Nathan Cofnas, Quarterly Review of Biology 93 (4):297–318 (2018).
Abstract
According to cultural evolutionary theory in the tradition of Boyd and Richerson, cultural evolution is driven by individuals' learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. Learning biases lead people to preferentially acquire cultural variants with certain contents or in certain contexts. Natural selection favors individuals or groups with fitness-promoting variants. Durham (1991) argued that Boyd and Richerson's approach is based on a "radical individualism" that fails to recognize that cultural variants are often "imposed" on people regardless of their individual decisions. Fracchia and Lewontin (2005) raised a similar challenge, suggesting that the success of a variant is often determined by the degree of power backing it. With power, a ruler can impose beliefs or practices on a whole population by diktat, rendering all of the forces represented in cultural evolutionary models irrelevant. It is argued here, based on work by Boehm (1999, 2012), that, from at least the time of the early Middle Paleolithic, human bands were controlled by powerful coalitions of the majority that deliberately guided the development of moral norms to promote the common good. Cultural evolutionary models of the evolution of morality have been based on false premises. However, Durham (1991) and Fracchia and Lewontin's (2005) challenge does not undermine cultural evolutionary modeling in nonmoral domains.
Having read only the Abstract above, I am reminded as I often am of Gregory Bateson's dictum:
ReplyDelete“Adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism.
The relative 'strength' of the adversaries is likely to rule the decision
regardless of the relative strength of their arguments. It is not so much
'power' that corrupts as the myth of power: ... He who covets a mythical
abstraction must always be insatiable!
“As teachers we should not promote that myth. It is difficult for an
adversary to see further than the dichotomy between winning and losing
in the adversarial combat. Like a chess player, he is always tempted to
make a tricky move, to get a quiet victory .... The player must have
his eye always on a longer view, a larger gestalt."
From ‘Time Is Out Of Joint’, in ‘Mind and Nature’
Hmmmm...For reasons having little to do with culture and biology, a lot to do with an enterprise I'm currently working on, that passage resonates with me, John.
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