I'm reading Robert Carneiro's Evolution in Cultural Anthropology (Westview Press, 2003) right now, and it's a good introduction to the debate over cultural evolution in the social sciences from Spencer to the present day. But I have some criticisms.
Carneiro's view of cultural evolution is basically Spencer's - evolution means unilinear progress. He got this via his mentors Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service. He criticises Boyd, Richerson and Rindos for being too "neo-Darwinian":
Rindos states that as raw material to work on, "Darwinian selectionism requires undirected, hereditable variations"... Now, in organic evolution, these "undirected hereditable variations" are the result of mutations, and mutations, everyone knows, occur randomly as far as the adaptive needs of the organism are concerned.
So in order to stick to a strictly Darwinian view of evolution, Rindos argues that the cultural counterpart of mutations - inventions - must also be random and undirected. And here he is stepping hip deep into quicksand. He would have us believe, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that inventions are essentially random. But to a large extent invention is a directed process, with well-recognized objectives being consciously pursued. [p177]
I think it is Carneiro who is hip deep in quicksand, not RIndos, and with him the entire tradition of cultural evolutionism. There is this assumption, not evidence, that at the cultural level, at which he insists one has to approach the evolution of culture, that culture is consciously developed. Nothing could be less supportable, in my view.
As the saying has it, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, and political plans would work out, and inventors would not have to spend years trying to get things to work. The goals are determined by the society's needs and the individual hope of gain of one kind or another, but that doesn't mean that they will work. For a start, most inventions occur by modifying things that were previously developed (just as organic evolution does), and a major part of it is due to serendipity, chance discoveries. As Pasteur said, fortune favours the prepared mind, but preparation and intent is hardly enough.
But there's something deeper here. A mutation is not random, in one sense. It is the determinate outcome of chemical processes in living organisms. It is only random, or better, uncorrelated, with the future needs of the species. The same is true of invention. By far the bulk of inventions die stillborn. The ones that get transmitted to future generations are those that happen to actually serve a need or a want in the general culture. Timing is everything too - the number of inventions that were reinvented later, and became successful when they were, is legion. When, and only when, they are correlated, do they spread through the society, and that depends on many things well outside the control of the inventor.
What is it that "bears" the cultural artifact? You can say that the individual does, and this is true, but the individual is no more the culture than a cell is me. It has to get spread throughout the culture, in a functional manner, before it becomes cultural evolution. A large part of the problem with cultural evolution lies in a failure to properly identify the entities of the evolutionary process. The intentions or goals of the individuals do not matter; what matters is the fitness of these novelties in the culture.
It is true that each step of evolution, whether biological or cultural, depends on there having been prior steps on which that change can be based. But this is hardly a general unilinear notion of progress. Instead it is local progress, and many paths can be taken. As David Hume pointed out dramatically, there is no guarantee that our plans will work out, and Hume's problem applies as much to technology as it does to science for which the point was made.
Anthropologists have a terrible time not seeing culture as a developmental process, and calling it evolution. A historian would call this Whiggism - seeing only those paths that led to the present, and ignoring, and thus biassing, the real history of dead ends, failures and loss. Rindos was right.
Caveat: Dave Rindos and I emailed each other almost daily for several years before his untimely death. He taught me much of what I know, and I found his grasp of evolution excellent. I miss his incisive wit even now.
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"if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, and political plans would work out, and inventors would not have to spend years trying to get things to work."
Iain Banks's "Culture" novels are about a utopian galaxy-spanning society run mostly by ultra-intelligent computers. The books are amazingly well thought out --- much cleverer and more consistent than most science fiction. At one point a human asks one of the computers to summarise humans in one word, and the computer says "gullible". Dead right.
If I ever get to be one of those wise old elder statesman figures like say Russell at 70, I'd like to write a book showing that practically all our problems both in philosophy and elsewhere are largely due to wishful thinking. (You read it here first.)
Jason
I get a signed copy, right?
This term, progress, should be censured from all writing on evolution - cultural or biological.
Random vs. Directed: This seems like a case of "not wanting to take the middle road syndrome." In regards to cultural evolution (the replication of dispositions, styles, 'ways of doing things,' behaviors, and artifacts), these always seem to consist of a complex combination of the directed, or purposeful, and undirected, or accidental. Think of the use of abbreviations and emoticons in cell phone text messaging use. On the level of replication, much of this was accidental, although the behavior must have initially been primarily intentional. From the initial use of abbreviations and emoticons within cell phone text messaging, advertisers caught on, reinforcing the replication of the behavior. There is an element of randomness regarding who adopts the behavior and who does not, but there is also an element (or two) of purposeful replication as well, especially when you start talking about behaviors, styles, etc. being replicated.
An example of a recent stillborn was the attempt by the same companies to convince cell phone users to pay to download entire music videos or movies onto their phones. This behavior has not taken off. Is the rejection of such a behavior random?
I agree with you about "progress" - it's arbitrary and subjective. On directedness, Elliot Sober once noted that if the lion has any intentions, he intends to eat the gaelle, and if the gazelle has any intentions, she intends for that not to happen. And evolution goes on, undirectedly.
But suppose that there were a directedness in an evolutionary process - would that guarantee a qualitative difference in the type of evolution? Only if the director knew enough about the process to predict exactly what would happen, and Hume's problem indicates that, pace Laplace's Demon, this won't happen. Humans "self-directing" their cultural evolution is a myth as spurious as the notion of a planned economy.
Obviously the director never knows "enough" about the process, and I definitely agree with you on the scale of entire processes (if there are such things) that there is no intentional directedness. Often, cultural evolution takes place because of intentions that are never fulfilled; they almost inevitably become mis-directed when enacted and disseminated throughout populations.
J Wilkins: Humans "self-directing" their cultural evolution is a myth as spurious as the notion of a planned economy.
Not completely true! Certainly, you can't just redesign things to suit, but pragmatics certainly affect culture, and over long periods of time, the effects of consistent policies can add up. For example, consider the evolution of the concept of rape, from property crime (Biblical), through "sin" and "illegitimate or forceful 'seduction'", and now mostly shifted to "personal violation". At the same time, the idea of rape has become progressively less socially acceptable in advanced societies.
I would say that the successively stricter laws both provide and track a selection feedback that is shifting the (previously mixed) balance on the cultural question of whether/when forcing sex is appropriate. Of course, there are other cultures around, that haven't been following this route for the past few centuries....
I think the rape case, and the corrollary, marriage, is instructive indeed. In both cases the issue was property rights of the male members of society, and in fact the wealthy male members. What drives the shift from this to individual rights for women is largely economic, and in my view, the ideas follow the economics. Of course one can't remove all causal efficacy for concepts in a blunt Marxian fashion, and as a philosopher I wouldn't want to, but it seems to me that no matter how intentional and forcefully concepts of legal rights or anything else are expressed, if the material conditions of the society are not suitable - or another way to express this is if the environment for those ideas makes them unfit locally - the ideas will go nowhere.
Carneiro has the notion that ideas (in =cluding institutional practices, norms, rituals and the usual fare of cultural anthropology) are the drivers of social change, and that culture is a primary force. I think it is a weak feedback on the real forces of societal evolution, and these are largely environmental.
Property law is no less a body of ideas than any school of literary criticism, so that if we're going to go in for materialism, it had better be a rather immaterial immaterialism. There are surely specific instances when differences in law made for obvious difference in economic life. In 17th Century Dutch law, for example, women had signficant property rights that were denied women in England at the same timewhen the Brits took over New Amsterdam, one group that was particularly unhappy about the development was the business women. Like Dutch marriage, Dutch economic life was relatively egalitarian.
Actually I think that human wishes and thoughts have a profound effect on social and economic history.
I think you might be conflating two distinct senses of "material" here, though. If I say that the material conditions of the social structure - its economy, geography, technology and so on - tend to motivate changes to the ideational content of that society, I am not thereby claiming that the law and other ideas are material. Of course, I happen to think they are, but that's a metaphysical debate for another time.
What I'm saying is that most conceptual changes are caused by the environment of the social members, and are generally (and at the level of the population), post hoc rationalisations of those necessities. Some individuals may in fact have generated them years, decades or even centuries earlier, but their supremacy is the result of changes in the society.
Let me take a case - usury. Christian theology from the very early days forbade the lending of money at interest, as also in the Islamic world. But as the age of exploration and the subsequent risks and opportunities developed, it became necessary to tone this doctrine down. While Luther was totally opposed to it, as long before as the reign of Richard Lionheart, barons were borrowing at interest from Jewish moneylenders, who had no such restriction (but many others that prevented them from engaging in ordinary professions). The extensive debts the barons of Richard ran up was the reason for the first European pogrom against Jews, eventually resulting in the expulsion of the Jews from England decades later.
But as the capitalist system developed, usuary began to be overlooked, or justified after the fact, by theologians, to the point that by the late eighteenth century many Calvinists were of the view that wealth earned by investment was a sign of God's grace. By the turn of the twentieth century, nobody but a few sects thought that usury was a sin...
An immaterial materialist is still a materialist! It just seems to me that the workings of the human world don't lend themselves very well to an analysis that divides things up into superstructure and infrastructure and then tries to show that the one layer controls the other in the long run, especially if this kind of analysis leads to thinking of culture as a body of shared representations (Durkheim) or as ideology (Marx) or something else essentially ideal or psychological. But culture is not only something that lurks inside brain pans. It's an intimate organization of things in the world, and includes some pretty heavy material stuff such as highways and buildings as well as law courts and money and the rest. The struggle for dominance and even survival takes place in this world which men have both made and which makes men--this is the niche construction version of historical materialism.
(For the record, I don't know whether I'm really responding to your point of view or not or just taking the opportunity to think out loud. Organizing a real dialogue would require a lot more negotiation and work, since both of us actually have new ideas from time to time and that complicates things.)
I never have new ideas, which is why I need commenters. All originality is creative theft.
I fully agree that culture exists both in heads and out of them. In fact I have argued this quasi-Marxist line before. But so far as I know what is in heads is equally material as what is out of them. Ideas do not, as best I can ascertain, float around being immaterial. They are at the very least neurological reactions to the physical inputs in the environment of the organism, as processed (physically!) by the structure of the organisms nervous system, as developed over time in social environments.
Consequently, there is nothing immaterial about talking about culture in a material fashion. Please forgive this unwarranted digression into undergraduate metaphysics.
I don't think of brain states as something immaterial myself, but I've noticed that a lot of folks seem to think that physical processes count as spiritual if they take place in a human brain. I guess it's like getting an honorary degree. Anyhow, I just don't understand why people expect psychology to be the fundamental or central science. I can understand sociology or physics, but not psychology.
The meme bit never appealled to me much because the mere fact that one can imagine a way of speaking about something doesn't mean it will turn out to be good for anything. I believe you make a similar point in the paper you referenced above.
Whenever a theory is overwhelmingly successful and prestigous, it attracts attempts to apply it to everything. In his earliest writings, if I remember correctly, Hume spoke about coming up with a physics of mental impressions that would duplicate in the mental realm what Newton had done in explaining the system of the world. In the absence of real homology between ideas and planets, however, the scheme doesn't work. Similarly, one can attempt to create a "genetics" of memes in order to piggyback on Darwin, but so far as I can see, nobody has been able to find anything really analogous to genes in brains or culture. I'm still waiting for the first application of the meme notion that actually explains something.
And I have said that, too :-)
For my money, cultural evolution does not require entities that are of a single class any more than biological or chemical evolution do. This is a question about ontologies here - looking for simple types won't get you the processes, and looking at the processes won't get you ranked and clearly demarcated types. It ought not to be forgotten that Darwin did not have any such entities in mind when he published the Origin, and it is, I believe, a matter of contingent truth that such entities were "found" (or better, declared) in genetics. Modern genetics has very little that resembles the clean mendelian factors, and the very notion of "the gene" is dissipating into a plethora of different, and phylogenetically relative, specific mechanisms.
The problem with memes is that it privileges the informational notion of genes which was the consensus in the 1960s and 1970s. But now we have physical objects that are a heterogenous set of differing mechanisms and roles, and the "gene" as a "replicator" is in danger of becoming a purely abstract object. So I think it no great objection to a cultural evolution view that there are no such abstract objects that address all and only cultural inheritance and objects.
The coherentness of your thoughts is humbling and hopeful. I hope to one day have as much to say as you do, it is fairly impressive - the moreso because it is on a topic I actually find germane to the human condition (a short list).
Anyhow - You're doing god's work here keep up the good work.
"the very notion of "the gene" is dissipating into a plethora of different, and phylogenetically relative, specific mechanisms."
I would like to see the notion of culture dissipate into a plethora of different and sociodevelopmentally relative, specific mechanisms.
Amen, brother...