Can the study of cultural evolution be successfully assimilated to a framework that is centered on biology? [No, but the biologists keep trying]

11:45 PM 9.26.20: This post has been edited considerably since I first posted it on the morning of the 25th. Here's a link to the article mentioned in the tweets, which are no longer publicly available.

This fills me with despair for the future study of cultural evolution. Why? Because the article is so relentlessly centered on biology. And why not? Much of the best known work in the study of cultural evolution has been done by biologists, or by thinkers oriented toward biological concepts and methods. And what is wrong with that?

It won't work, not for language, music, art, poetry, ideas in all domains, and so forth. Why? Because the authors of the paper (implicitly) assume that the benefits cultural evolution must accrue to biological individuals as do the benefits of biological individuals. But cultural change often happens too rapidly for this to provide a mechanism. And they know this. But they are unwilling to draw the logical conclusion, that cultural evolution cannot be centered on biological individuals. It must be centered on cultural individuals. Cultural individuals? Don't ask, this is only a blog post, not a book-length exposition of a theoretical position. But see the entry for "cultural being" on this page: Cultural Evolution: Terms & Guide.

For example, there they acknowledge the rapid rate of cultural evolution (p. 9): "Cultural evolution can proceed much faster than biological evolution both in rate of change and in terms of trait complexity. This has been pointed out previously, and several reasons are generally given for why this is the case [...]." A bit later they note (p. 12):

In biological evolution, the fate of a trait can be understood by considering the average reproductive success of all carriers of that trait (Haig, 2012; Hamilton, 1963). It is common to use optimisation and game theoretic approaches to study evolutionary endpoints (i.e. adaptations). In contrast, in cultural evolution there is no generally accepted formulation of cultural fitness (Ramsey and De Block, 2017) as the relationship between the individual and its traits is more complicated. Here, transmission is not tied to biological reproduction, can occur between arbitrary individuals, and the individual is not fixed with respect to the cultural traits it possesses and exhibits to others during its life. [...] For instance, traits that are contagious enough can spread and be maintained in a population even if they reduce the survival and/or biological reproduction of individuals (Anderton et al., 1987; Boyd and Richerson, 1976; Campbell, 1975).

Yes, a well-known issue. So why adopt a theoretical framework that treats this as a complication rather than as one of the phenomena central to the theory?

Let’s consider another brief passage (p. 12): “It is quite possible that concepts like adaptation and fitness in cultural evolution will not have equivalent and as straightforward meanings as they do in biological evolution.” They then go on to convert that into a question for further investigation (p. 13), which it certainly is. In the context of their discussion, that feels a bit like an add-on, or a secondary issue. But if the object is to think about cultural evolution, shouldn’t that be central to the theoretical enterprise?

This enterprise feels like it is about taking a biological theory, evolution, and extending it to cover cultural phenomena. That’s certainly the core of gene-culture coevolution, where cultural is simply a different, and more rapid and flexible, means of inheriting behavioral traits. It seems to me that it would be better in the long run to take the logical structure of evolutionary explanation and figure out how to realize it in the materials of human mind, culture, and society. Dawkins took a stab at this when he coined the idea of a meme in The Selfish Gene. But this article doesn’t mention Dawkins at all and memes only once in passing (it also shows up in a title in the bibliography). I can certainly understand why this is so given the amount of fruitless speculation that has grown up around the idea, which I have criticized at some length, but the basic idea is worth pursuing, which I have done, most recently in a paper about music, “Rhythm Changes” Notes on Some Genetic Elements in Musical Culture.

Now consider this passage from one of the articles cited (Buskell, Enquist, & Jansson, A systems approach to cultural evolution):

While humanities and social science scholars are interested in complex phenomena—often involving the interaction between behaviour rich in semantic information, networks of social interactions, material artefacts and persisting institutions—many prominent cultural evolutionary models focus on the evolution of a few select cultural traits, or traits that vary along a single dimension [...]. Moreover, when such models do build in more traits, these typically are taken to evolve independently of one another [...]. Within cultural evolutionary theory, this strategy holds that the dynamics and structure of cultural evolutionary phenomena can be extrapolated from models that represent a small number of cultural traits interacting in independent (or non-epistatic) processes. This kind of strategy licences the modelling of simple trait systems, either with an eye to describing the kinematics of those simple systems, or to illuminate the evolution and operation of mechanisms underpinning their transmission [...].

That passage implies another issue: description. Existing models favor systems and traits that are descriptively simple, while many phenomena of interest to humanists and social scientists require complex descriptions.

When Darwin began his career he had several centuries of careful naturalistic description at his disposal, descriptions of plants and animals and their life ways. He undertook such work himself and it was central to his thinking. This article says nothing about the need for accurate description of cultural phenomena, as though it were not an issue. It is. That’s one thing I undertook in my article on Rhythm Changes: I described the phenomenon. I have written extensively, if informally, about the need for better description of literary texts (three working papers here) and have published a long paper on the need for literary morphology. There has been a fair amount of work on the cultural transmission of myths and folktales; that work is based on standard descriptions of individual texts. Without careful descriptive work, there is nothing to think about.

I could go on and on, but as I said, this is only a blog post, not a book. 

I take it as given that culture, taken as a whole, is a biological adaptation – though, of course, there is always a chance that, either by action (e.g. nuclear war) or inaction (e.g. global warming) humankind may destroy itself. What we need from a theory of cultural evolution is a set of conceptual tools that will help us better understand how culture works. The biology-centric conceptual orientation of this article, gene-cultural coevolution or dual-inheritance theory, is of limited value. It cannot be the basis of a robust account of cultural evolution. It is, in effect, a geocentric proposal (biology) about a heliocentric world (culture). The theory of cultural evolution needs a Copernican+Keplerian revolution, not a complex arrangement of deferents and epicycles appended to the mechanisms of biological evolution.

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Here's an exercise for the reader: Take this article and analyze it in terms of the four questions I pose in my quick guide to cultural evolution (for the humanist):

1. What is the target/beneficiary of the evolutionary dynamic?
2. Replication (copying) or (re)construction
3. Is there a meaningful distinction comparable to the biological distinction between phenotype and genotype?
4. Are the genetic elements of culture inside people’s heads or are they in the external environment?

You might want to start with this table (from page 6) in the second tweet above.