Not only did humans have to adapt to changing natural conditions—the climate and geography and the fauna and flora of a place—but increasingly people had to adapt to human culture, as well. Human culture was a creation of the human brain and, correspondingly, culture created new environments to which the brain had to adapt. With specialization, for instance, came novel roles—the shaman, the priest, the doctor, the scribe, the lawyer, the blacksmith, the organizer, the warrior, the farmer. With each role emerged whole new worlds and worldviews, new societal niches and power relationships, status, wealth, as well as new standards for sexual selection. Reading social cues became increasingly important, as did wit, charisma, and facility with language, spoken and later written. It may even be that culture more than the wild is responsible for the present structure of the human brain.[i]
Together, culture and nature provided more complex environments to which people had to adapt and which, in turn, sped up human evolution. It has been estimated that, had we been changing as rapidly throughout the past six million years as we have in the past ten thousand, the genetic difference between humans and the chimpanzees would be 160 times greater than they actually are.[ii] The pace of biological and, to a far greater extent, cultural change accelerated as the auto-catalytic and cross-catalytic cybernetic[1] reinforcement process involving innovation, surplus, and population took-off. Each innovation, every addition of material wealth, every shift in population, changed the environment to which people had to adjust.
Captain James Cook witnessed human sacrifice in Taihiti during his visit around 1773. 1815 edition of Cook's 'Voyages'/Wikimedia Commons
It takes only the slightest leap of faith to entertain the notion that as the material exterior lives of humans changed so did people’s internal phenomenological experiences. That is, the inner life evolved. Through etymology—the study of the origin of words—and comparative linguistics we can appreciate how language reflected the coming into being of new objects and people’s relationships to those objects and to other people who were affected by those objects, and then to oneself as an individual. Not just new, but entirely novel thoughts, values, beliefs, and behaviors emerged. A stonewall, a catapult, and a pen each changes the material and mental landscape of its inhabitants. One materializes ownership; one amplifies violence; one manifests the legal contract, algebra, and the labyrinthine possibilities of literature. And from each one of these manifestations spilled out a more complex cornucopia of possibilities for humans to experience. Culture and individual became synergistically involved (unconsciously mostly) in the emergence of novel, more complex societies and cultures that fed through each person and, in turn, became the raw materials for further complexity and novelty.
Like any hypothesis under consideration, for cultural and mental evolution to be scientifically accepted there must exist a causal mechanism—a material thing or a process or pathway(s) through which the change is brought into being.[iii] Biological evolution required both natural selection and genetic coding as causal mechanisms before it was accepted as a viable theory beyond rational dispute. In planetary evolution, the geothermal dynamics of plate tectonics provided the mechanism missing in Wegner’s earlier mistaken Continental Drift hypothesis. But since our thoughts and feelings are nonmaterial, their evolution and their causal mechanisms are difficult to discern. Even if all our inner lives were encoded in the material structures of our brain, this soft material quickly decomposes and disappears. Francis Fukuyama noted that, “Reliance on the archeological record also leads to a bias toward materialistic explanations for change, since much of the spiritual and cognitive world of prehistoric civilization is effectively lost.”[iv] So an evolution of cultural consciousness stands almost outside scientific scrutiny.
An excerpt of an artwork by Laura Santi.
This is where the idea of “universal Darwinism” and Richard Dawkin’s playful concept of the meme come in handy.[v] Universal Darwinism suggests that for any system (not just the biological) to undergo evolution, only three conditions must be met: the traits of that system must vary in some way; there must a mechanism to select for those variations that are most successful in the environment; and there must be a causal mechanism to copy the successful traits into future generations of that system.[vi] For the intangible world of consciousness and culture, memes are the variable traits that can be copied. The meme is conceptualized as a reproducible unit of information.[2] It can be any idea, thing, value, belief, etc. that can be replicated. It can be as mundane as shoes and earrings; as abstract as the unwritten rules of courtship; as significant as ownership and patriotism. These are all memes. If it can be replicated it is, by definition, a meme.[vii]
The meme as concept is similar to Plato’s concept of ideas or forms. The meme “phone,” for example, is an abstract idea that can in reality vary in color, size, shape, function, in whether it is wired or wireless, etc. The causal mechanisms for copying the memes are the neurons. These nerve cells (within the brain mostly) have become—through the billions of years—highly evolved instruments for processing, manipulating, and transmitting information. According to this idea—to this meme about memes—brain cells called mirror neurons copy the memes. The memes are then stored, manipulated, and transmitted back to the organism’s environment by the brain’s complex neural network. For memes, as with the genes that preceded them, to reproduce is to be successful. What selects which memes will be successful? The natural environment, the culture, the individual human brain.
By co-evolutionary logic, those memes useful to our survival endured. The psychologist Susan Blackmore suggests, for instance, that the meme language co-evolved with bigger brains, each facilitating the evolution of the other.[viii] The bigger brain facilitated the copying of language, and those people who were facile with the language were most successful in their cultural and natural environments. Meanwhile, both enhanced the reproductive success of humans. But not without some personal trade-offs. The bigger brain made birth far more painful and fatal for the mother. And then once that dangerous bridge is successfully crossed, the big brain takes years to develop. Managing gravity on two legs, outwitting faster, stronger, better armed species, competing with members of our own species, learning language and the subtle rules of culture—all these require at least a decade—and now two to three decades—of dependency and metabolic energy from the community.[ix] Also, using twenty percent of a person’s total energy output, the bigger brain requires that its host intake substantially more nutrients than it did when it had a smaller brain. Our species had to become better at procuring food in a world where the competition is, by nature, stiff. Here the brain paid its way by providing for long-term memory, sequential memory, copying, innovation, language, attention, reasoning, problem-solving, inhibition of impulses, delayed gratification, goal-attainment, planning, flexibility, integration over space and time, social intelligence, and so forth.[x]
Not all successful memes are beneficial to the host. Similar to the bio-logic of genes, also surviving are numerous seemingly useless memes—fads like party balloons and pet rocks and bell-bottoms. They serve no apparent evolutionary benefit, but like the many hitchhiker genes in our genome, they come along for the ride because they do not significantly compromise the individual, either. Also thriving have been lots of memes that are actually deleterious to many people—to the point of being catastrophic to the species—and yet they have managed to survive because they are so advantageous to some few people. War and cluster bombs, dishonesty, junk food, large families, conspicuous consumption, and planned obsolescence top the short list.
However they manifest—whether by this hypothetical memetic process or not—our interior lives are far more complex than the external ones. Intricate as a car may be—the mechanics, metallurgy, combustion, electronics, and so forth—the meanings we give to a car and what it symbolizes in our minds (individually and collectively) and all the cultural spin-offs are incomparably more complex. The freedom and pleasure of driving; the pain and suffering of collisions; the thoughts and experiences related to traffic, to laws, to the types of communities it fosters (urban, suburban, rural), to the spin-off businesses of metal, tire, concrete, and petroleum, and to the history of these, corporate capitalism and national economies, of wars, unions and global warming; and even the simple value judgments that enters one’s mind as a person passes a Toyota Prius or the late GM Hummer (R.I.P.). The mental ripple effects of this one material meme seem virtually infinite.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Autocatalytic means that the process is internally self-perpetuating. Cross-catalytic means that systems catalyze other systems. Cybernetic means that the system (a person or society, in this case) reads environmental stimuli and responds.
[2] Unlike the gene, the meme does not necessarily exist as a material entity. However, among the biggest proponents of the concept have been the materialist philosophers. Materialist and idealist are the two endpoints of the dualist worldview. Dualists perceive matter and mind (or spirit) as being of two very different qualities. To the materialist, matter is primary, and all else—if it truly exists—is caused by matter acted upon by one of the four fundamental forces in the space-time field. For the materialist, consciousness presents great difficulties, as it appears to be a phenomenon that exists outside the materialist paradigm.
ENDNOTES
[i] Sagan, C. (1977:103) The Dragons of Eden, Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Ballantine Books, New York.
[ii] McAuliffe, K. (2009, March) Are We Still Evolving? Discover, pp. 51-56, 58.
[iii] Or the hypothesis may fit within a mathematical relationship and therefore not need a causal mechanism.
[iv] Fukuyama, F. (2011:52) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
[v] Memes—Dawkins (1976), Blackmore (1999), Oudeyer and Kaplan (2007).
Dawkins (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Blackmore, S. (1999) The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Universal Darwinism or similar idea of evolution in systems other than those living—Dennet (1995), Blackmore (1999), Smolin (1999), Chaisson (2001), Oudeyer and Kaplan (2007). Beddoe et al. (2009) submit in PNAS that “The evolution of cultures follows rules analogous to those governing the evolution of organisms, but they vary in their units of selection (cultural variants vs. genetic variants) and the method of transmission of successful variants to the next generation (learning vs. genes).”
Dennet, D.C. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life, Simon and Schuster, New York.
Smolin, L. (1999) The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Chaisson, E.J. (2001) Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Oudeyer, P.Y. and Kaplan, F. (2007) What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches. Frontiers in Neurobiotics.
Beddoe, R., Costanza, R., Farley, J. Garza, E., Kent, J., Kubiszewski, I., Martinez, L., McCowen, T., Murphy, K., Myers, N., Ogden, Z., Stapleton, K. and Woodward, J. (2009) Overcoming Systematic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), v. 106, pp. 2483-2489.
[vi] Palumbi, S.R. (2001:39) The Evolution Explosion: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change, W.W. Norton and Company, New York.
Campbell, J. (2009) Bayesian Methods and Universal Darwinism, American Institute of Physics, Conference Proceedings, v. 1193, pp. 40-47.
[vii] Blackmore, S. (1999) The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
[viii] Blackmore (1999).
[ix]Potts, R. (2011) Big Brains Explained, Nature, v. 480, pp. 43-44.
[x] Ramachandran (2000, 2011), Coolidge and Wynn (2001, 2005), Rizzolatti and Craighero (2004), Potts (2011).
Ramachandran, V.S. (2000) Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind the Great Leap Forward in Human Evolution, Edge. Accessed Mach 2, 2013.
Ramachandran, V.S. (2011) The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
Rizzolatti, G., and Craighero, L. (2004) The Mirror-Neuron System, Annual Review of Neuroscience, v. 27, pp. 169-192.
Potts, R. (2011) Big Brains Explained, Nature, v. 480, pp. 43-44.