Cultural Evolution and Oral Tradition: ‘Information transfer’ at the micro scale

Bumping this to the top of the queue because cultural evolution is on my mind these days. This books speaks to a number of issues, including what makes a story culturally "fit": what features make a story easy to memorize/remember?

 

It’s clear that one problem I have with Dennett’s memetics is this his conception face-to-face mechanisms of cultural evolution – like the transfer of information from one computer to another – seems rather thin, unrealistically so. I tend to think that meaning is something arrived at through negotiation whereas Dennett writes as though one-shot one-way ‘information transfer’ is sufficient to the process.

I want to present some passages from David Rubin, Memory in Oral Tradition: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford UP 1995) that I think merit close consideration. These are passages about oral epic and so are relevant to thinking about folktales, myth and such, stories that are held in memory and delivered to an audience without benefit of written prompt. One thing we need to keep in mind is that, in oral culture, the notion of faithful repetition is not the same as it is in literate culture. In the literate world repetition means word-for-word. In oral cultures it does not. A faithful recounting of a story is one where the same characters are involved in the same (major) incidents in (pretty much) the same order. Word-for-word recounting is not required; in fact, such a notion is all but meaningless. With no written (or otherwise recorded) verification, how do you tell?

This passages illustrates that nicely (pp. 137-138):

Avdo Medjedovic was the best singer recorded by Lord and Parry. An example of his learning a new song provides insights into what it is that the poetic-language learner must learn about his genre (Lord, 1960; Lord & Bynum, 1974). A singer sang a song of 2,294 lines that Avdo Medjedovic had never heard before. When the song was finished, Avdo Medjedovic was asked if he could sing the same song. He did, only now the song was 6,313 lines long. The basic story line remained the same, but, to use Lord's description, "the song lengthened, the ornamentation and richness accumulated, and the human touches of character, touches that distinguish Avdo Medjedovic from other singers, imparted a depth of feeling that had been missing" (p. 78). Avdo Medjedovic's song retold the same story in his own words, much as subjects in a psychology experiment would retell a story from a genre with which they were familiar, but Avdo Medjedovic's own words were poetic language and his story was a song of high artistic quality. Although the particular words changed, the words added were all traditional; and so the stability of the tradition, if not the stability of the words of a particular telling of a story, was ensured.

Several aspects of this feat are of interest. First, the song was composed without preparation and sung at great speed. There was no time for preparation before the 6,313 lines were sung, and once the song began, the rhythm allowed little time for Avdo Medjedovic to stop and collect his thoughts. Such a feat implies a well-organized memory and the equivalent of an efficient set of rules for production. Second, the song expanded yet remained traditional in style, demonstrating that more than a particular song was being recalled. Rather, rules or parts drawn from other songs were being used. Third, although Avdo Medjedovic was creative by any standards, he was not trying to create a novel song; he believed that he was telling a true story just the way he had heard it, though perhaps a little better. To do otherwise would be to distort history.

So, an expert listens to a story than runs to 2,294 lines and then immediately repeats it back, but embellished to 6,313. Would he be able to do the same thing the next day or ten days or a year later? Probably.

Mental capacities and cultural variation: A comment on a recent post by Tyler Cowen about a new book by Charles Murray [Notes on mind-culture co-evolution 3]

Tyler Cowen has done a recent review of Charles Murray’s forthcoming, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class (January 2020). He finds it “Not as controversial as you might think”, but is disappointed Murray gives so little attention to culture:

Culture is a truly major shaper of our personalities, abilities, and social behavior, and self-evidently so. For my taste the book did not contain nearly enough discussion of culture and in fact there is virtually no discussion of the concept or its power, as a look at the index will verify.

On the general issue of variability in mental capacity across different populations Cowen references an old post from 2007 where he remarked:

I’ve spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there. They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring. And that’s in their second language, Spanish.

I’m also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably. In fact I can’t think of any written test — no matter how simple — they could pass. They simply don’t have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome.

Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people. If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village. But still, there you have it. Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts.

That makes sense to me. To be sure, it’s a conclusion one man has drawn from a variety of experiences in one Mexican village – and, given that Cowen travels quite a bit in underdeveloped areas, I would imagine his current thoughts rest on a wider range of personal experience. I certainly have no personal experience that would contradict that. More to the point, I have considered reasons to believe that any written test is unsuited for assessing the intelligence of non-literate peoples.

In the rest of this post I want to repeat and expand upon material I made in two long comments to Cowen’s recent post.

Literacy and the mind

There is more to literacy than the provision of a sharable and long-lasting public record, though that in itself is valuable. Literacy also supports a cognitive architecture, if you will, more attuned to abstract thought and to thinking about thought. Language, after all, is itself a rather direct expression of thought, which implies that when you've got big chunks of it written down, you can examine it in a way that's difficult to impossible without that record.

Consider this passage from an essay David Hays and I published some years ago [1]:

General categories such as "plant" and "animal" are very rare at this level [preliterate cultures] and even categories such as "bird," "beast," and "fish," are not routinely used (Berlin et al. 1973). The commonest categories are at the level of "oak," "eagle," and "trout," with some subcategories, "white oak," "bald eagle," and "rainbow trout." [Preliterate] peoples certainly have a practical knowledge of differences between plants and animals—they don't set snares for plants or expect animals to stay in the same place, but the conceptual basis of that practical knowledge is not made explicit in their systems of categories.

To illustrate this, let's consider an example recorded by the Russian psychologist A. R. Luria. In 1931-32 Luria made observations on the effect which literacy training had on the thought processes of Uzbekistani peasants. The following exchange took place with an illiterate thirty-eight year old adult (Luria 1976: 81-82).

What do a chicken and a dog have in common?
"They're not alike. A chicken has two legs, a dog has four. A chicken has wings but a dog doesn't. A dog has ears and a chicken's are small."
You've told me what is different about them. How are they alike?
"They're not alike at all."
Is there one word you could use for them both?
"No, of course not."
What word fits both a chicken and a dog?
"I don't know."
Would the word "animal" fit?
"Yes."

Immediately after this exchange the subject was asked about fish and crow. When the subject denied that they had anything in common he was asked whether one word could be used for both. He replied, "If you call them animals, that wouldn't be right. A fish isn't an animal and a crow isn't either. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a bird. A person can eat a fish but not a crow."

While the subject is acquainted with the word "animal," he doesn't thoroughly know its meaning. It took a great deal of prompting for him to agree that chicken and dog were both animals and, having so agreed, he was unable to apply the term to fish and crow. The concept clearly was not one he routinely used. The subject's comments about the difference between chicken and dog suggests that he cannot form a generalization which covers both. That is, there is no easy way to eliminate extraneous detail from his concepts of dog and chicken so that the same conceptual core remains in each case. The similarity between wings and forelimbs is not at all compelling to this peasant, nor would it be to any but a biologist or those whose view of the world has been informed by the biologist's thought.

Notice further that in justifying his account of fish and crow the subject talked about the roles which "fish," "crow," and "person" can take with the verb "eat." This is the sort of consideration which generates ontological categories, but this subject clearly couldn't get to a meta level from which he could explicitly grasp this categorization.

The Luria is a classic in what I suspect is still a small comparative literature [2] and Berlin et al. [3] is paradigmatic work in cognitive anthropology.

Let’s think about this. What’s puzzling is that categories that are self-evident to us, plant and animal, are somewhat problematic in preliterate cultures? How could that be?

We have reason to believe that folk classification is strongly dependent on the visual appearance of organisms [4]. Dogs, cats, mice, lizards, elephants, horses, kangaroos, giraffes, bison, and so forth, are all alike in that they have a head, neck, torso, tail, and four limbs. They vary greatly in size and body covering and somewhat in shape as well, but they are alike in having those parts. Birds are like that as well, head, neck, torso, two wings, two legs, and a tail. That’s similar to those beasts, but wings are quite different in appearance (and use) from forelegs. Moreover birds are covered in feathers while beasts are not. And we can go through a similar exercise for fish. And yet again for plants, trees, shrubs, grasses, and vines.

The upshot is that a system of classification strongly grounded in visual perception is not going to have much motivation to recognize the categories animal and plant. Preliterate peoples treat plants and animals differently and their languages recognize differences in verb use – e.g. plants don’t run or see. They just don’t have monolexemic designations for those categories and that, in turn, implies that explicit verbal reasoning about them as categories is awkward at best, a difficulty we see with that Uzbekistani peasant (despite the fact that recognizes the word for animal).

Just how and why literacy changes the situation is not entirely clear to me –  and it’s been awhile since I examined the relevant literatures so I don't know the most recent accounts. But I observe that as a writing system develops, people make lists [5]. When you fill a wax tablet or cover a velum scroll with lists of plants and animals you are remote from their visual appearances and more likely to think generally about them. In that situation you notice and a lot of these creatures, for example, have powers of autonomous motion, while others do not, and so on. Those gross similarities and differences will rise in salience and prompt the creation monolexemic designators for those categories. Once that has been done and the terms thoroughly assimilated into the languages, children will learn them – those things are animals, these are plants – and it becomes easier to organize ones thoughts about them. And that’s the problem that Uzbekistani peasant had; he couldn’t organize his thoughts very well. Broader exposure at a younger age will change that.

Those pesky memes: Theoretical imagery as a block to progress in thinking about cultural evolution [Image schemas in the annals of conceptual confusion]

What to I mean by “theoretical imagery”? I mean image schemas as the notion is used in, e.g., the cognitive metaphor notions of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. While I think cognitive metaphor theory is badly overextended (thus I was unable to finish reading Philosophy in the Flesh because the nonsense was piling up so fast I couldn’t breathe) that’s no reason to toss out the useful stuff. And one of the useful ideas is that many of our ideas are grounded in simple visual images, called image schemas.

In the case of cultural evolution I’m thinking of orthodox memetics of the Dan Dennett kind, where memes are little packets of “information” in people’s brains that flit about from brain to brain. This nonsense reached its high point with the 2002 publication Brian Auger’s The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. I retaliated – the martial metaphor is apt since the book was an assault against reason and evidence – with a review entitled “Colorless Green Homunculi” (Human Nature Review 2 (2002) 454-462). But that’s a digression.

Container schema

Back on track, theoretical imagery. In this case the imagery is that of a container. Think about biology. Considered as physical entities, phenotypes are relatively large while genes are relatively small. Further, genes are physically contained within phenotypes, not vice versa. When we transfer this implicit imagery into the cultural realm we are led to think of memes as relatively little things that must be enclosed in some relatively large thing, such as the human brain. Hence, we have the common notion of memes as quasi-autonomous agents hopping around from brain to brain, taking over mental real estate, and often driving their “hosts” to irrational acts, like belief in God, psychoanalysis, Marxism, or, for that matter, homuncular memetics.

Back to biology, phenotypes play a certain role in the little story of biological evolution. They are the things that are exposed to an environment where they either thrive or die. If they thrive, then the genes they contain within themselves will be passed onto another generation; if they die, well, that’s not so good for their genes, is it? In this story the environment is the container and the phenotypes are the little things within it.

When we transmute this story into one about culture, where’s the environment? What determines whether songs, stories, works of art, and so forth have a living presence in a group? Surely it’s the human mind, and the human mind is in the brain which is in the head. Now we’ve got a problem.

If memes are the cultural analog to biological genes, then they are little things inside a bigger thing, like the head. Now biology: genes are inside phenotypes, and phenotypes, in turn, are in the larger environment. So, in culture, memes are in the head and cultural phenotypes...They’re in the head as well because that’s where the cultural environment is as well. Whoops!

Does not compute. Does not compute. Does not compute.

What do we do? One strategy memeticists have taken is to trivialize the idea of a cultural phenotype so that, for example, a book becomes the phenotype for the word memes written on its pages, or a record or CD becomes the phenotype for sound waves, and so forth, and its really the memes that are the targets of election. Since they’re inside the head where the selective environment is as well, that’s fine.

Another strategy is simply to drop the notion that there is a cultural analog to the phenotype. In this version, memes are like biological viruses, not genes, and so no phenotype analog is needed. This is what Dan Dennett has done. Brian Auger took it to an extreme form in The Electric Meme, where he speculated – I kid you not – that memes raced one another along axons and only the winners got to make the Big Leap to another brain.

In Beethoven’s Anvil I took a different route altogether. But that required some fairly sophisticated conceptual construction of the sort that’s difficult to make convincing in a short note. Basically, I put the cultural analog to genes out there in the physical environment, where they need to be to mix and mingle and be available to people and stuck the cultural analogy to the phenotype in something like a collective brain. That’s where the tricky construction comes into play.

In the specific case of people making music together, I argued that they movements are so closely coordinated that we may consider their brains as being linked together into a single physical system. Some signals in the system are internal to individual brains while others pass between brains through sound waves in the external world; but it all functions as a single system. When the music making stops, the system decouples into autonomous individuals each with their own brain. But, here’s the point, if it was sufficiently pleasurable, they’ll get together again on a different occasion, re-couple, and do it again, thus re-creating the musical phenotype that had given them pleasure the first time.

I’ll stop here. You can get a richer story in Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). I’ve placed some of the story online here, where you’ll find final drafts of the 2nd and 3rd chapters, which is where I provide some of the conceptualization needed to think about linked brains as a single physical system. There is a now a fairly large literature about coordinated activity in brains of humans interacting with one another. While I'd like to be able to claim my book helped that work along, the fact of the matter is that the idea was in the air at the time. I link to some of that work in posts labeled "synchrony" and/or "coupling".

Where Are Memes? [Again] [And again]

Another bump, from Nov 20, 2019, in which a take back the suggestion I'd inserted then. This comment is again flush right, but in blue Helvetica.

I’d originally posted this on July 24, 2010. I’m thinking about these things again so I’m reposting it along with comments inserted in italics and flush against the right margin.

Back in 1996 I published a long article, Culture as an Evolutionary Arena (link to downloadable PDF), in the, alas, now defunct, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. In that article I introduced the notion of units of cultural inheritance with these paragraphs:

Following conversations with David Hays, I suggest that we regard the whole of physical culture as the genes: the pots and knives, the looms and cured hides, the utterances and written words, the ploughshares and transistors, the songs and painted images, the tents and stone fortifications, the dances and sculpted figures, all of it. For these are the things which people exchange with one another, through which they interact with one another. They can be counted and classified and variously studied.

What then of the ideas, desires, emotions, and attitudes behind these things? After all, as any college sophomore can point out, words on a page are just splotches unless apprehended by an appropriately prepared mind, one that knows the language. Pots and knives are not so ineffable as runes and ideograms, but they aren't of much use to people who don't know how to use them, that is, to people whose minds lack the appropriate neural "programs". Surely, one might propose, these mental objects and processes are the stuff of culture.

What I in fact propose is that we think of these mental objects and processes as being analogous to the biologist's phenotype just as the physical objects and processes are analogous to the genotype. Properly understood, these mental objects and processes are embodied in brain states (cf. Benzon and Hays 1988). Thus we have the whole of physical culture interacting with the inner cultural environment to produce the various mental objects and activities which are the substance of culture.

Richard Dawkins has proposed the term "meme" for the units of the cultural genotype, but proposes no special term for the cultural phenotype, though he recognizes the necessity of distinguishing the two (Dawkins 1982, pp. 109 ff., see also Dawkins 1989, pp. 189 ff.). Following more or less standard anthropological usage, I offer "psychological trait", or just "trait", as a term designating phenotypical units or features. Note, however, that Dawkins places memes in the brain and traits in the external world, which is just the opposite of what I am doing.

I have maintained that position until quite recently, say a week or two ago. I am now considering abandoning that conception. But first, a little more about how I further developed it. 

In my 2001 book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, I developed that idea with respect to music, arguing that the neural ‘trace’ (trajectory in neural state space) of musical performances is a cultural phenotype while the memes are those aspects of musical sound around which individuals coordinate their music-making activities. I further developed this idea only a few weeks ago in a series of posts I wrote as background to a post I did for the National Humanities Center on cultural evolution.

Specifically, I developed this notion using so-called Rhythm Changes as my main example (see this post, and then this one [1]). By Rhythm Changes I mean the harmonic structure of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” The phrase itself has become a term of art in the jazz world; any reasonably competent jazz musician can jam on Rhythm Changes. In that series of notes, however, I took the further step of extending this approach to language and, by implication, to all of culture, not just music. Here’s what I said in my discussion of language:

The question before us is: How do we conceptualize the memetic elements of language? In glossing the emic/etic distinction in a comment to John Wilkins I remarked that (now I’m simply repeating that comment) the distinction originates in linguistics, in the distinction between phonetics and phonemics. The former is about the psychophysics of speech sound while the latter is about phoneme systems. These are obviously very closely related matters, but they aren’t the same. We tend to perceive the speech stream as consisting of discrete sound entities, syllables and phonemes; this is the domain of phonemics. But the speech signal is, in fact, continuous. If you look at a sonogram of some chunk of speech, you don’t draw a series of vertical lines through it separating one phoneme from another; nor can you snip a tape recording into phoneme-long or syllable-long segments and reassemble it into something that sounds like natural speech. The aspects of the speech stream which are phonemically active differ from one language to another, which is why foreign languages all sound like “Greek.” Independently of the fact that you don’t know what the words mean or how the syntax works, you can’t even hear the phonemes in the speech stream.

Now, that’s the distinction I’m after, between phonemes and the raw speech stream. That’s the distinction I drew in my discussion of music (third post). Phonemes are those properties of the speech stream that are linguistically active.

In thinking about this over the last week or two I’ve begun to suspect that things would work out fine if I reversed my old position and put memes in the head and phenotypes out there in the world. In this view, then, memes are sensorimotor schemas, or aspects of such schemas, with/through which we perceive objects and events in the physical world. And cultural phenotypes are objects and events in the world.

Well, maybe not quite that. Take music. Let’s think of the physical performance, the waves of music out there in the world, as the phenotype. The whole thing, in a lump. So it’s out there as a phonetic object. The memes (which I’m now calling coordinators) can still be emic attributes of that object, in keeping with my current terminology. They can be said to be painted on that phonetic object so as to cover it in an envelope or package (again, terms in my current lexicon for cultural evolution). And, I suppose if we’re going to do this, then we can think of the psychological process, the route, as it were, from coordinators to sense organs through perception, cognition, and motoric guidance of muscles – the whole transit through the mind/brain – that corresponds to the biological process of development from genes to phenotype, which, of course, takes place in interaction with the environment.

Do I believe this? Let’s see.

Perhaps it (now) makes sense to talk about the “fit” between the envelope of coordinators and the physical phenotype. Hmmm... But then, what term do I use for that physical phenotype? And what do I do with the term phantasm, which I’d been using for “the mental act occasioned by a package or envelope of coordinators”? And Cultural Being? Problems, problems!

If we accept that suggestion then books that are no longer read, musical scores that are no longer performed, recordings no one listens to, paintings no one cares about, and so forth, those are phenotypic entities on a conceptual foot with works currently in circulation and use. But if we say, as I had done in the first version of this document, that the cultural phenotype exists only as a living process, a trajectory, in the (collective) brain, that problem goes away. Those unread texts, those abandoned recordings, etc., are just packages or envelopes of coordinators that cease to be active.

But...they could be activated at any time. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a good example. The text is from the 14th century, but was lost until the early 19th century. Now it is taught regularly in college and in high school. It has become, once again, a living text.

This solves one rather odd problem in my previous conception. Consider a musical performance where there are, say, 125 people present. Just how they’re divided between performers and audience is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that we have 125 different brains processing the music. Since I’d identified the cultural phenotype with a neural event, does that mean that we’ve got 125 phenotypes, one for each person present? To be sure, we can index them to the one event in the external physical world that they all share, but still, this seems rather odd. Alternatively, do we think of the phenotype as one collective event, which is perhaps not so odd given the discussion in chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Beethoven’s Anvil? We have to think about that collective event anyway, but it’s no longer clear to me that we need to assign such events the phenotype role in an evolutionary account of human culture.

Why, then, did I ever adopt such an odd formulation? For one thing, it’s always been clear to me that the environment to which culture must adapt is the collective psyche of a cultural group.

Yes.

That environment is realized in the brains of the individuals in the group, taken as a collective entity. If that’s the environment, I reasoned, then the thing that thrives or dies in that environment, i.e. the phenotype, must be in that environment, no? Well no, all that’s necessary is that it be closely coupled to that environment. The mechanisms of human perception guarantee that and the specific “points” of coupling are the memes.

Hmmmm...Is that how it works? I note that this is REALLY tricky stuff. It requires careful formulation and close attention to details. Details details details!

Another thing that was certainly on my mind is all the talk of memes flitting about from brain to brain and even, in some cases, hijacking brain space against the biological interests of individuals. Such talk is OK for informal chitchat, as is talk of selfish genes, but it’s useless for serious intellectual work. By sticking the memes in the external world, as properties of things and events, I eliminated the possibility of such idle nonsense.

OK. But of course idle nonsense comes in many varieties. There’s still plenty to go around.

The fact of the matter is, alas, those who insist on talking idle nonsense about culture will do so regardless of how I think of memes. They aren’t my audience. My audience, whoever it is, is going to have to put up with an account that insists on psychological reality. Not only that, on neuropsychological reality. And that precludes notions of ideas hopping from one head to another quite independently of whether or not culture is conceived under the aegis of an evolutionary process involving the selective retention of (that is, repetition of) phenotypes and random variation among memes (culturally conditioned perceptual schemas, or aspects thereof).

In any case, under my conception, memes are not a new and heretofore unidentified class of entities — as they are in Robert Aunger’s embarrassing The Electric Meme. Rather, they are entities that have already been talked about as cultural codes of one sort or another. Identifying them as memes simply assimilates those codes to an evolutionary dynamic.

* * * * *

[1] I have since developed those two posts into a published article:  William Benzon, “Rhythm Changes” Notes on Some Genetic Elements in Musical Culture, Signata 6, Annales des Sémiotiques /Annals of Semiotics: Sémiotique de la musique / Music and Meaning. Per Aage Brandt and José Roberto do Carmo Jr., eds. Presses Universitaires Liège, 2015, pp. 271-285, http://www.academia.edu/23287434/_Rhythm_Changes_Notes_on_Some_Genetic_Elements_in_Musical_Culture.

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.

Divergence and Reticulation in Cultural Evolution: Some draft text for an article in progress [#DH]

That's the title of my latest working paper. You can download it here: https://www.academia.edu/41095277/Divergence_and_Reticulation_in_Cultural_Evolution_Some_draft_text_for_an_article_in_progress.

And you can participate in a discussion of it here: https://www.academia.edu/s/9b97738023.

Abstract, Contents, and introductory material below.

* * * * *

Abstract: In a recent review of articles in computational criticism Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk bring up the issue of tree-like (dendriform) vs. reticular phylogenies in biology and pose the question for the form taken by the evolution of cultural objects: How is cultural information transmitted, vertically (leading to trees) or horizontally (yielding webs)? Dendriform phylogenies are particularly interesting because one can infer the phylogenetic history of an ensemble of species by examining the current state. The horizontal transmission of information in webs obscures any historical signal. I examine a few cultural examples in some detail, including jazz styles and natural language, and then take up the 3300 node graph Matthew Jockers (Macroanalysis 2013) used to depict similarity relationships between 3300 19th century Anglophone novels. The graph depicts a web-like mesh of texts but, uncharacteristically of such patterns, also exhibits a strong historical signal. (Just how that is possible is the subject of another draft.)

Contents

What’s Up? 1

The need for theory: Cultural evolution 2

Trees, Nets, and Inheritance in Biology 4

Divergence and reticulation in culture 7

What kind of objects are we dealing with? 12

Jockers’ Graph, a reticulate network 18

Appendix: A quick guide to cultural evolution 22

 

What’s Up?

In the past year we have had two reviews of recent work in computational criticism:

Nan Z. Da, The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies, Critical Inquiry 45, Spring 2019, 601-639.

Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk, Hidden in Plain Sight: Data Visualization in the Humanities, New Left Review 118, July August 2019, 86-119.

Though both are critical of that work, they are quite different in tone and intent. Da is broadly dismissive and sees little value in it. Moretti and Sobchuk see considerable value in the work, but are disappointed that it is largely empirical in character, failing to articulate a theoretical superstructure that deepens our understanding of literary history.

I’ve been working on a critique of those papers which seems to have expanded into a primer on thinking about literary culture as an evolutionary phenomenon. I’m currently imaging that the final article will have five parts:

1. Genealogy in literary history
2. Unidirectional trends in cultural evolution
3. Jockers’ Graph: Direction in the 19th century Anglophone novel
4. Expressive culture as a force in history
5. A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists

I have already posted draft material for the second part of the article, which centers on a graph from Matthew Jockers’ Macroanalysis (2013) [1].

That graph was my central concern from the beginning. It is the most interesting conceptual object I’ve seen in computational criticism, but it is easily misunderestimated and glossed over – as far as I know Da’s understandable but unfortunate dismissal is the only treatment of it in the referred literature. The problem, it seems to me, is that a proper appreciation of it requires a conceptual framework that doesn’t exist in the literature. My objective, then, is to begin assembling such a framework.

Moretti and Sobchuk didn’t mention it at all as their review was confined to journal articles. But it merits consideration in a framework that did establish in their review, if only barely. The invoke a distinction from evolutionary biology, that between tree-like (dendriform) phylogenies and free-form or web-like phylogenies, and suggest that it is important for understanding the relationship between literary for and history (pp. 108 ff.). Jockers graph is web-like network of texts but it exhibits an important feature of dendriform phylogenies, it displays a strong temporal signal. Thus a discussion of issues raised by Moretti and Sobchuk is a good way to begin constructing the missing conceptual framework.

This document consists of draft material for the discussion, the first part of the planned article, and the fifth part. The fifth part, the appendix is straight forward, and I have included it the end of this document. Once I have discussed the issue of dendriform vs. web-like relationships I introduce Jockers’s graph.

In the second part of the article, unidirectional trends in cultural evolution, I plan to say a few words about time and directionality. I will then take up a number of the examples Moretti and Sobchuk review in their article. While they don’t frame them as evidence for unidirectional trends, that is what they are. From my point of view that’s the most interesting and important aspect of their review, they gather those articles into one place. I will be placing those articles in the context of other work showing unidirectional trends.

I don’t yet know whether I’ll post draft materials on the second and fourth sections before drafting the whole article.

The need for theory: Cultural evolution

Now let us turn to Moretti and Sobchuk. Here is their penultimate paragraph (112-113):

Tree-like, linear, reticulate . . . why should we even care about the shape of cultural history? We should, because that shape is implicitly a hypothesis about the forces that operate within history; the tentative, intuitive beginning of a theoretical framework. ‘Theories are, even more than laboratory instruments, the essential tools of the scientist’s trade’, wrote Thomas Kuhn over a half century ago; too bad we didn’t heed his advice. Although the crass anti-intellectualism of Wired—‘correlation is enough’, ‘the scientific method is obsolete’—has fortunately remained an exception, what seems to have happened is that, as the amount of quantitative evidence at our disposal was increasing, our attempts at in-depth explanations were losing their strength. Disclaimers, postponements, ad hoc reactions, false modesty, leaving inferences ‘for another day’ . . . such have been, far too often, our inconclusive conclusions.

Ah, “the forces that operate within history”, that’s what we’re after, no? And we’re not going to get there without theory, yes?

I believe that that theory will be about culture as an evolutionary phenomenon. It is clear that both Moretti and Sobchuk believe that as well, but they do not introduce or frame their essay that way. They introduce it as a methodological inquiry into the use of visualization. It is only as the essay unfolds that evolution emerges as an ideational engine parallel to if not quite driving their interest in visualization.

Accordingly it is necessary to make some preliminary remarks about cultural evolution. Work in cultural evolution has blossomed in the last quarter century but:

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 [...]. [2]

Hence, if students of literature want to think about culture as a phenomenon of evolutionary processes, we will not find suitable models and methods in existing work on cultural evolution. Though we certainly need to be aware of and conversant with that work, we are going to have to construct models and methods suitable to our material. That is the primary objective of this essay. To that end, then, I will be introducing a several of examples of work on cultural evolution in other domains.

Biologists, of course, has been developing evolutionary theory over the last half century. While they agree on basic issues, many details are still under contention. When we, then, as students of literary culture set out to adapt evolutionary theory to the analysis of literary phenomena, just what do we take from biological thinking and how do we do it? Various approaches exist in the general cultural literature, but this is hardly the place to sort through them – though I have prepared a brief appendix with pointers into those discussions. What Moretti and Sobchuk seem to have taken over is the distinction between tree-like lineages and more chaotic, network-like lineages. So that’s where I will start.

Where I am going, though, is toward an argument which says that that distinction is a reflection of the mechanisms that underlie the evolutionary process and it is to those mechanisms that we must look in adapting evolutionary theory to the study of human culture. Cultural evolution unfolds though collectivities of human minds, and they give cultural evolution a different texture, if you will, and different large scale patterns.

References

[1] On the direction of literary history: How should we interpret that 3300 node graph in Macroanalysis, Version 2, https://www.academia.edu/40550795/On_the_direction_of_literary_history_How_should_we_interpret_that_3300_node_graph_in_Macroanalysis_Version_2.

[2] Buskell, A., Enquist, M. & Jansson, F. A systems approach to cultural evolution. Palgrave Commun 5, 131 (2019) pp. 4-5, doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0343-5 https://rdcu.be/bVNtP.

* * * * *

Addendum 12.10.19: Cultural cross pollination is very old:

According to the Seshat team, the data also clearly undermine another of Jaspers’ key claims: that innovation arose independently in the five core societies, which he referred to as “islands of light”. These societies were engaged in a “ton of cross-cultural exchange,” says historian and Seshat project manager Daniel Hoyer at George Brown College in Toronto, Canada. “The Rabbinical tradition and even Plato’s writings aren’t really conceivable without the Zoroastrianism and Egyptian moral ideals and Hittite legalism that went before.”

Work in Progress: Frameworks for studying the evolution of literary culture

I’ve been working hard over the last two month, writing a response to two reviews of recent work in computational criticism:

Nan Z. Da, The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies, Critical Inquiry 45, Spring 2019, 601-639.

Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk, Hidden in Plain Sight: Data Visualization in the Humanities, New Left Review 118, July August 2019, 86-119.

As I’ve working it’s just been growing and growing and has turned out to be more involved than I had guestimated or intended when I started.

Which is not all that unusual.

First I say a bit about what’s been going on with that essay and then to the point, which is about crafting intellectual frameworks in which we can study cultural evolution. THAT’s what’s been taking me so long with this essay. I’d misjudged that maturity of existing frameworks.

How I got here

Back in early October I’d posted draft material for the main argument, which would be in the second part of the article [1]. That centered on that 3300 node graph in Macroanalysis, by Matt Jockers, that’s interested me since I first encountered it in 2014. Each node in the graph represents roughly 600 pieces of information about one 19th century Anglophone novel. This is the graph:

I figured that would be the most difficult part of the piece to write, which is why I drafted it first. I figured the first part of the article would be much easier since the material I wanted to cover wasn’t as sophisticated and difficult.

It’s six weeks later and I’m still working on draft material of the easier part of the article (I’ll be ready to post that in a couple of days, or maybe the end of the week). A week ago I published material for an appendix on cultural evolution [2]. When I started this project I hadn’t even intended that there would be such an appendix because I hadn’t intended to get that deep into cultural evolution.

What happened? Had I misunderestimated the nature of the task? Yes and no.

On the one hand material I’m currently drafting is not as conceptually sophisticated and dense as that I’d devoted to the graph. However, I’ve already written quite a bit about that graph and I had some draft material sitting around on my hard-drive. So putting that all together wasn’t difficult. But, for various reasons, I’d underestimated the amount of time I’d have to spend on tree structures and network structures for biological and cultural phylogenies, a subject in which I’d published two decades ago [3].

I’ve now got a reasonable sense of what I’ve got to do to bring closure to the current draft material and I’ve got concrete plans for next steps. All I’m doing here is taking a breather, clearing the decks for the final push as it were.

Frameworks for studying the evolution of literary culture

In her review Da devoted a long paragraph to that graph, dismissing it as a lot of effort for a trivial result. She’s wrong, of course, but I can see why she would think that. She didn’t have an intellectual framework in which to understand the significance of that graph. Nor did Jockers himself; he knew it was an interesting conceptual object, but couldn’t explain quite why. My project in this essay has been, then, to set up such a framework.

What does that have to do with Moretti and Sobchuk, who didn’t even discuss that graph? They called for more theory and clearly believed evolutionary theory was called for. But they had little to say about what it might look like. That’s what I’m supplying in the draft I’m currently working on and it appears that it will be useful in explicating that graph in ways I hadn’t anticipated. More framing.

I figure we need (at least) three interlinked conceptual frameworks:

• Statics: This framework characterizes the entities in our model, if you will, and specifies the structural relations between them.
• Dynamics: This framework characterizes the way these entities interact over time.
• Experimental Method: This framework links those two to empirical evidence.

Computational criticism has concentrated on the methodological issues comprising that last framework and hasn’t given any attention to the first two. Why not? Because, Moretti aside, almost know one is interested in explaining literary history using an evolutionary framework.

I, on the other hand, have spent a great deal of time on the first two. That’s why I latched onto Jockers’ graph back in 2014 when I first saw it. I could see that it somehow related to the conceptual framework I had been working on. That framework sees cultural evolution as a unidirectional phenomenon over the long haul. Just what that direction is, that’s not so clear. But it turns out that we don’t need to work that out in order to see Jockers’ graph as evidence for unidirectional evolution. That’s what I’ve been working in the various things I’ve written about it, including the draft material for this essay [1]. If I read her right, Da simply takes a unidirectional history without really having thought about it – I’ve argued this in the draft – while Jockers is just puzzled.

But again, what does this have to do with Moretti and Sobchuk? Their issue is treelike histories vs. nets; they seem to want their large scale historical hypotheses to hang on those structures (p. 112):

Tree-like, linear, reticulate . . . why should we even care about the shape of cultural history? We should, because that shape is implicitly a hypothesis about the forces that operate within history; the tentative, intuitive beginning of a theoretical framework.

What’s important about tree-like phylogenies is that you can use information about the current state of the system to infer the order of its past history (biology: vertical transmission of genetic information). You can’t do that with net-like phylogenies (biology: horizontal transmission of genetic information).

Jockers’ graph is clearly a net, not a tree. But it isn’t a cultural phylogeny either. It’s something else. And, as I’m typing this, I’m thinking that it’s something that you don’t even see in biological evolution. Why not? Because cultural evolution takes place in human minds, albeit human minds operating in a complex dance of cooperative and competitive interaction.

THAT’s why the current draft has been such a slog. Teasing that out has been difficult, and I’m not quite there. What surprised Jockers about the graph is that its nodes – one for each text – are in roughly chronological order, but there is no temporal information in the data on which the graph is based. Where did that order come from if there is no temporal information in the underlying data? It came from form. Each text has a form. Jockers used standard methods for characterizing that form. The graph thus represents the evolving stochastic form of the 19th century Anglophone novel. There is historical information in the relationships between the stochastic forms of those novels, just as there is historical information in the relationships between biological species where almost all inheritance is passed along vertically, giving us a three-like phylogeny. Horizontal transmission, which is characteristic of reticular phylogenies, obscures the historical signal.

Well, Matthew Jockers created a graph that has a historical signal despite the fact that it is network in form. That strikes me as being very important, as well as interesting. But it doesn’t explain itself. My objective in this essay is to lay the groundwork for a framework in which he can understand and work with that graph.

More later.

References

[1] William Benzon, On the direction of literary history: How should we interpret that 3300 node graph in Macroanalysis, Version 2, October 11, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/40550795/On_the_direction_of_literary_history_How_should_we_interpret_that_3300_node_graph_in_Macroanalysis_Version_2

[2] William Benzon, A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists, November 14, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/40930224/A_quick_guide_to_cultural_evolution_for_humanists

[3] William Benzon, Culture as an Evolutionary Arena, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 19 (4): 321-362, 1996, https://www.academia.edu/235113/Culture_as_an_Evolutionary_Arena

Why do we need to talk of cultural evolution, specifically, rather than of history considered as a collection of narratives?

I’ve posted about this before, e.g. A short note on why it is important to conceive of culture as giving rise to an evolutionary process. And I continue to think about it, this time prompted by John Lawler.

I’ve got two things to say. First, when we think of culture at the level of nervous systems I think we’re going to have to conceive it as an evolutionary process. Second, even without that it does seem to be at least heuristically convenient to think of culture as more or less coherent force acting in history. Let’s take these in order.

Culture at the neural level

All of human behavior is executed by the nervous system. At some point we’re going to have to think about this at the neural level. I undertook to do that in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (Basic Books 2001). And I was prompted in part by observations by the late Walter Freeman [1].

Drawing on his work in complex neurodynamics, Freeman argued that each brain is unique, and hence we are in some sense epistemically isolated. Music, however, breaks down neural connections and allows them to reform in concert with others, who share in our music making. When we share music with others we become more alike and so better able to interact.

That became the conceptual seed of the argument I made in Chapters 2 and 3 of Beethoven’s Anvil [2] that, when people are making music together, we may consider their nervous systems to be one interlocked physical system in which some signals travel within brains while other travel between brains through the medium of music itself. Subsequently I wrote an essay review of Steve Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, where I began extending that argument to language [3]. Though I didn’t quite get this far, the meanings of words, after all, are constantly being negotiated though interactions with others. That’s the only way to keep those meanings stable enough so that they serve as a reliable medium of communication. Still, over time, things drift; that is to say, they evolve.

And so we’re led to a point that Richard Dawkins makes in the second chapter of The Selfish Gene (1976), that stability is the foundation of life and, hence, at the heart of evolution. He finds stability in what he calls replicators (genes in biology, memes in culture). I think we’re better off seeing it in a process. In biology that process is the interactions of genes and phenotypes though action in an environment, which does lead to change over the long term. In culture we find a process involving corresponding entities, though establishing the cultural correlates of those biological entities is tricky – something I discuss at great length in Beethoven’s Anvil and elsewhere [4]. In the short term – which is one thing in biology, something else in human history and culture – this evolutionary process provides stability, but over the long-term it produces change, relatively graduate change.

Food for thought: Surely something like this interactive process must be going on in primate societies to keep individuals in a group ‘in synch’ with one another. I’m thinking particularly of primates that live in so-called fission/fusion societies, where individuals spend most of their time in relatively small groups, but those groups then get together on occasion. How do we keep the smaller groups in synch with one another when the fuse, if only temporarily, with the larger group? I can see this becoming amplified over time so that it comes to ‘coalesce’ around specifically cultural products (remember that apes do have culture, of a sort) and practices – e.g. hand axes, proto-music – and clever apes become proto-humans.

Culture as a useful heuristic

But that neural argument is, for the most part, my own argument, and certainly played no role in the emergence of cultural evolutionary thought in the last quarter of the previous century. Some of that work has been done by experienced biologists – I’m thinking, for example, of Marcus Feldman, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, and Peter Richerson – and was often empirical in nature. Others have different backgrounds – Robert Boyd is an anthropologist. None of this work involves a cultural theory with parallels to both the gene and the phenotype. That distinction doesn’t exist. And much of the work is empirical in character.

More recently various investigators have taken biological techniques and software for establishing phylogenies and applied them to cultural phenomena such as musical instruments, folk tales, and language. But this doesn’t require conceptualizing culture as an evolutionary phenomenon in any particularly interesting way (which is what I have in mind in the previous section). That is, it seems to me that the empirical work could have done without the evolutionary framing.

So why is it used? I suspect that it’s useful in a loose and metaphoric way. Thinking about populations of individuals and practices is different from thinking about narratives about people, cities, societies, and so forth.

I’ve posted about cultural evolution as a force in history, and subsequently found an article about biological evolution as a play of forces. What I’m thinking is that, whether or not these investigators consciously regard biological evolution as a force or an interplay of forces, they have developed intuitions of that kind and have decided to apply those intuitions to the study of human culture. In doing that they naturally think in terms of cultural evolution even though they don’t have a model of cultural evolution that parallels biological evolution in a ‘deep’ way. They do worry about the parallel, some more than others, but they don’t let that get in the way of empirical investigation.

So, thinking of culture as an evolutionary process has a heuristic value. In the long term, however, I do think this heuristic has to be cashed out in a substantial theoretical model. And that model will be grounded in the nervous system.

References

[1] Walter Freeman, “A Neurobiological Role of Music in Social Bonding, in The Origins of Music, eds. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and Steve Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 411-424.

[2] Final drafts of those chapters are available online as Brains, Music and Coupling, https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture.

[3] William Benzon, Synch, Song, and Society, Human Nature Review, Vol. 5, 2005: 66-86, download: https://www.academia.edu/19595352/Synch_Song_and_Society.

[4] For the cultural analogue to the biological gene, which I’ve come to call coordinators, see William Benzon, “Rhythm Changes” Notes on Some Genetic Elements in Musical Culture, Signata 6, Annales des Sémiotiques /Annals of Semiotics: Sémiotique de la musique / Music and Meaning. Per Aage Brandt and José Roberto do Carmo Jr., eds. Presses Universitaires Liège, 2015, pp. 271-285, http://www.academia.edu/23287434/_Rhythm_Changes_Notes_on_Some_Genetic_Elements_in_Musical_Culture.

Issues in Cultural Evolution 1: Cultural Stability in the Mesh

Once again I'm thinking this stuff through. Hence another bump. (Previous bump was on 4.13.17.) As I'm thinking about cultural evolution these days, I thought I'd bump this post to the top. It's from January of 2015.

This is the first of a series of three posts – I hope it’s only three – in which I explore the relationships between my views on cultural evolution and the views of more orthodox thinkers. The number of thinkers is in fact quite large, but I don’t intended to be exhaustive, just indicative. For the most part I’ll be working with reference to two sources:

1.) Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture & Synthesize the Social Sciences, Chicago: 2011.

2.) An online report of a workshop that Daniel Dennett convened at the Santa Fe Institute that included the following evolutionary thinkers: Susan Blackmore, Robert Boyd, Nicolas Claidière, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Joseph Henrich, Olivier Morin, Peter Richerson, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny. Note that while most of these thinkers have special interests in cultural evolution, two of them are more generally interested in evolution, Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny.

In this first post I’m concerned with a general framework in which to think about culture and its evolution. In the second post I’ll examine the micro-scale mechanisms of cultural evolution, the cultural analogues to the biological gene and phenotype. In the third post I’ll look at the large-scale dynamics of cultural evolution. And, who knows, maybe there will be a fourth post to put things together. We’ll see.

Stability in the Mesh

Let me start out with a standard distinction, between culture and society. A society is a group of people and culture is the attitudes, ideas, customs, and practices through which they interact. Thus I will not be using the term “culture” to refer to a society, a common usage.

In the simplest societies people lived in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers and had relatively few material possessions. Whatever they possessed they had to carry with them from one place to another. Everyone knew everyone else and they were, as well, acquainted with those living in neighboring bands. Those people were, after all, their friends and relatives.

When I talk of the mesh I mean those people and their relationships among one another, among and with their material goods, and with the features and creatures of their environment. That is where human culture arose, in that mesh. Culture provides a means of enriching those relationships, both by introducing new entities into the mesh – whether handcrafted objects, new activities, or various abstract entities, and so forth – and by establishing new kinds of relationships among entities in the mesh.

It is only to the extent that these entities and relationships are stable that the group can be said to have a coherent culture. Dawkins makes that point with respect to biology in the second chapter of The Selfish Gene (p. 12):

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation–rocks, galaxies, ocean waves–are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms. Soap bubbles tend to be spherical because this is a stable configuration for thin films filled with gas. In a spacecraft, water is spherical globules, but on earth, where there is gravity, the stable surface for standing water is flat and horizontal. Salt crystals tend to be cubes because this is a stable way of packing sodium and chloride atoms together. In the sun the simplest atoms of all, hydrogen atoms, are fusing to form helium atoms, because in the conditions that prevail there the helium configuration is more stable. Other even more complex atoms are being formed in stars all over the universe, and were formed in the ‘big bang’ which, according to prevailing theory, initiated the universe. This is originally where the elements on our world came from.

Dawkins then goes on to argue that stability in the biological world depends on molecules he will call replicators (p. 15). At first these replicators were free-floaters in the primeval biomolecular soup. In time they became (p. 20) “genes, and we are their survival machines.” I understand that there is some controversy within biology as to whether or not Dawkinsian replicators are in fact the source of stability in the biosphere (see Peter Godfrey-Smith, The Replicator in Retrospect, Biology and Philosophy 15 (2000): 403-423), but that is secondary to my current purpose.

What’s important is Dawkins’s plea for stability as the necessary precursor to meaningful change. That is as important in culture as in biology. Without stability there is no chance of accumulating cultural innovations.

With this in mind, let’s go back in time. Here’s a passage from my review of Steven Mithen’s book on music (“Synch, Song, and Society”, Human Nature Review 5, 2005, pp. 66-85):

Obviously we have no record of these utterances, but the archeological record does have indications of cultural conservatism. The repertoire of stone tools was both limited and unchanged between 1.8 and 0.25 million years ago; Mithen gives particular emphasis to the constant form of hand-axes (164). Mithen suggests that, because their finely wrought form exceeds the practical demands of butchery, wood-working, and cutting plants, these hand-axes may have been fitness indicators in the sort of sexual selection regime Geoffrey Miller has advocated.

Beyond this, I note that Ralph Holloway (1969, 1981) long ago suggested that strongly conserved hand-axe form was an indicator of social norms. Those forms could not be conserved from one generation to the next unless there was a deliberate intention to do so. One has to note the significant features of an existing axe and discipline one’s knapping motions to produce that result. That is considerably more exacting than simply producing an axe with a sharp edge and appropriate heft. The motivation behind such exacting form, then, is not practical. Nor can it be merely aesthetic, which would allow for considerable individual variation. That leaves us with a desire to conform to social norms. Given the importance of such norms, that may in itself be a sufficient motivation for their form, to serve as a visible token of social solidarity. In any event, Holloway’s observation does not contradict Miller’s, and now Mithen’s hypothesis. Norms are norms, regardless of their specific purpose and norms that serve multiple ends are likely to be particularly strong.

My point is a simple one: the oldest evidence we have of specifically human cultural norms is of something that can be seen and therefor copied, those stone axes. Of course, we know little of the lifeways that those creatures lived. The oldest, of course, were not human. Since we cannot observe them we do not know exactly how they made those axes, but archaeologists have experimented and so we know something of the likely techniques.

Whatever those techniques were, exactly, those no particular mystery about how they were passed on from one person to another as the crafting would have been fully observable. As they saying goes, hominid, hominid do. What we don’t know is just what neuro-motor advances made this activity possible, nor why they did it. What we see in the fossil record, however, is stability, norms. That’s what we need to get started.

The coupled-group as a single unified cultural actor, a brief note

I have written of a group coupled in music-making as a single actor, a single physical system in which some signals pass internally within the nervous systems of individual participants while others pass externally between them. The external signals are transmitted as acoustic waves while the internal signals are transmitted as electro-chemical signals. Furthermore the individual’s movements, and hence their neural activity, must be synchronized at the level of 10s of milliseconds in order for the coupling to be effective.

That’s one aspect of coupling. There is, of course, another. When individuals enter into such a group, the give up many degrees of neural and neuro-muscular freedom otherwise available to them. We can think of this as an intentional characterization of the phenomenon that the previous paragraph characterizes physically.

My primary account of this coupling is given in chapters 2 and 3 of Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001). You can download a prepublication draft of those chapters HERE.

Has Dennett Undercut His Own Position on Words as Memes?

I'm bumping this post, originally from April 2015, to the top of the queue because it has elements, which I've highlighted, that are reminiscent of Rodney Brooks's recent talk in which he argues that the computer metaphor is not adequate to understanding what the mind/brain does. Brooks invokes the idea of adaptation and examples from biology. Dennett brings up thermodynamics. Does biology have an advantage there? Powerful computers use huge amounts of energy. Can electronic devices match the energy efficiency of neural tissue? See this remark by Mark P. Mills:

But it’s important to keep in mind that Moore’s Law is, as we’ve noted, fundamentally about finding ways to create ever tinier on-off states. In that regard, in the words of one the great physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, “there’s plenty of room at the bottom” when it comes to logic engines. To appreciate how far away we still are from a “bottom,” consider the Holy Grail of computing, the human brain, which is at least 100 million times more energy efficient than the best silicon logic engine available.

* * * * *

Early in 2013 Dan Dennett had an interview posted at John Brockman’s Edge site, The Normal Well-Tempered Mind. He opened by announcing that he’d made a mistake early in his career, that he opted a conception of the brain-as-computer that was too simple. He’s now trying to revamp his sense of what the computational brain is like. He said a bit about that in that interview, and a bit more in a presentation he gave later in the year: If brains are computers, what kind of computers are they? He made some remarks in that presentation that undermine his position on words as memes, though he doesn’t seem to realize that.

Here’s the abstract of that talk:

Our default concepts of what computers are (and hence what a brain would be if it was a computer) include many clearly inapplicable properties (e.g., powered by electricity, silicon-based, coded in binary), but other properties are no less optional, but not often recognized: Our familiar computers are composed of millions of basic elements that are almost perfectly alike – flipflops, registers, or-gates – and hyper-reliable. Control is accomplished by top-down signals that dictate what happens next. All subassemblies can be designed with the presupposition that they will get the energy they need when they need it (to each according to its need, from each according to its ability). None of these is plausibly mirrored in cerebral computers, which are composed of billions of elements (neurons, astrocytes, ...) that are no-two-alike, engaged in semi-autonomous, potentially anarchic or even subversive projects, and hence controllable only by something akin to bargaining and political coalition-forming. A computer composed of such enterprising elements must have an architecture quite unlike the architectures that have so far been devised for AI, which are too orderly, too bureaucratic, too efficient.

While there’s nothing in that abstract that seems to undercut his position on memes, and he affirmed that position toward the end of the talk, we need to look at some of the details.

The Material Mind is a Living Thing

The details concern Terrence Deacon’s recent book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2013). Rather than quote from Dennett’s remarks in the talk, I’ll quote from his review, "Aching Voids and Making Voids" (The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 88, No. 4, December 2013, pp. 321-324). The following passage may be a bit cryptic, but short of reading the relevant chapters in Deacon’s book (which I’ve not done) and providing summaries, there’s not much I can do, though Dennett says a bit more both in his review and in the video.

Here’s the passage (p. 323):

But if we are going to have a proper account of information that matters, which has a role to play in getting work done at every level, we cannot just discard the sender and receiver, two homunculi whose agreement on the code defines what is to count as information for some purpose. Something has to play the roles of these missing signal-choosers and signal-interpreters. Many—myself included—have insisted that computers themselves can serve as adequate stand-ins. Just as a vending machine can fill in for a sales clerk in many simplified environments, so a computer can fill in for a general purpose message-interpreter. But one of the shortcomings of this computational perspective, according to Deacon, is that by divorcing information processing from thermodynamics, we restrict our theories to basically parasitical systems, artifacts that depend on a user for their energy, for their structure maintenance, for their interpretation, and for their raison d’être.

In the case of words the signal choosers and interpreters are human beings and the problem is precisely that they have to agree on “what is to count as information for some purpose.” By talking of words as memes, and of memes as agents, Dennett sweeps that problem under the conceptual rug.

Issues in Cultural Evolution 2.2: ‘Cultural Genes’ are Out There in the World

I think the thing to do at this point is post a version of my own view of cultural evolution, but one that skips the terminology that I’ve recently adopted. In this version, which more or less centers on my 1996 article, Culture as an Evolutionary Arena, I adopt the term “meme” as the name of the genetic entities of culture. Though I’ve recently dropped the term, I’ll use it in this post.

Gavagai and Conduits

First, though, I want to think a bit about the problem of evolving a communication system.

Some years ago I was engaged in an email conversation with Valerius Geist, a naturalist, who pointed out that biological communication systems are very conservative because they have to evolve two sets of matched traits. They’ve got to evolve a system to emit signals – vocal calls, gestures, postures – and one that understands those signals. These two systems have to match. If they don’t, the communication will fail.

Culture has the same problem, which we can illustrate with a classic thought experiment in the philosophy of language. This is from Willard van Orman Quine, Word and Object (1960). He asks us to consider the problem of radical translation, “translation of the language of a hitherto untouched people” (Quine 1960, 25). Consider a “linguist who, unaided by an interpreter, is out to penetrate and translate a language hitherto unknown. All the objective data he has to go on are the forces that he sees impinging on the native’s surfaces and the observable behavior, focal and otherwise, of the native.” That is to say, he has no direct access to what is going on inside the native’s head, but utterances are available to him. Quine then asks us to imagine that “a rabbit scurries by, the native says ‘Gavagai’, and the linguist notes down the sentence ‘Rabbit’ (of ‘Lo, a rabbit’) as tentative translation, subject to testing in further cases” (p. 25).

Quine goes on to argue that, in thus proposing that initial translation, the linguist is making illegitimate assumptions. He begins his argument by nothing that the native might, in fact, mean “white” or “animal” and later on offers more exotic possibilities, the sort of things only a philosopher would think of–one of the possibilities was “mere stages, or brief temporal segments, of rabbits” (p. 46). Quine also notes that whatever gestures and utterances the native offers as the linguist attempts to clarify and verify will be subject to the same problem. Quine’s argument is thorough and convincing.

This situation, of course, is rather different from that of ordinary speech between people who share a common language. In the common situation both parties would know the meaning of “Gavagai.” Yet, however effective it is, ordinary speech sometimes fails to secure understanding between people and, when such understanding is achieved, that achievement has required back-and-forth speech. The mutual understanding is achieved through a process of negotiation. As William Croft reiterates in chapter 4 of Explaining Language Change, we cannot get inside one another’s heads and so must negotiate meanings in conversation.

That is to say, communication through language is not a matter of sending information through a pipeline. It does not happen according to what Michael Reddy (1993 in Ortony, Metaphor and Thought) has called the conduit metaphor. Reddy’s article is based on 53 example sentences. Here are the first three (p. 166, italics in the original):

1. Try to get your thoughts across better
2. None of Mary’s feelings came through to me with any clarity
3. You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean

Reddy’s argument is that many of our statements about communication seemed to be based on the notion of sending something (the thought, idea, feeling) through a conduit, hence he calls it the conduit metaphor. He knows that communication doesn’t work that way, but that’s not his central issue. His central concern is to detail the way we use the conduit metaphor to structure our thinking about communication.

Of course, language is not the only medium of human communication and culture. One can craft a wheel that’s just like an existing wheel without having to know what the wheelwright was thinking. As long as your wheel is acceptably like existing wheels, it is OK. How you made it is secondary. Even there, of course, you can observe a master wheelwright at work and imitate his process. One can learn music through imitation as well.

That is, as long as there is a publicly visible physical model, of an object or a process, one can learn how to make the object or perform the process through imitation, hence the emphasis on imitation in the memetics literature. Imitation fails, however, when it comes to the meanings of words. You can learn to imitate sounds, but not meanings. The learning of meaning is different, and it is something that’s been all but ignored in the orthodox memetic literature. That literature assumes that we “transfer information” like sending oil or water through a pipeline. It uses a reified concept of information to dissolve the problem, rather than solve it. It is not well-informed about cognitive science and linguistics and so cannot be considered intellectually serious.