I am not sure how to prove or disprove a conjecture like
this, that cultural development parallels individual development. Yet, it
seems to me it must be so. The allure of the idea is that culture has a
logic in it, which is a distillation of the cumulative experience of many
individuals.
There's lots of things we do as children or teenagers which are proven
useless when we are adults. What is a successful behavior is contextual. A
child throwing a temper tantrum sometimes manipulates parental behavior,
but that tactic is unlikely to influence the larger natural world. Thus,
inevitably, children must give up temper tantrums as they grow up. In the
same way, the group behavior of teenagers seems strongly related to sexual
development, but it is counter-productive once mating and reproduction
occurs.
Culture is an idea discovered in the observation of group behavior, which
in turn amounts to the averaging and generalizing of individual behavior.
Culture is transmitted from adults to children by example and specific
teaching. Children learn by example, because
Homo sapiens and other primates
are very good at monkey-see-monkey-do (copy-catting). Specific teaching
only works in intelligent species such as
Homo sapiens, since it involves abstractions expressed in language,
or suggested by signs, pictures and other methods. (Despite thousands of
years of philosophical work, concepts are still mysterious things even
though we know they are central to our intellectual and cultural
development.) For my immediate purpose, the important point is that
children learn from adults. That fact implies surviving adults are the
reservoir of culture, which further implies that culture is distilled
experience. What is taught is that which has survived; i.e., children
learn from the adults that survived long enough to teach it.
Since physical survival to adulthood and reproduction is usually a
qualifying factor in the transmission of culture, there is a winnowing of
culture in parallel to Darwinian fitness. Even so, the existence of a
fitness criterion does not by itself control the content of culture, since
there may be many ways to survive. Again, the parallelism of cultural
survival and physical survival is just that: there is no necessary
interaction which determines specific outcomes (cultural content). That
this is so is demonstrated in the persistent existence of thousands of
human cultures, all different in their assumptions and patterns of
behavior. The "winnowing" that occurs only excludes behavior that is
clearly destructive to biological success; e.g., jumping off cliffs
without parachutes at an early age.
Although many paths exist to attain the result of adult fitness, they must
still lead to reproductive success. If there are no children to teach, the
culture dies out. This implies there must be some common elements in the
various cultures, even if those elements are very stylized or general.
That is, the common elements do not have to be specific instructions,
behavior or acts, but could be implicit in an array of instructions or
behavior. Whether explicit or implicit, at some point successful cultures
bring about mating, reproduction and child-rearing (replacement). In
addition, they must involve the basic methods by which people eat, drink
and survive the environment. In other words, the culture has to contain a
core of instructions for biological success. Whatever else it contains is
only relevant to the extent that it inhibits or prevents biological
success, which is the negative reason why many cultures are possible.
As methods of survival improve and pass on to succeeding generations,
culture changes. For example, the hunting lifestyle is quite different
from that of farming. This is not to say that improved survival techniques
(generically, technology) always impose a different lifestyle on users.
The invention of improved arrows, hooks, knives or spears may not of
itself change the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, just as there is little
cultural difference between those who own different brands of computers.
Nonetheless, the variation of technology does alter specific behavioral
patterns. The improved spear may make hunting elephants and whales
possible in addition to smaller animals. PC and Mac users developed
different attitudes about computers in just a few years. These small
variations can lead to larger divergences over time. In our recent
experience, the graphical user interface (GUI) changed computer uses
dramatically, making possible the devolution of computers from huge
corporate centers to a handheld gadget. While miniaturization and cost
reduction were crucial in that trend, the most important step was making
the computer concept available to ordinary people, not just an elite
priesthood. The GUI, by presenting an easily learned, intuitive model of
the computer, increased the range of computer uses. Each user could invent
a new way of looking at the gadget, thus redefining the concept and its
uses. In turn, those new attitudes and uses can change personal and group
behavior. Lately, young people seem to have grown an accessory on their
heads: the cell phone. That has dramatically changed grocery shopping, and
often made the roads more hazardous. In just one generation, what young
mothers teach their children about handling day-to-day life is being
transformed.
I am often struck by ancient practices which have
been quite suddenly abolished in modern times. Roman men behaved like
today's adolescent boys, unduly impressed by sexual and military prowess.
That sort of behavior continued among aristocrats until the French
Revolution. Since the application of the guillotine, male behavior has
increasingly changed. The relations between the sexes have changed
radically to the advantage of women
in many parts of the world. Similarly, slavery has
been outlawed, even if it is still an abominable practice in many places.
I believe the modern struggle for civil rights and the "clash of
civilizations" (Huntingdon's phrase) is a final test of tribalism and
other useless discriminations. Little by little, adaptations that no
longer work are discarded. However slowly, people learn new ways of life
consistent with their environment and technology. This is cultural
evolution, which is based on nurture, not nature.
In proposing cultural evolution, even if it seems
humanly purposeful to its participants, there is neither ultimate meaning,
order, nor end in it. In discerning cultural evolution, I hope to be
observing actual events in the intelligent species that supports it. In
short, this proposal is neither a reprise of Victorian Progress (Spencer)
nor a form of Social Darwinism. There are no Heroes, Supermen, or New Men.
It is just History that is happening.
13:31:44 - Saturday, 04/01/2006