I am in full agreement with almost everything Pigliucci says
in the above-linked essay about "human nature." I am concerned, however, about what I see as his opinion that a good
(unified, comprehensive?) theory of cultural evolution may one day be
established.
"...despite much interest and a
number of valiant efforts — we really don’t quite have a good theory of
cultural evolution at hand."
Though he doesn't directly address the reasons for this lack
of a good cultural evolutionary theory, Pigliucci is right about this.
The lack of a "good" cultural evolutionary theory, however, has less to do with our not yet coming up with one than it does with our scientistic expectations. That is, the incorrect belief and
insistence that the patterns and practices of human cultural adaptation, extant
cultural adaptations and all of those throughout history and prehistory, are
reducible to a unified theory containing equations, formulae, and genetic
mapping in a manner similar to what mathematics, physics, chemistry, and
biology apply to other phenomena.
An illustration of only a fraction of the ideas in the
Ethosphere and our commentary on them. This graph represents
co-citation patterns based on all articles published between 1993 and 2013 in
Nous, the Journal of Philosophy, the Philosophical Review, and Mind. Photo Credit:
Philosophy@MHS
Culture and cultural evolution are not fully explained by
the Darwinian-Mendelian theory of biological evolution, or more recent related
efforts called evolutionary psychology and memetics. Worse, the approaches taken and speculations used in most of these two latter-day efforts are misinforming the public.
Ideas such as beliefs and values and their attendant and
complex social relations such as marriage, family, and broader group relations,
and the rituals, institutions, codes, and laws that, in turn, attend to them,
have different properties from those of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues,
organs, bodies, and species.
Cultural phenomena, both within a society at any point in
time and through time, and comparatively between societies over large expanses
of time, are artifacts of human mental life. They are created, shared,
enforced, upheld, maintained, revised, and/or rejected within ever-fluctuating
environmental and social and historical contexts.
There is a similarity between cultural phenomena and atoms, molecules, and species in that all are acted upon by conditions and processes in their environments. The difference is in the type and nature of their respective environmental conditions and processes.
Physical environmental contexts are at work on matter,
biological individuals, and on cultural phenomena. However, over time the
cultural adaptive strategies of individual societies and Humankind as a whole
have led to the emergent development of an immense, complex, worldwide cultural
environment – an Ethnosphere*. This cultural domain influences the ideas and
values of every human society and their constituent individuals.
Non-human species are impacted by the physical environment. The
decisions and other behaviors of individuals also influence individual and
group survival and reproduction. Cultural phenomena are not completely
comparable to matter and species. They are subject not only to the same
physical and social influences at work on matter and species, they are also
subject to the history and prehistory of ideas.
Take fire, for example. Its controlled use by our human
ancestors began almost half a million years ago. Archaeological evidence shows that it was initially
used by Homo erectus for warmth,
lighting, and perhaps cooking and protection from predators. Later, fire was also used to facilitate stampede-ambush
hunting. Since those earliest times, there has been a gradual increase in the
quality and quantity of ideas about the nature and uses of fire. Since its
initial use and spread between bands any new idea about fire has not only been subject
to its potential influence on and from the environment, and on the viability
and reproductivity of human groups, it has also been subject to the full range
of historical and prehistorical ideas, codes, laws, and behaviors pertaining to
fire. Fire usage, once it began and was
retained as a worthwhile adaptive stategy, was thereby added as a subset of the
totality of Humankind’s cultural knowledge.
Eventually, the knowledge of and behaviors associated with fire became
part of the cultural repertoire of all human groups via cultural diffusion or independent
invention.
Trying to evaluate and understand the essence or fundamental
nature of fire only (reductively) in
terms of its relationship to the physical environment (matter), or
fireness" as might be found in genes and neurons, or from fire's potential
impact on individual and group survival and their biological fecundity, is
ludicrous.
Fire ideas may be, to a degree, successfully subjected to
the above approaches. However, and far more importantly, ideas about fire are
also subject not only to the current market place of ideas (itself an
environment separate from material physicality and bio-repro), but to all
market places of ideas throughout cultural evolutionary history.
Pigliucci is right. Physio-chemical reductionism
(materialism) is insufficient on its own and the Darwinian clone memetics is a
misplaced metaphor ineffectively posing as a biologized theory of culture and
cultural evolution.
Will there ever be a physical/genetic equation or formula
for, or Darwinian explanation of, cultural evolutionary processes and their
expression in human lives, past and present? I am doubtful. The best minds in
the social sciences over the past century and a-half have failed to reduce this
vast cultural complexity, this Ethnosphere, to a "good" unified
theory.
I see a parallel between this failure and the failure, so
far, to solve the brain-mind problem. The levels of complexity inherent in the
entirety of cultural phenomena and their processes and manifestations, past and
present, are directly expressed, in large part, in the mental life of the
contemporary human individual.
Such information, for the most part, can be
"held," "carried," and manipulated by the brain but deep
notions about fire and its use are embedded not in our nerve cells and genes,
rather in our archaeological sites, textbooks, and libraries. In practical terms, each person born into a
society, aside from the most basal neurologically reflexive responses to the
bright light and intense heat of fire which he is born with, must learn the complexities, nuances,
and utility of fireness and all other cultural phenomena of his society anew – from others.
* "Ethnosphere" - "[Y]ou might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness." https://www.wordnik.com/words/ethnosphere
