Pattern-Bound Primate: Human Culture

Pt.2

Stories and Memes

The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955

The Pleistocene Ice Boundary

During the Pleistocene the glaciers processed far south, and recessed, 17 times. This glaciation continued cyclically, at times covering as much as 30% of the Earth's surface, from around 1.8 million years ago until the present Holocene epoch began some 10,000 years ago with the appearance of modern humans.

     There is much debate among experts about exactly what happened during the closing years of this "Great Ice Age," but what is clear is that the bipedal children of the African Eve walked out into the Holocene a very different primate than had met the first encroachments of the proliferate poles. Factors in the environment were surely changing rapidly at the end of the Pleistocene, too fast for natural selection to provide for gradual adaptations of organisms to the volatile clime. It is widely agreed that this need for flexible, predictive response brought about the speciation of Homo sapiens, seen biologically in the increase in brain size.




Neanderthal to Homo sapien

 The hominid which entered this punctuated environmental flux  emerged a creature whose cognition had been  pressured by  drastic variation in survival challenges. By naming the way in which they effected his senses, building upon and adding to his language by exchanging it with others through abstract expression, humans seemed to have evolved a mind disposed to predict the future.
     I don't think human intelligence is much of a mystery. A mind which could bypass direct learning strategies (i.e., trying things out) through non-imitative means would have a fitness advantage in the drastic climate variation at the end of the Pleistocene/ beginning of the Holocene.


     We see it in the first symbolic evidence of this augmented executive's new trick: culture.

     Culture is a word which primarily serves as job insurance for anthropologists by guaranteeing they have a definition to argue about.



Herbert Spencer

     Early social "scientists" like Spencer thought of culture as the honing of society from primitive to modern (and by modern he explicitly meant white European). His "survival of the fittest" was a massive misapprehension of Darwinism as a sort of biological ladder to excellence, and served as ostensible justification (really it was the stuff the natives had and the guns the Europeans brought) for taking up the imperial yoke of Kiplerian duty. 

     But of course, evolution makes no promise that it will follow a trend of refinement, at least  not so that it suits human ideas of "refined." This perspective was replaced by an idea of culture much closer to our present notion, initially spurned primarily through the work of Franz Boas, called "the Father of American Anthropology," (presumably because he was quite old in addition to being an anthropologist. Interestingly, he wasn't an American.) and since then perspective has vacillated between more biologically focused perspectives and theories which remove biology from culture altogether.

 The Shackles of Tradition, Franz Boas


Levi-Strauss Structuralism:

"the search for the underlying patterns
of thought in all forms of human activity."

 

My definition, the one used here, includes just about everything we associate with being human.

We have ideas about eating through which we relate to it and around which it revolves. Far from being simply a function of survival, associations of aesthetic and sociality are inextricably linked to consuming food. Our worlds are made up of our names for things.

   By culture I mean the "comprehensive whole" manifestation of human symbolic thought.

     The present quibbling between academics about culture is for the large part a debate over agency. How could genetic selection, patently selfish, result in systems which favor cooperation and often altruism?

     And why do humans retain and promote some cultural elements that are so obviously maladaptive for their physical well being? Much of my own musing will be conjecture. When it comes to picking a camp, I frankly see it as my task to include the camps and campers in my survey of the landscape.



Heraclitus and Democritus, Jan van Bijlert

The atomists held that there are smallest
 indivisible bodies from which everything
 else is composed, and that these move
 about in an infinite void space.
 Of the ancient materialist accounts of the
 natural world which did not rely on some kind
of teleology or purpose to account for
 the apparent order and regularity found
 in the world, atomism was the most influential.
Even its chief critic, Aristotle, praised Democritus
for arguing from sound considerations
 appropriate to natural philosophy.



     There are theories which I find flawed, but not scientific schools. I think the criticism ought to remain on method about some these points for which we lack evidentiary verification, and Democritus will tell you that cheese cutting will eventually become too precise a task for the blade. I do think we'll reach a point in our reduction where we cannot discern any finer a pattern.

    

 In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his account of a selective explanation for cultural behaviors. A meme is a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultural counterpart of genes." This theory serves as an explanation by bypassing biological fitness altogether. It is not necessary for an idea to truly be beneficial to the person who has it, it only need to have appeal, "fitness," of it's own right.


     Here Blackmore is brilliant on the process: Variation, Selection, Heredity, and "you must get evolution." This is the process which Darwin describes in "The Origin," and Darwin himself had no concept of a gene. He was describing the pattern of information, the details of the world around him and how those details appeared in groups in common.


    I think she goes too far in naming a new replicator with "temes," and frankly I think "we're the ones who let the 2nd replicator out of the box" is a tad alarmist sounding and inaccurate. I do love the phrase "We are Earth's Pandoran species," but  even regarding memes a great deal of novelty need not be attached. It is a discussion of pattern, THE pattern, within a different context. 

     So many humans are so resistant to be called an animal, they feel it takes something special away from humanity--and perhaps it does, but if so, what it takes away is an illusion of ourselves as exceptions in nature.
All life is in a perpetual  if/then interaction with its environment, feedback loop, a computation, an algorithm.





I don't mean to equivocate, but this pattern is evident in the very basis of our perceptual mechanisms.

We can't simplify life ontologically, but we can identify the process. It's not that controversial.

Given (a), if (a) meets circumstance (b), then (a)(b)
"        (a), if  "    "               "              (c)     "     "  (c) 

Alan Turing describes the same process in Computing machinery and intelligence,  

Click the link to see
my post on Turing,
machine intelligence,
and "the God Algorithm."

[mind is shaped by:]

"(a) The initial state of the mind, say at birth, (b) The education to which it has been subjected, (c) Other experience, not to be described as education, to which it has been subjected."

I have a thought experiment in mind, almost like a children's story or picture book, and I'd like some ideas.
I think if we start an explanation from that "initial state of mind" we demonstrate complexity without too much misunderstanding.

Next: The Evolution of Form, How Shapes Show the Way to Consciousness.

"Genes are defined as such according their longevity, the potential to persist for multiple generations. It is not known what the first or even the first many thousands of generations of replicators were like, or exactly what circumstances they did their copying, but we may be sure that those replicators which did not have traits which kept them from being destroyed did not have a chance to produce another generation of copiers.  Imagine the earth of 2 billion years past was a mountainous world of steep cliffs, with no break in incline until reaching the ocean.  Now imagine that at this point there are three types of replicators present on this hypothetical earth: red pods, small spheres with smooth surfaces which are heavier than then others because they are dense; yellow pods, which are the same as the red on the surface but which are on the inside very porous and weigh very little, and blocks, larger replicator cubes with 6 flat sides at right angles. All three types make identical copies of themselves, at the common rate of one copy every day. "