunting. Tools allowed the harvesting and cultivation of plants and animals. And now, tools came increasingly to provide the mechanisms and energy to drive more complex and sophisticated process that has effectively transformed the entire earth.
We can say that the rest is history, as indeed it has been. We can only now speculate on the latest form of cultural selectionism that is witness not only the vanishing of the last remaining rain-forests on earth, and the mass extinction of many forms of life. But the disruption of entire ecosystems and even global scale disruptions of the basic geo-physical systems underlying the biosphere itself. Especially, I believe, we must seek to understand the biological significance and outcomes of cultural selectionism as it is coming to intrude increasingly upon genetic and genetic evolution itself. It has reached a point that human cultural selectionism has largely come to be the major determining factor in evolutionary process, and to a great extent has replaced natural selection processes over many regions of the world.
Natural selection of course continues, especially at the margins of human civilization, as this is about the way the human relationship to nature has been defined. Enduring what are fundamentally restricted and socially circumscribed habitats, wild forms of life are perhaps undergoing speciation and selection processes that are unparalleled in natural history. In these narrow zones, perhaps, evolution is raging, and if it knew any better, it would be raging at humankind.
Many species have been counter-adaptive to human civilization as well, and achieve considerable success in this regard. New forms of bacteria appear to be emerging in the environmental context of the human body and the social body. It is clear that one way or another, human cultural selectionism has become a major force to be reckoned with for life on earth today. And this is whether it is experienced in the form of habitat loss from urban development, in the form of ecosystem disruption from environmental pollution and catastrophe, or from massive poaching, deforestation, or over fishing. In whatever form it is experienced, it has had a net effect of driving back the flow of life, and stemming its tide generally in all corners of the earth.
I will not make any blanket statements on this matter in this regard, except to note that there are both good and bad aspects of this process. Without a doubt, we should seek to understand these processes of human cultural selectionism and cultural fitness much better than we do, especially in its impact upon the natural order of evolutionary process.
I wish here to emphasize that biological engineering is but one more logical step in the long evolution of cultural selectionism, where the willpower and control of humankind is increasingly asserting itself in every more basic and powerful ways upon the very shaping forces of life itself. This is cultural selectionism. It is the outcome of human sociobiology deeply rooted in our natural history, but it is not in itself a form of genetic transmission.
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I must finish the last chapter of the second part on the issue of the current condition and predicament of humankind. We as a single species represent a tremendous biomass. We occupy by our nature certain trophic levels in the natural chain of life. We have through our patterns of cultural fitness and cultural selection come to increasingly interfere with and control the fundamental processes that controlled the evolution of life from the beginning. We do so without a fundamental sense of responsibility or far-sighted vision of what place our current roles will take us to in the long run. We appear to be more driven by basic sociobiological issues of social competition than we were even a millennium before. We are quickly reaching the total carrying capacity of the biosphere itself, such as we have shaped it with our own collective hands and tools. Once our world reaches its point of saturation, we will have little where else to turn except out to space, and space represents such vast distances that it remains for most of humanity and life on earth an insuperable boundary.
The human age is a biological age that is represented by the near total dominance and monopolization of life by the human species. We are quite correctly in an age that can be characterized as the age of the Human biological regime. This has been undeniably an age of mass extinction and a termination process for many patterns of natural selection that were for a very long time the driving forces of evolution.
The basic sociobiological drives for survival that makes people so competitive, can become the same drive that prevents us from charging over the edge in our human race to achieve. This is only possible if we can engineer a social system on a global scale that will effectively counteract the same natural human predispositions toward competitiveness and violence that so characterizes our nature. We have to come to impose a system that serves to re-channel the symbolic expression of this human potential in ways other than what we have known before.
The choice remains ours to make, and it will be made by default if we do not conscientiously take some form of collective action in our lives. A new sense of responsibility tied to global ecology has been dawning, and the clock is slowly ticking away. This responsibility indicates an emergent understanding of the role of humankind, and cultural selectionism in mediating the relationship between nature and culture for the entire earth. It is a responsibility for assuming a role of stewardship over the earth's natural resources in a manner that will guarantee its protection and survival in the indefinite future. Obviously, the model of unlimited economic growth and human expansionism must be done away with. Obviously, means must be found for bringing the rate of human reproduction to a standstill, and to allow the human population to achieve a lower level of equilibrium with the earth.
I would like to argue in this paper that Life on earth has entered a new epoch, and that is the age of the Human regime. In this age, human selective factors largely made by people or indirectly resulting from the behaviors of people, have had a critical and dramatic impact on all forms of life upon the planet. This regime of human biology is, on a biological scale, relatively recent, and may, in the long run, have the appearance in the record of a sudden mass extinction event. Unless humans carry themselves, by their own blind adaptation, to the verge of extinction, taking most of life along with itself, humanity must come to terms with its own role and function in this new regime as the primary stewards of life, and assume some sense of environmental responsibility.
In a sense, this can be considered to be an expected long-term outcome of evolution itself, that led to selection for more intelligent adaptation, hence bigger and better brains, hence the expression of intelligence as something even beyond the control of biology's basic forces. Human beings themselves are evolving, but this evolution has slowed down largely due to its successful adaptations to all environments and to the massive increase in human population. The selective factors that play upon human evolution now are more social than they are natural, and thus humans are becoming increasingly the victims of their own selectionism.
The concept of human stewardship of biological life proceeds from the realization, not of life's dependency on us, but of our dependency on life, for if we destroy most life on earth, then chances are that we are in the process also destroying ourselves. But stewardship also proceeds from the realization of the responsibility that it entails and that knowledge of our interdependencies in life creates. It proceeds as well from sentient, aesthetic and ethical considerations relating to life, and that demarcates us, as human beings, as unique to the planet. It leads to a form of non-violence that becomes reflected at many levels of our individual and social behavior and structural organization. It leads to concerted and well-organized efforts to repair and restore the health and vitality of damaged biological systems, and to protect those systems remaining from further disruption and destruction. This non-violence begets a form of respect for our selves as well, as living creatures that are part of a larger natural system.
What starts off as a systems analytic approach, ends up as a meta-ethical and normative approach. But this is a logical and natural outcome of the development of life on earth, and should be a part of that system, especially if we are not to proceed blindly to our own mass destruction and eventual extinction.
2001
Hugh M. Lewis
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 03/17/05