The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings
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Traditional society and the accumulation of experience
Both natural and cultural selection (the latter arising from the former) occur in two steps: the first step is mutation, that is, a random change in genes/meanings, and the second step is inheritance, that is, the transmission of genes/meanings that ensure successful adaptation to the environment. The difference between selection and choice is that choice essentially occurs in one step, combining ideas about possible actions (counterfacts) and the action itself (meaning). In this one step, the chosen action is carried out. With the advent of choice, the evolution of meanings followed Lamarck, not Darwin: people began to select meanings purposefully, while retaining the meaning features they needed. Now the figurative “giraffe” actually began to grow a neck as it reached up for leaves, because people kept the offspring of just such a “giraffe.”
“Biological evolution is a bad analogue for cultural change because the two systems are so different for three major reasons that could hardly be more fundamental. First, cultural evolution can be faster by orders of magnitude than biological change at its maximal Darwinian rate—and questions of timing are of the essence in evolutionary arguments. Second, cultural evolution is direct and Lamarckian in form: The achievements of one generation are passed by education and publication directly to descendants, thus producing the great potential speed of cultural change. Biological evolution is indirect and Darwinian, as favorable traits do not descend to the next generation unless, by good fortune, they arise as products of genetic change. Third, the basic topologies of biological and cultural change are completely different. Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return” (Gould 1992, p. 65).
Biological evolution is based on the variability and inheritance of genes and the natural selection of organisms with a genotype that promotes adaptation to the environment. Man as a living being is the basis of society and culture. Therefore, in primitive communities, the mechanism of natural selection continues to operate, influencing the instinctive behavior of people. People are still guided by instincts and emotions, which are to some extent restricted by cultural norms: traditions and prejudices relayed through learning overlay instincts and override them. Cultural evolution is based on the inheritance of meanings, their variation and the selection of people with meaning types that contribute to adaptation to the environment:
“Here’s the idea, broken down into its simplest form. We’ve established that from a very young age, humans focus on and learn from more skilled, competent, successful, and prestigious members of their communities and broader social networks. This means that the new and improved techniques, skills, or methods that emerge will often begin spreading through the population, as the less successful or younger members copy them. Improvements may arise through intentional invention as well as from lucky errors and the novel recombinations of elements copied from different people” (Henrich 2016, pp. 212-3).
While cultural selection was the selection of facts based on implicit norms, traditional choice is the choice of counterfacts based on explicit norms. Traditional choice was still heavily dependent on norms and relied on practices transmitted through cultural learning. But even this traditional choice, based on the random drift of meanings and a deliberate retention of chance, eventually allowed humans to move to artificial selection, that is, the choice of animals and plants. About 30,000 years ago, the supposed domestication of the dog began the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming.
The rise of traditional choice as a driving force of social change did not lead to any “primitive revolutions.” We prefer to call the domestication of animals and plants agricultural evolution because this process took thousands and tens of thousands of years. Early human inventions and discoveries were happy accidents that were able to persist through the selection of the populations that made those discoveries and inventions. In a traditional society, intelligence and purposeful choices of individuals contributed to cultural evolution but did not yet play a prominent role. Human practices and prejudices dominated traditional society and ensured its survival.
It is hard for modern humans to accept the idea that developed intelligence is not a competitive advantage. However, this was well understood by members of traditional societies who relied not on intelligence but on practices in order to adapt to their environment. Joseph Henrich illustrates this with the example of Franklin’s expedition frozen in the Arctic ice in the 1840s:
“…Inuit snow houses look designed and are clearly functionally well fit to life in the Arctic. In fact, they appear to call for a team of engineers with knowledge of aerodynamics, thermodynamics, material science, and structural mechanics. Not surprisingly, facing the real threat of freezing to death in their tents, Franklin’s men didn’t figure out how to make snow houses. No single individual or even a group of a hundred highly motivated men in this case, could figure this out. It’s a product of cumulative cultural evolution and contains features that many or most Inuit builders just learn as ‘that’s the way you do it’ without any big causal model” (Henrich 2016, p. 115).
Traditional society accumulates cultural experience through practices passed down from generation to generation. Socio-cultural order and causal models are prerequisites for counterfacts and choice: in a situation of total uncertainty, choice is impossible. In this society, individual intelligence and counterfactual choice play a significant but subordinate role. They cannot accelerate the accumulation of cultural experience to the speeds to which modern people are accustomed.
Meanings, genes and memes
The idea that culture is made up of elements is nothing new. We will not review the entire long history of such research here, but will focus on memetics. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins hypothesized a unit of cultural transmission that he called a meme: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Dawkins 1976, p. 206). Dawkins introduced the concept of a meme by analogy with a gene.
Genes do not divide or mix, they are particles. At the same time they appear on the surface as continuous phenotypic traits: a person’s height or skin color can take on any value within a certain interval. Dawkins raised the question of whether memes are particulate (Dawkins 1976, p. 209; Mesoudi 2011, pp. 41-2). According to Alex Mesoudi, units of cultural heredity are not particulate, unlike genes:
“Memetics makes the neo-Darwinian assumption that culture can be divided into discrete units that are inherited in a particulate fashion, like genes. It also assumes that memes are transmitted with high fidelity, this being one of the defining characteristics of a replicator according to Dawkins. However, whereas genetic inheritance is particulate, cultural inheritance in many cases appears to be nonparticulate” (Mesoudi 2011, p. 42).