Mechanisms of cultural evolution

If at least one of these conditions is not met, for some objects, then they do not evolve. Throughout biological evolution, the first and third conditions are met due to the presence of genes in cells, which play a key role in the mechanisms of inheritance.

Genes ensure the inheritance of only innate properties, and not acquired during life.

This is one of the cornerstones of population genetics.

Human cultural evolution has been observed throughout the entire historical period. Its manifestation consists in the accumulation of cultural achievements (adaptations) by humanity, achievements not innate, but acquired. This raises questions about how cultural adaptations arise and where they accumulate and what are the mechanisms of their inheritance. After all, cultural evolution is an observable fact. What plays the role of replicators (from the Latin replicatio, renewal, repetition) in cultural evolution instead of genes?

Evolution without genes

In populations of living organisms, in response to changes in the external conditions of existence, adaptations arise as a result of selection. These adaptations are fixed in genes and transmitted during the sexual process to the next generation, i.e. genes carry out vertical replication, link generations through inheritance.

Adaptation in biological evolution is a change in the morphology of organisms, allowing the body to better adapt to the conditions of existence. At the cellular level, adaptations consist in modifying the genome, which largely programs the morphological features of the organism.

Due to the established mechanism of transmission of adaptations through the sexual process, the restructuring of the morphology of organisms in populations occurs slowly, according to the scale of human life.

The historical process of human development (cultural evolution) demonstrates the development of culture. One culture replaces another, inheriting some of the features of the previous one. These changes occur much faster than the processes in biological evolution.

The presence of the evolution of human culture indicates that three conditions necessary for its course are fulfilled. But inheritance in culture is the inheritance of acquired properties that cannot be carried out with the help of genes. It can be concluded that the observed human cultural evolution, apparently, occurs with the help of other replicators (not genes) and a different inheritance mechanism.

Therefore, we can talk about the cultural (social) evolution of man, as evolution without genes, occurring with the help of other replicators. Over the past millennia, the appearance of new significant morphological changes in a person has not been seen, he has remained the same as he was. All changes in the conditions of existence are determined by the cultural evolution of a person.

Culture and mentality

It is time to define the concept of the term «Culture». You can find many definitions of the phenomenon of culture, which are given by people from different points of view. All these definitions are based on attempts to grasp the common in different types of cultural manifestations.

Another approach is based on defining a culture in terms of how it is inherited. The most convincing is the definition of the remarkable cultural scientist Yu. Lotman:

«Culture is a collection of genetically non-inherited information in the field of human behavior. Art is part of culture along with science.»

The term «mentality» comes from the Latin «mind, thinking, way of thinking, mental disposition», meaning a general mental attitude, a relatively holistic set of thoughts, beliefs, skills that creates a picture of the world in the head. Mentality is both a characteristic of the type of thinking (consciousness) and the subconscious activity of the brain.

A prerequisite for evolution in populations or societies is natural selection. In the cultural evolution of a person, adaptations consist in changing the mentality, which changes (adapts) a person’s behavior in such a way as to adapt it to external conditions, including the social environment.

But cultural adaptations do not arise at birth, but during life with the development of the mind. Since these mental adaptations are not inherited through genes, the question arises as to how they are passed on to subsequent generations. What replicators help this process take place? This issue will be discussed later.

Clarification of the term «cultural evolution»

Please note that it is incorrect to talk about the evolution of culture in itself. Culture is recorded in the form of traces of human activities. Culture is an inanimate substance and cannot evolve as a living one, with the creation of adaptations. The evolution of culture is manifested through changes in the discovered traces of human activity in different eras. If the traces of a person’s activity change, then apparently because the person himself changes, his thinking (mentality) and, as a result, his behavior change.

A person has morphologically changed insignificantly during the historical period, but his «soul» has changed. And speaking in scientific language, the mentality of a person has changed.

When anthropologists talk about changes in the bones of ancient animals from different eras they found, they conclude about the evolution of one or another species, and not about the evolution of the bones themselves. It’s the same with culture. An important clarification is that it is not the evolution of culture, but the cultural evolution of man.

When they start talking about the evolution of culture in itself, they fall into a logical dead end. It is impossible to talk about the evolution of an inanimate entity. And here art historians, philosophers and everyone who joined them are trying to find a way out, talking about the inheritance of elements from different cultures. This is a conversation about nothing. Warm and heavy cannot be combined in one theory.

Some cultural researchers see this incongruity. Cultural anthropologists such as Julian Steward drew attention to the Darwinian concept of «adaptation» in the middle of the 20th century, arguing that all societies must adapt to the environment in one way or another.

Functional adaptations of the brain

The activity of the brain is a change in the functional state of its individual fragments (neurons). The essence of functional changes can be demonstrated using the example of a water tap. The water tap has two positions – «Open» and «Closed». The difference between these two functional states of the crane cannot be determined visually. The tap looks the same in both positions. If you supply water to its input, then the difference in these states will immediately be revealed. The difference manifests itself in the work, i.e. in behavior.

Mentality should be considered as a result caused by all functional states of parts of the brain, both consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness. To a large extent, only the unconscious can be inherited, since it is the result of the work of genes.

Therefore, the mentality can only be partially inherited, and transmitted by genetics to the next generation of the species.

On the mechanisms of creation and preservation of cultural adaptations in the following chapters.

Culture and cultural evolution

From the point of view of sociobiology, culture can be defined in this way.

Culture is a manifestation in human behavior and thinking of a set of functional adaptations of the brain that arose as a result of the historical process of development of the species Homo sapiens, which are transmitted from person to person, from generation to generation in a non-genetic way.

Those who are trying to give a definition of culture that could combine into one group, for example, poetry, ballet and painting, cannot understand that such attempts are not constructive. Many philosophical definitions of culture have been invented, and none of them is meaningful. At the same time, everyone notes the complexity of constructing such a definition.

So you took the wrong side, gentlemen. Human culture can be correctly defined in terms of sociobiology, not philosophy.

It is obvious that cultural manifestations should be united not according to the ways of expressing thoughts, emotions, behavior in them, but according to the way these manifestations are inherited in societies. Culture is the accumulation and manifestation of the development of various aspects of the human personality, and what is common to all manifestations is that they are accumulated and transmitted to subsequent generations in a non-genetic way.

The evolution of culture should be considered as a change in time of the preserved manifestations (traces) of activity in different spheres of the social (living in society) man, just as the change in time of the remains of ancient animals is traces of biological evolution.

The term «culture» in this formulation acquires an expansive meaning, since it covers both science and religious beliefs, as was pointed out by the cultural scientist Yu. Lotman. It is impossible to argue with the fact that humanity is evolving. But not like other primates, not like other species. This is especially noticeable over the past 300 years, when science acquired a systematic character, uniting the islands of knowledge of previous eras.

Human evolution due to functional adaptations of the brain is fast, compared to slow biological evolution, which can therefore be ignored when analyzing the changes that occur in societies. You will not find an adequate definition of the concept of «cultural evolution» anywhere. This expression is replaced by the expression «cultural evolution», as if these are equivalent concepts. It is time, finally, to give the first adequate definition.

Cultural evolution – time-consistent changes in human culture in society, caused by functional changes in the brain. Culture is one shot from the film «Human Cultural Evolution».

In the process of biological evolution, with the appearance of a brain in multicellular organisms, it became possible in it to maintain functional adaptations that regulate behavior. The significance of non-genetic adaptations in humans has increased over time. Finally, evolution on a new trajectory, which led to the development of civilization, made the good old morphological methods of adaptation for Homo sapiens little in demand.

Although the world around us has changed greatly with the development of civilization, the global principles of evolution have been preserved. Now, as before, in order to survive in the World, you need to adapt to it. No other way. Living together in the modern world on one planet Earth, covered by numerous communications, will not work according to your own rules. Everyone needs to adapt in order to live.

Endless talks about unchanged sovereignty for states are manipulations of public opinion, psychological opium for the people. Sovereignty for states becomes limited. A discussion is permissible on the question of how best to fit into this world, with minimal losses for oneself. If, nevertheless, the discussion goes in the wrong direction, then perhaps the next branch of the evolution of intelligent beings will be an inorganic machine civilization.

Differences in human evolution from other species

Some people find it intolerable to realize that man and any kind of monkey have a common ancestor, that man is one of the species of the order of primates. I don’t understand this snobbery. But even among the human tribe, you can find representatives that seem terrible to every civilized person.

When you get to know a person, it is more correct to look not at his distant ancestors, but at what he is today. For a more detailed analysis, you should also pay attention to relatives.

In this section, we will show some of the differences between human evolution and the evolution of other mammalian species. According to the biological classification, it is customary to consider a person to be one of the species of the order of primates, therefore, he must obey the biological laws common to all, but this turns out to be not entirely true.

1. The basic model, which well describes the dynamics of animal population, is the logistic model proposed by the Belgian mathematician Verhulst back in 1838. The logistic curve, which is a solution to the Verhulstom equation, indicates a rapid increase in the number of the species at the beginning and a slowdown when it reaches the ceiling of the ecological niche. Thus, the capacity of an ecological niche is a systemic factor that determines the ceiling for population growth in a given habitat.

The logistic model reflects the dynamics of populations, the number of which, under any initial conditions, approaches with time to a certain stationary value.

Simply put, as long as there are resources for development, the number of this species grows rapidly, but resources are always limited, which causes limitation of the population size. Growth stops. The ecological niche is filled. A biological species is a passive consumer of existing resources.

Demography does not obey this law, although we are typical monkeys in morphology and mathematicians had to invent their own equations for humans that describe the demographic process.

On the models of population growth (http://www.keldysh.ru/papers/2005/prep13/prep2005_13.html)

This suggests that, under the guise of HS, someone has appeared whose numbers do not obey the general rule.

2. The ecological niche, which limits the distribution of any species, is expanded by man and is not a limiting parameter for him.

3. With an increase in the population size, the area occupied by it increases proportionally. So it was with HS. But for some time, people began to crowd into cities.

4. Natural selection is selection, as a rule, individual selection in populations. Different structures (state, private) appear in societies, and along with individual selection, there is also group selection, selection between social structures within states and between different states on the planet. In particular, the class struggle and other types of joint struggle of different social groups for some preferences is a manifestation of group selection.

These processes of group selection cannot be adequately described within the framework of socio-Darwinism, but only within the framework of sociobiology, because this is mental selection, not selection based on morphological properties. For biological systems, group selection is not characteristic, but for human societies it is important.

5. People have created constitutions, laws that guarantee them certain rights. In biological evolution, no one guarantees anyone any rights.

6. The speed of human social evolution is much higher than biological and is still increasing.

The listed changes (deviations from the usual biological evolutionary path) indicate that man has somehow evolved and is significantly different from Homo Sapiens, which appeared 160—180 thousand years ago. But these differences are not genetic. Differences in behavior are caused by functional changes in the states of neural networks, changes in thinking.

Functional changes in thinking are analogous to changes in the software environment in a computer, which give it different qualities.

These arguments are enough to admit that man is no longer an animal and cannot be viewed from a purely biological standpoint. It has evolved. But this happened not with the help of genes, as the evolution of species in biology takes place, but with the help of other replicators and a different mechanism of inheritance.

4. The origins of cultural evolution

For any evolution of living things, energy resources are needed to support the processes of life, and hence homeostasis. The plant world receives energy directly from the Sun, using the reaction of photosynthesis, biological objects for energy must be fed on organic food with energy stored in it. Cultural evolution is human evolution in the field of information processing and needs to be fed by an information resource.

All organic resources are limited, so biological objects are forced to fight for them in different ways. The struggle for coexistence leads to natural selection of individuals in populations, useful adaptations are preserved in populations in the process of inheritance.

The information resource of cultural evolution is essentially unlimited. Having learned how to extract, exchange and use it, a person gains almost unlimited power and significant ecological release. Human actions are no longer fully determined by environmental conditions, there is a certain «free will».

Information resource properties

In real life, when two subjects share resources (voluntarily or as a result of coercion), then the resource increases for one, and decreases for the other. This is a fundamental rule of life following from the laws of conservation of matter. Thanks to this property, competitive relations of living beings for resources arise, and history is the incessant wars of mankind for material resources.

If a person shares an apple with a friend, then he has only half of the apple left for consumption. There must be motivation to share.

Information is also a resource, a resource with special properties.

The donor’s information resource, when shared with others, does not decrease, which radically distinguishes it from any material resource.

If people share an information resource, it makes both of them richer. The mind is a tool that allows information to be used. And it is beneficial to share information, because it makes everyone richer.

The one who received becomes richer because the resource received can be used to his advantage (it is assumed that this is some information and technological resource), and the other, acting as a donor, has a chance to receive a similar resource in the future from the recipient, if between the counterparties have established a relationship of trust.

This property of information resources makes the process of uniting people endowed with sufficient intelligence in large agglomerations (the process of socialization) beneficial and evolutionarily inevitable, where one can communicate and share experience (information), and where, as a result of communication, everyone’s information security increases. Socialization allows the exchange of information between people, there is a possibility of division of labor, leading to a multiple increase in productivity, to an increase in the wealth (resources for development) of society.

Thus, the emergence of sufficient intelligence in the HS makes it possible to use an information resource that has such a remarkable property.

The reasons for the emergence of cultural evolution

Not upright posture of a person, i.e. the movement of a person on two limbs, and not work made Homo sapiens a person, as they write about it

evolutionists are philosophers. These are only accompanying factors of this metamorphosis.

Two factors made cultural evolution possible:

1. A developed mind and advanced communication languages created by it, which made it possible to work effectively with information.

2. The property of an information resource – when sharing it with others, it does not diminish in the original owner.

Man has managed, living in relatively small communities of hunter-gatherers, to create developed languages of communication, and his mind made it possible to extract useful information from everyday experience and systematize. For example, the mind suggested that it is possible not to roam, collecting prey and hunting, but to live in one place, raising what is possible, domesticating animals and raising livestock. The creation of relatively large settlements revealed the benefits of cooperative interaction, because in such settlements, the division of labor, the exchange of information is already possible, and the protection against possible aggressive actions of the neighboring population increases.

Languages of communication were the tool allowing to own, use, exchange information.

Correct division of labor

The variability of species discovered by Charles Darwin extends to the species Homo Sapiens. Only a small percentage of gifted people in societies are able to extract information and dissect it in the brain so that it turns out to be useful for the life of not only them, but a significant number of people. Therefore, large agglomerations are needed, in which there will be a certain number of such people.

The wealth of peoples is not in the accumulated gold, it is in the technologies mastered, in the ability to develop innovations, in the division of labor, in the correct use of the information resource.

A team of creative people is needed for innovation. It cannot be done alone.

The correct division of labor means that it is Archimedes (people of this kind) who thinks, invents, learns, Hercules performs feats, the Macedonian conquers India, Abram and Joseph as the most wise, compose religious texts that are supposedly dictated from above, and the common man works hard with their qualifications. And everything starts to develop rapidly due to the cooperation of efforts. But this is ideal. This is not exactly how it happens in life.

But it is still clear that in a large community there should be more smart, gifted people. And if one of them invents the wheel, the idea of the wheel becomes common property, and today the whole world is already on wheels. But there was someone first who came up with it.

In A. Tvardovsky’s «Vasily Terkin» this idea about innovation in relation to the field kitchen in the war is formulated as follows.

Smart, to be sure,

There was the same old man

What did the soup come up with

On wheels straight.

To use the information resource and share it, they need some trust in large societies.

Homo sapiens had a significant obstacle on the way to socialization. This is intraspecific aggression. It is justified, is an adaptation, to the conditions of existence in ancient times, when every stranger on the territory of the tribe was considered an enemy and was subject to exile, since the territory provided the tribe with food, just like now it is happening in the animal world.

Overcoming intraspecific aggression

On the trajectory of biological evolution, HS was retained by those adaptations that had been developed in previous periods.

Genetic adaptations are always a modification of the genome to the previous environmental conditions and in this sense they are obsolete, since the environmental conditions themselves change over time.

So, for example, in Africa, the homeland of HS, lions still live in prides, marking their territory. Any lion who invades someone else’s territory is considered by the leader of the pride as an enemy that must be expelled or destroyed. After all, the habitat is a matter of feeding the pride.

Likewise, the ancient hunter-gatherers considered the enemy of any HS located on their territory that did not belong to their family. This is where aggression is needed to destroy or expel a stranger.

We must understand that this behavior is genetically determined, we can even say that this is a genetic adaptation, which also sits in our genes in a somewhat softened form. This adaptation manifests itself as an instinct that creates a certain pattern of behavior.

Even in recent times, primitive people not only killed their enemies, but did it with special cruelty – they buried them alive, scalped them, and so on. They did it without any apparent need, by order of their primitive instinct. Such behavior is described by Charles Darwin, who observed how the natives on Tierra del Fuego were killed by the colonists simply because «they quickly multiply.»