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. 212-213).

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. 41-42). 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).

In reality, meanings have the properties of both a discrete and a continuous set. The discreteness of meaning is reflected in the fact that a single meaning can be isolated and defined. The continuity of meaning is reflected in the fact that meanings exist only in their movement: unlike a meme, meaning does not exist separately from human society, like a “cultural gene” that may or may not be transmitted between humans. Meanings are not “cultural genes” but human actions and their results, the totality of their material, social and abstract aspects.

Meaning is not an analogue of a gene, since it does not come from another meaning or even from a discrete set of meanings, but from their continuous set, which in the process of transmission and elaboration forms a culture. In essence, Culture represents a single Meaning that is both an inherited and an acquired property. While new genes can only arise from existing genes, new meanings—counterfacts—arise from the interaction of the subject and his culture with the natural and cultural environment: counterfacts arise from a set of meanings and non-meanings. Counterfacts come not only from variations in cultural traditions transmitted through learning, but also from an intellect solving problems in a changing environment. In other words, meaning as the substance and determinateness of culture depends on man as its subject and direction:

“Ideas and items of technology also have no stable analogue to the genome, or germline, because different elements within cycles of technological reproduction, including ideas, behaviors of artisans, and material elements of technologies themselves, can all temporarily acquire the status of replicators depending on the attention that human agents happen to be paying to them. Accidental variations in one’s mental plan for constructing a pot, or in one’s actions in producing the pot, or in the made pot itself, can all conceivably be reproduced when another artisan comes to make a resembling item” (Lewens 2018).

Biologists studying a minimum genome that would allow organisms to exist and reproduce assume that such a genome consists of 256 active genes (Hutchison et al. 2016). In nature, the bacterium mycoplasma genitalium has the smallest known genome among self-reproducing organisms—525 genes. The human genome contains 20,000 to 25,000 active genes. To date, there is no research on the minimum set of meanings that would trigger cultural evolution. Human culture began with a scanty set of primitive meanings, perhaps with a few simple tools, causal mini-models and an elementary tongue. However, by the time when Ötzi lived 5,300 years ago—a man from the Copper Age whose mummy and personal effects were discovered in the Alps in 1991— the meanings had multiplied to the point that a multi-story museum building is required to store and research them. And modern human culture is an immense accumulation of meanings that would require an encyclopedia of thousands of volumes to describe.