How the lifetime experience of evolution affects the emergence of culture.

What is it about?

Darwin suggested that a single evolutionary process explained organic and cultural evolution. Many biologists and sociologists instead still see culture as an exceptional product of intentional, conscious human choice. I show that this is a false dichotomy. In the course of evolution, all life forms, humans included, face the same fundamental problem: to survive in unpredictable natural and social environments. Evolution enables life to respond to uncertainty by generating blind variation because this maximizes the chance of finding utility. Variation itself evolves, from blind mutation to behavioral trial and error, and eventually to the cognitive ability to anticipate and evaluate environmental change. Long-term genetic selection continues, but lifetime adaptation is increasingly guided by cognition, eventually allowing organisms to explore imagined environments in light of imagined choices and retain these in cultures. However, this shift to internal selection remains subject to the first principle of evolution: that the production of blind variety, whether genetic, behavioral or cognitive, allows organisms, including humans, to survive in an unpredictable world. Inevitably, it also brings high levels of redundancy, error and harm into the life of individuals and their culture.

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Why is it important?

Most evolutionary research has tended to treat organisms as objects rather than subjects. Individual agency played little or no role. Selection was governed by external genetic or social rational- functional constraints and produced successful outcomes. Maladaptive or redundant biological and cultural traits were dismissed as short-lived and unimportant. By looking at how evolution as experienced by the living organism we obtain a more realistic picture of the complexity of cultures. The blind, random nature of both environments and variation confronts organisms, including humans, with unpredictable flows of advantages and threats, and the results of what we intended frequently differ from what we expected. Chance, whether it opens opportunities or frustrates our plans, is the hallmark of all evolution, including that of human culture.

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