Cladistics & culture - Wilkins responds, etc.

I'm presently reading Boyd and Richerson's summary book:

Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. 2005. The origin and evolution of cultures, Evolution and cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.

and one thing that strikes me that I don't entirely agree on is that they use the fitness of the learner and the imitator as the benchmark. That is the evolution of cultures, maybe, but the fitness that matters in my view is the fitness of the cultural object, and from that perspective, the fitness of learners and imitators forms the background environment of the cultural objects.

Similarly with their view of vertical versus lateral transmission - the genetic relatedness of the cultural agents is irrelevant to the evolution of the cultural objects, just as the genetic relatedness of hosts is irrelevant to the fitness and evolution of disease pathogens.

Both approaches have their virtues, but when we talk about cultural evolution, it is the objects not the agents that we should track. IMO...

Co-evolutionary scenarios of genes and "memes" (which will do duty here for the cultural objects, but don't think that I adopt the usual interpretation of them) likewise are interesting, so long as the generation/transmission time of each is roughly commensurate, but "memes" will evolve at a different rate to genes, by several orders of magnitude. So in a first approximation one can treat cultural evolution as being founded on a static biological backdrop.

I like Boyd and Richerson's work (and having met Richerson, I like him too) but I think they conflate different levels of ontological objects. The biological and the cultural are distinct, and the agents involved are likewise distinct.

My methodology is haphazard and eclectic, but when I've tried to represent the same things I ended up with a kind of geographical-historical braided stream. For example, histories of this type often tend to minimize the Persian influence on Judaism and Christianity (and as far as that goes, classical Greece and Islam). Likewise, Judaism was heavily Hellenized for a period (for example, the Torah was first defined in its Greek translation) and Christianity was both Hellenized and Romanized, to the point that the Aramaic original has been almost entirely forgotten.

The braided-stream mess was, as I see it, disciplined by the relevant governments to give it whatever order it ever had. This fits into the proliferation and decimation, random variation and selective retention pattern which I think can cover both history and evolution. Heresy trials and persecutions thus comprise a major proportion of the "selection" function of religious history, as does government sponsorship with money.

One thing not comparable to evolution, in my opinion, is that something like Arianism can reappear again and again, after long latencies. All during the XIXc, and to this day, American Bible-readers have been concocting new religions which revive heresies thought long dead.

Awhile back I met someone from one of the Garner Ted Armstrong spinoffs and the theology, as he explained it to me, was a bizarre mess that seemed almost Gnostic. A different such church I know, which consisted primarily of the father of a friend of mine and his minor children, was Arian and Judaizing. (As far as revivals go, my own father, born 1914 in Iowa, was an orthodox Deist in every respect).

One point of dissimilarity between organic and cultural evolution is that cultural variants are manifestly not thrown up "randomly" (well, I guess for IDers there isn't a dissimilarity, but...). Another is that the selection between at least some alternatives seems to be anything but "natural," at least if this is contrasted (as in the organic realm) with "artifice." But descent with modification does seem to be the order of the day in both organic and cultural evolution, and maybe that's enough to build a viable research program.

I think that the word "natural" is often misleading or meaningless. Culture is "natural" in one sense (it is part of nature) and not "natural" in another (because it's symbolic, conventional, invented, etc.)

Parts of biological evolution are now cultural -- domestic animals and plants evolving in "constructed environments" devised in accordance with human needs and intentions.

Cultural and even technological evolution has a lot of randomness in it. You get used to things after they've happened, but on their appearance they're often quite unexpected.

Penicillin was discovered without any research program at all, for example, as a spinoff of something else, and led to a whole array of antibiotics. By contrast, tens and even hundreds of billions have been spent on anti-cancer research, with some success but without the revolutionary consequences of antibiotics.

As I've argued on Razib's other blog, religious innovations are often so bizarre in their beginnings that they count as random, more or less, even though they're intentional. The Mormon Church is an example.

It seems the combination of the perspective of looking through the large end of the telescope, and Aristotelian logic, is a dominant style of western thinking.

That's to observe that in our scientific thinking, analysis still wildly dominates synthesis, holistic, cybernetic, and systems dynamic views (analysis is a lot easier) - and it's difficult in the (cartesian) analytical view for apparently different, contradicting, or paradox-inducing observations to be so together in the same frames of reference (of the observer).

That's one of the reasons I like this blog, the thinking tends to be organic in the sense of systems-oriented (not the same as systematic!) and hence tends to be inherently cybernetic and eco-logical (involving the observations of, the use of logics and phenomena of - and thence the taking into play of - relations, consequences, feedforwards as well as feedbacks, etc).

So, rather than argue whether or not culture is or isn't like biology in terms of its evolution we can topologically invert our perspective and view the dynamics of culture and biology as each demonstrating evolutionary dynamics. In this view (and that's all it's presented as here) both kinds of systems can be seen as (a) hypercomplex systems involving information, matter, and energy; and (b) they are not distinctly separate or different systems - rather - they are closely interrelated and interdependent yet different aspects of a system of life.

"Culture" can be pithily defined as "the way we do things around here" where 'things' covers everything manifested and expressed "by us" - from beliefs and behaviour through forms and functions, to constructs and artifacts. In this sense we can speak fruitfully of the culture of any organized phenomena observed to be sufficently complex to have non-linear adaptive behaviours - whether the company we work for or the culture (no pun intended) of a population of bacteria.

Where is the line between culture and biology where anything complex enough to have a culture already has a biology or, at least, a dynamic cybernetic system of organization (Though software systems are and will challenge this view)? So I think, of course, I too think, at least, that " it is exactly like it, and that the "analogy" between cultural traditions and species is quite exact. All that differs is the frequency of the various kinds of evolution."

Well, almost. In that, observably, biology precedes culture and culture is interrelated and interdependent with biology as well as manifesting phenomena at and beyond its own level or organization. Therefore in precedence terms, culture is an epiphenomenon of biology. And a vastly more accelerated and distributed one as its "bandwidth" grows, and, interestingly, as the bandwidth between culture and biology grows (one example, genetic research).

The deeper we look into DNA and some of its trillion op functions and dynamics (using femto-scale chemistry, for example), the larger the suspicion grows that "culture" is comparatively slow compared to "biology," and certainly is yet to match the richness, complexity, diiversity, and sheer genius that has apparently been both expressed and evolved in biological systems.

That is the evolution of cultures, maybe, but the fitness that matters in my view is the fitness of the cultural object, and from that perspective, the fitness of learners and imitators forms the background environment of the cultural objects.

this tends to be my preference as well. i prefer dan sperber's conceptualization of it as an 'epidemiology of representations.'

the genetic relatedness of the cultural agents is irrelevant to the evolution of the cultural objects, just as the genetic relatedness of hosts is irrelevant to the fitness and evolution of disease pathogens.

hm. perhaps i am misunderstanding you, but genetic relatedness with pathogens is importance insofar as pathogens must adapt to a particular immune background. genetic heterogeneity is harder to adapt too, so it seems that the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in an inbred population will differ from a non-inbred population. similarly, one can argue that particular cognitive/psychological profiles are susceptable to particar cultural forms, and those profiles tend to track, to some extent, genetic relatedness (even if the intergroup variation is induced by something like toxoplasma).

One thing not comparable to evolution, in my opinion, is that something like Arianism can reappear again and again, after long latencies.

one can analogize this to an ancestral trait which is reduced in frequency but not extinguished. it can crop up against when selection makes it more fit (it can lay 'latent' as a recessive if it is such a trait).

One point of dissimilarity between organic and cultural evolution is that cultural variants are manifestly not thrown up "randomly"

and yet, there are mutational hotspots, and there is a difference in the bias toward transversions and transitions on bases.

i agree with john on 'cultural' as 'natural.'

genetic relatedness with pathogens is importance insofar as pathogens must adapt to a particular immune background. genetic heterogeneity is harder to adapt too, so it seems that the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in an inbred population will differ from a non-inbred population. similarly, one can argue that particular cognitive/psychological profiles are susceptable to particar cultural forms, and those profiles tend to track, to some extent, genetic relatedness

This is true, but I don't find any such bias in cultural evolution (despite those who think that "Asians" are smarter than "whites" and the like, but let's ignore this for now). As F. H. Bradley long ago noted, what makes an Englishman an Englishman is that he was raised in England, no matter what his biological background ("My Station and Its Duties"). The biology seems to have little effect on the cultural capacities of any individuals apart from their own native (in the sense of congenital) idiosyncrasies. Even white Australians can occasionally do good science or even philosophy.

As to the "randomness" point - from the perspective of the future fitness of culture, variations may be intended to solve problems, but they very rarely do, and by far the vast bulk of "non-random" variations die stillborn. That some variations in culture are biased (consider our anthropomorphic tendencies) doesn't mean there is a prior correlation between our intentions and their success. Likewise, as Razib notes, there are biased mutations in biology, but they don't necessarily correlate with future success.

On resurgent ideas - it is either a latent inheritance, as Razib notes, or it is something akin to homoplasy, i.e., convergent evolution. The only historical Arianism was forumulated sometime in the second century, and all subsequent instances must be directly inherited from that original (with or without modifications) to be "Arian". Otherwise you have merely some later conceptual adaptation that resembles Arianism, but which is no more Arianism than a copy of the Mona Lisa is the real thing.

john,

psychologist jerome kagan has suggested that asians are more introverted than europeans, and that fair europeans are shyer than non-fair europeans (this seems to hold across sibships).

There's a conceptual connection between the notions of 'randomness' as applied to the generation of variations and 'natural' as applied to selection mechanisms in that both are meant to contrast with the operation of intentional, forward-looking behaviors.

The natural/cultural contrast doesn't mark an unbridgable metaphysical divide, so efforts to naturalize culture are not wrongheaded. But treating culture as a natural phenomenon does not eliminate the contrast between cultural and non-cultural processes (i.e., between symbol mediated processes and processes that don't involve symbolic forms). So if we are careful about the ambiguity in 'natural' pointed to by John E, the role of symbol mediated intentional processes in cultural evolution does mark a dissimilarity relative to organic natural selection.

Turning the "randomness" point, and to John W's claim that variations intended to solve problems very rarely do, we must remark that if there isn't a positive correlation between intentions and their success, then the ground has been pulled from under the program of explaining intentionality as a biolgical adaptation -- and with it the whole program of naturalizing epistemology. I don't think you can have it both ways.

To say that there's a major factor of randomness and non-intentionality in cultural action does not mean that there is no intentional action at all. It does not even mean that large-scale historical or cultural change is not sometimes the result of itentional action. It only means that some major changes (and new directions) are unexpected, unpredictable, and not really the result of intentional action -- especially in the sense that the outcomes are only weakly matched to the intentions.

So I think you can have it both ways.

The example I've used before is charismatic religious groups. Often they change the world permanently, but if you look at what the founder (or founders) and the founding generation actually were trying to do, and compare it to what specifically was accomplished, often the match is very weak.

Some of these founders seem to have been mentally-ill but functional. And I have argued that the main thing they brouight to the world was not necessarily the specifics of what they propose (which often was primarily changes in ritual, symbolism, and dogma), but simply the willingness to break with the past and do something different and forbidden.

One reason I ended up fairly friendly to the "meme" idea is that it made it possible to describe cultural evolution as a parallel, autonomous development not determined by biology. Treating culture evolutionarily does not mean subordinating cultural studies to biology. It just means describing cultural history according to an adapted version of the evolutionary logic used to describe biological history.

"Autonomous" above was misleading, though. "Gene-culture coevolution" is better. According to this description, genetic change enables cultural change, but then, in turn cultural change enables genetic change. It's not one-way dependency. Culture produces a new environment within which evolution continues differently (strikingly in the evolution of sleectively-bred farm animals and plants, many of which would not be viable outside a human environment -- I don't necessarily mean recombinant DNA here, but mainly just selective breeding.)

John E - It wasn't my intent to suggest that there are no features of culture that don't evolve in a manner similar to organic evolution. But that can't be the whole story. There are some features of culture that seem to require a different style of explanation, one in which the forward-looking aspects of the intentional use of symbolic forms plays a crucial role in the explantion. That forward-looking orientation doesn't have an analog in explanations of change framed in terms of the operation of natural selection.

My point about not having it both ways concerned only the downplaying of correlations between intent and success, and pursuing the program of explaining intentional behavior as a biological adaptation. I trust that you don't think you can have it both ways in this restricted context.

Sorry... in the first sentence in my reply to John E I stumble over a double negative (please disregard the "don't". I should learn to proofread.

Yeah, I would agree that there is the intentional aspect of cultural or historical evolution too, in a way that there isn't in biology. One reason why history is faster than evolution.

Some of the randomness or unexpectedness of historical or cultural change is like the randomness or unexpectedness of scientific experiment -- scientists don't know exactly what they'll find when they begin an experimental program, and in many respects the most exciting and significant results are found when experiments go differently than expected.

And usually, though not always, intentional behavior is customary (non-progressive, non-evolving) behavior. There is an experimental way of doing things (not only in science) where you're looking specifically for new and unexpected things, and trying new and unexpected methods. And the results of this will be in some sense "random", though the activity is fully intentional.