In earlier notes I examined the idea of cultural evolution by selection operating on groups of people.
This note looks at a different process: cultural evolution operating directly by selection of cultural traits. The general idea is simple: cultural traits (customs, institutions, art forms, etc) ‘reproduce’ (they get themselves copied); the ‘copies’ are similar but not identical; and the variant forms have different rates of survival and further reproduction. These processes meet the usual requirements for natural selection to occur. We can therefore expect cultural traits to evolve in such a way as to maximise their own reproductive success.
This is not a wholly new idea. Even in Darwin’s lifetime people talked about the ‘struggle for existence’ between competing ideas. Philosophers and psychologists like C. S. Peirce and James Mark Baldwin explicitly developed ‘evolutionary’ theories of knowledge using Darwinian concepts. More recently, Karl Popper made the process of ‘trial and error’ central to his ‘evolutionary epistemology’, and pointed out the analogy with Darwinian selection, while Friedrich Hayek described the economics of the free market as a ‘discovery procedure’ in which actions that are not centrally planned or co-ordinated can nevertheless lead, by a process of selection, to efficient outcomes.
But none of these approaches went beyond a vague and rhetorical analogy between cultural processes and natural selection. Richard Dawkins changed that in the 1970s by introducing the concept of a ‘meme’ as the cultural counterpart of the biological ‘gene’, and tracing in some detail the similarities and differences between the two. (To be historically fair, it should be said that Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman simultaneously proposed somewhat similar ideas, but without Dawkins’s flair for publicity.) Apart from establishing the basis for regarding memes as replicating entities, and objects of natural selection, Dawkins points out the corollary that, like genes, memes are essentially selfish. The properties that we expect memes to evolve are those that enhance their own survival and reproduction, and not the interests of individual humans or societies. Sometimes these will coincide, but there is no guarantee of that. Consider, for example, the ‘meme’ for suicide bombing.
In re-reading Dawkins’s writing on memes in ‘The Selfish Gene’ and ‘The Extended Phenotype’ I find very little to disagree with. Dawkins’s explanations are clear, he makes all the necessary cautions and reservations, and he succeeds in proving that the term ‘natural selection’ can legitimately be applied. And yet….. I still feel that the concept of natural selection is far less useful in dealing with culture than it is in biology. Perhaps because Dawkins overplays the ‘selfishness’ of genes within biology itself, he underplays the differences between genes and memes. By and large, functioning genes (as distinct from passive stretches of ‘junk’ DNA), are successful only when they promote the interests of the organisms that carry them, or of other organisms carrying copies of the same gene (usually relatives). Genes are integral parts of the organisms that carry them, and they can only reproduce if those organisms are successful in obtaining nutrition, mates, etc, in competition with others. Moreover, the elaborate system of meiosis ensures that all genes in a body have an equal chance of being replicated. A gene will therefore get itself reproduced if and only if the bodies that carry it are successful in their own ‘struggle for existence’. Long before Darwin, it was easy to see that much of animal and plant morphology and behaviour was ‘adaptive’. The problem was not so much to identify adaptations, as to explain them. Before Darwin, there were only two explanations: the traditional one of ‘God made it that way’, and the more recent, but quite inadequate, one of ‘Lamarckism’. Darwin transformed biology by providing a better explanation.
In culture, by contrast, we do not know how to recognise adaptation, and we are not entitled to assume that it exists at all. We cannot ask ‘which part or function of the organism (or society) does this cultural trait help, and how?’, because we have no reason to assume that it helps any of them. In this respect the meme is quite unlike the gene. The meme can spread and reproduce itself without the aid of biological reproduction. This considerably weakens the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution. There might be a closer analogy between memes and viruses, which are essentially disembodied bits of DNA, free to skip from one body to another. Dawkins himself makes the comparison with viruses, but does not pursue its implications as far as I would wish. The key point is this: in so far as cultural traits are the product of evolution by the natural selection of memes, this gives us no reason to suppose that they will in general be useful, by contributing to reproductive fitness or in any other way, to individual humans or societies. The most we are entitled to say is that the capacity to acquire and transmit culture is (or has been in our evolutionary past) on balance useful, because that capacity has evolved by conventional biological selection.
It does not follow from this that all or even most cultural traits are desirable in themselves. It might be that the capacity for acquiring and transmitting culture is so valuable for certain vital purposes (such as learning how to find food), that its value outweighs the cost of carrying useless or harmful traits. It is conceivable that the great majority of cultural traits are ‘junk culture’, analogous to the ‘junk DNA’ that takes up a large part of the genome. The difference is that junk DNA is usually harmless. Admittedly, it takes up space, and a certain amount of time and resources are wasted in copying it, but beyond that it is harmless because it literally does nothing. In contrast, junk culture may have very serious effects. Belief in witchcraft is, presumably, junk culture, but try telling that to the Witchfinder General when he calls!
If this is accepted, the majority of culture might be ‘junk’. It does not follow that it is. I will try to pursue this in another note.
DAVID BURBRIDGE
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