Why talk about culture as an evolutionary phenomenon?

Wrapping up my recent working paper, Divergence and Reticulation in Cultural Evolution, has brought that question to the fore.

I’ve been worrying about it for awhile. The alternative, I suppose, is to talk change and to do so with a bunch of individual narratives. Does it make sense to do that with that 3300 node graph that’s been moving in and out of the center of my thought for the last several years? This question, I’m thinking, is mostly about language use, but language use guides intuition, and it’s the intuitions that concern me.

What kinds of objects appear in these historical narratives, and how many? Individual people show up, especially in so-called Great Man accounts. But we also have abstract entities, such as states and cities, and collective entities, such as armies or crowds. And we don’t have all that many of them either, not in any given narrative.

Yes, I know, “all that many” isn’t very specific. All I need from it is that it contrast with 3300 nodes (actually 3346) in Jockers’ graph. On the one I talk about the graph as itself an object, and talk about its properties, and so forth. But it is also clear that, at least in principle, I might want to talk about each and every node in that graph, or, rather, the texts designated by each node. Some of those texts, of course, have received quite a bit of detailed discussion. Others will never get individual attention. And there are those between those extremes that may be discussed for this or that reason – Jockers mentions a few like that.

This property, it seems to me, moves us away from framing our history in terms of a collection of narratives. We’re not going to construct 3346 narratives, one of each text, and then attempt to make various generalizations over those narratives. We’re going to do something else.

We’re going to engage in population thinking, as Ernst Mayer had said. Population thinking doesn’t demand that we think construct narratives for each individual in the population, but it does recognize that each such narrative should be, at least in principle, open and available for inspection. It provides ways of talking about and analyzing the population as a collectivity that is open to the uniqueness of each individual in the collectivity.

That’s what evolutionary thinking is about. The concepts of evolutionary thinking were created for, have evolved for, the purpose of treating collectivities in this way. They are thus quite different from the concepts employed in conventional historical narratives.

Of course, we can think of an evolutionary account as a kind of narrative, which it is. And once we do that, we must then ask, what kinds of narratives are there? That question is outside the scope of this post.