Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences

Alex Mesoudi is lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author or coauthor of articles in such leading journals as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Evolution, and Psychological Review.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2011 by The University of Chicago

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52043-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52044-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52045-2 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-52043-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-52044-7 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mesoudi, Alex.

Cultural evolution : how Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences / Alex Mesoudi.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52043-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-52043-9 (alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52044-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-52044-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social evolution. 2. Culture. I. Title.

HM626.M486 2011

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2010054354

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Cultural Evolution:

How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture

and Synthesize the Social Sciences

Alex Mesoudi

Cultural Evolution

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgments

1     A Cultural Species

2     Cultural Evolution

3     Cultural Microevolution

4     Cultural Macroevolution I: Archaeology and Anthropology

5     Cultural Macroevolution II: Language and History

6     Evolutionary Experiments: Cultural Evolution in the Lab

7     Evolutionary Ethnography: Cultural Evolution in the Field

8     Evolutionary Economics: Cultural Evolution in the Marketplace

9     Culture in Nonhuman Species

10   Toward an Evolutionary Synthesis for the Social Sciences

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

The year 2009 was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. As was the case for the 50th and 100th anniversaries in 1909 and 1959, the 150th anniversary was celebrated with lavish events and prestigious meetings at universities and learned societies around the world, as well as TV series and a movie biopic of Darwin. Few other scientists, and even fewer books, warrant such long-term attention. But this is not merely hero worship on the part of scientists. It is the recognition of a major scientific advance. In The Origin, somebody had set out for the first time a tenable scientific explanation for two phenomena that had predominantly been, and often still are, attributed to supernatural, mystical, or religious forces. The first phenomenon is the incredible diversity of biological organisms that we see in the natural world. This diversity ranges from beetles to cacti to hummingbirds to algae to gibbons, to name just a few random examples. Prior to Darwin, the accepted explanation for this diversity was simply that God had created these species in their present forms, for whatever reason he saw fit (he works in mysterious ways, after all). The second phenomenon that Darwin explained was the often intricately complex adaptations that these diverse organisms possess, such as eyes, wings, echolocation systems, and brains. As many theologians have noted, such adaptations have multiple, functionally interrelated parts that appear to work perfectly together, seemingly betraying clear evidence of having been designed by an intelligent being.

Darwin’s genius—the reason he is still celebrated today—was to provide the first coherent and workable scientific explanation for these phenomena. According to Darwin, the diversity and complexity of the natural world could be explained using a handful of simple principles, all of which could be demonstrated empirically to be operating in nature: first, that variation exists between individuals; second, that a struggle for existence occurs due to limited resources, such as food, nesting space, or mates, and ever-increasing population sizes, such that not every individual has an equal chance of surviving and reproducing; and third, that characteristics are inherited from parent to offspring during reproduction. The consequence is what Darwin called natural selection: those characteristics that increase an individual’s chances of surviving and reproducing are more likely to be inherited by the next generation, and such characteristics will increase in frequency within a population. Over time, beneficial characteristics gradually accumulate and combine to generate the eyes, wings, and so on that had previously been attributed to the actions of a creator. Darwin’s work has stimulated a century and a half of enormously productive research in evolutionary biology, which has been devoted to working out the details of Darwin’s principles, such as the genetic basis of inheritance, of which Darwin was only dimly aware.

In this book I survey a growing body of scientific research that is based on the fundamental premise that cultural change—by which I mean changes in socially transmitted beliefs, knowledge, technology, languages, social institutions, and so on—shares the very same principles that Darwin applied to biological change in The Origin a century and a half ago. In other words, culture evolves. This is not a new idea by any means. In fact, Darwin himself would later draw parallels between biological evolution and cultural change, specifically language change:

The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel . . . The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.¹

Darwin wasn’t just using an analogy here for purposes of exposition. Language change isn’t a bit like natural selection, or resembles in some respects natural selection, it is natural selection, plain and simple. And many other illustrious scientists since then have made similar observations, such as William James, one of the founders of psychology:

A remarkable parallel . . . obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.²

Despite these early pronouncements by prominent scholars of a curious and remarkable parallel between biological and cultural change, only now are scholars beginning to properly apply Darwinian methods, tools, theories, and concepts to explain cultural phenomena. This book is an attempt to summarize and synthesize this growing movement.

In many ways, the problem that Darwin set out to solve—the diversity and complexity of biological organisms—is echoed in the problem faced by those studying culture. Human culture, too, shows enormous diversity: there are approximately 10,000 different religions currently practiced in the world, almost 7,000 different languages spoken, each one of which contains around half a million words, and 7.7 million patented items of technology in the United States alone. Human culture also shows often astounding complexity, such as the intricately detailed ecological knowledge of the behavior of other species that is passed from generation to generation in many hunter-gatherer groups, technological artifacts such as computers or space shuttles that are composed of countless functionally interlinked parts, and political and financial institutions that successfully organize (at least to some degree) the lives of millions of people. This body of diverse and complex culturally transmitted knowledge has allowed our species to successfully colonize virtually every terrestrial environment on the planet, from freezing poles to scorching deserts, from tropical rainforests to mountain ranges. Chapter 1 is devoted to more precisely defining this phenomenon that we call culture, as well as demonstrating empirically that culturally acquired knowledge significantly shapes various aspects of human behavior, from society-wide patterns of aggression and cooperation to fundamental psychological processes such as how we perceive objects and interpret other people’s actions.

In chapter 2, I outline the argument that Darwin’s explanation for the diversity and complexity of biological life also applies, in a broad sense, to human culture. That is, cultural change—changes in beliefs, knowledge, technology, social institutions, and so on—shares the same principles that Darwin laid out in The Origin. First, culturally acquired traits show variation in their form and expression; second, there is some kind of competition between these cultural variants due to finite resources, such as space in memory, so that not every variant is equally likely to survive and spread; and third, cultural variants are passed from person to person due to cultural transmission. Chapter 2 is devoted to expanding this basic proposition and showing that the resulting theory of cultural evolution is empirically well supported—at least as well supported as the equivalent argument that Darwin made for biological species in The Origin.

Equally important as the basic similarity between biological and cultural change, however, are the differences. Beyond the theory outlined by Darwin in The Origin, many of the details of biological evolution that have been worked out by biologists since then, such as particulate inheritance (the existence of discrete particles of inheritance, genes), blind variation (new genetic variation is not generated to solve a specific adaptive problem), or Weismann’s barrier (the separation of genotypes and phenotypes such that changes acquired in an organism’s lifetime are not directly transmitted to offspring), may not apply to cultural evolution. But, crucially, this does not invalidate the basic argument of chapter 2 that culture evolves. It just means that the details of cultural evolution may be different from the details of biological evolution, and it is up to social scientists to fill in those details, just as biologists have done over the past 150 years.

With this in mind, chapter 3 outlines the microlevel details of cultural evolution, drawing on groundbreaking mathematical models developed in the 1970s and 1980s by a handful of pioneering researchers based in California. Some of these resemble the underlying processes of biological evolution, such as drift (changes due to chance events in small populations) or vertical cultural transmission (from one’s biological parents, just like genes). Others are unique to culture, such as the Lamarckian-like process of guided variation, where people modify what they learn from others before passing it on. Each of these microevolutionary processes has distinct population-level consequences for cultural evolution, consequences that could only have been worked out with formal mathematical models borrowed from population geneticists.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine cultural macroevolution, which describes the large-scale, long-term patterns and trends that are documented by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and linguists. Of course, scholars in these fields have long described and explained large-scale patterns of cultural change without any reference to cultural evolution. Yet these explanations are typically based on informal and nonquantitative methods. We will see how cultural evolution researchers are using rigorous, quantitative methods originally designed to detect and explain patterns and trends in biological evolution, such as phylogenetic analyses and neutral drift models, to uncover patterns and trends in cultural macroevolution with greater certainty than is possible with traditional, nonevolutionary methods.

Chapters 6 and 7 concern two specific methods for studying cultural microevolution: lab experiments and ethnographic field studies. Experiments can be used to simulate cultural evolution under controlled conditions in the lab. This brings all kinds of benefits over purely observational or historical methods. With experiments, for example, we can manipulate variables to determine the causes of cultural phenomena, we can re-run history several times to see whether trends are meaningful or due to chance, and we can obtain uninterrupted and complete behavioral data—none of which is possible with purely observational or historical studies of actual cultural change. Ethnographic field studies complement experiments by tracking cultural change within small communities of people, addressing such questions as whether people learn primarily from their parents or from their peers, and how such transmission pathways affect within-and between-group cultural variation.

Chapter 8 examines recent efforts to model economic change as an evolutionary process. Traditional economic theory is not very good at explaining change over time, instead focusing on whether an economic system is in an optimal state at any one point in time. This is problematic when economies are constantly changing, for example, in response to rapid technological change (e.g., in telecommunications or computing), and evolutionary economists have begun to construct an evolutionary theory of economic systems in which change rather than stasis is the default. Other researchers have argued that cultural evolutionary processes, specifically the process of cultural group selection, can potentially explain puzzling findings from various economic experiments that suggest that people are typically far more cooperative than they should be if they are just maximizing their own utility in a purely self-interested manner, as assumed by traditional, nonevolutionary economic theory.

Chapter 9 asks whether any species other than humans have culture. To a large extent, this depends on how we define culture to start with. It is clear, however, that a surprisingly large number of other species possess at least some of the key elements of human culture, such as the ability to learn from other individuals and to maintain stable between-group differences in behavior that might be described as cultural traditions. Yet only humans appear to have cumulative culture, where modifications are built up over successive generations. Why only humans have cumulative cultural evolution is at present a mystery, but this avenue of study promises to shed light on the origin and basis of human culture.

In the final chapter, I argue that all the research that I have discussed here is indicative of a coming evolutionary synthesis for the social sciences. For all the brilliance of The Origin of Species, it was not until the so-called evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s that evolutionary biology really took off as a coherent and successful discipline. Prior to this synthesis, biology was fractionated into several isolated disciplines composed of experimentalists, theoretical modelers, field naturalists, paleontologists, and so on. Each discipline had its own theoretical assumptions that often conflicted with those of other disciplines. During the synthesis, scientists within each discipline came to accept the same basic assumptions, thus synthesizing biology within a single Darwinian theoretical framework. More specifically, it was recognized during this period that broad trends and patterns in biological macroevolution, such as patterns of adaptive radiation in the biogeographical record or periods of change and stasis in the fossil record, could be explained in terms of the small-scale microevolutionary processes studied by experimentalists and model builders, processes such as natural selection, sexual selection, and drift. I argue in chapter 10 that the social sciences are currently in a similarly fractionated state as the biological sciences were prior to the 1930s. However, if culture does indeed evolve in a similar way to species, then a similar evolutionary synthesis might be possible for the social sciences. That is, large-scale trends or patterns of cultural macroevolution, as studied by archaeologists, historians, historical linguists, sociologists, and anthropologists, might be explained in terms of small-scale microevolutionary cultural processes, as studied by psychologists and other behavioral scientists. We can see the emergence of a unified science of culture, one that transcends traditional social science disciplinary boundaries.

This view of a single, overarching science of culture, unified around a Darwinian evolutionary framework and incorporating anthropology, archaeology, economics, history, linguistics, psychology, and sociology, may seem naive. Anyone who has studied a social science subject at university level will probably be aware that there is little theoretical common ground, or even communication, between many of the different branches of the social sciences. Yet the current state of the social sciences, composed as they are of theoretically incompatible and mutually incomprehensible disciplines, is hugely problematic. Valuable findings and theories are rarely transferred across disciplinary boundaries to stimulate work in other fields, and scholars waste time reinventing discoveries that have already been made in other disciplines. Consequently, while there are pockets of rigorous and high-quality research being carried out within specific social science disciplines, it is lamentable that so little progress has been made over the past few decades in understanding one of the most intriguing and astounding phenomena known to science—human culture—especially when so much progress has been made in the natural and physical sciences over the same period. My aim in this book is to nudge the social sciences along a little by showing that there is a growing interdisciplinary body of work that is making significant progress in explaining culture scientifically.

Acknowledgments

This book is the cumulative product of the influence of many people over several years. Henry Plotkin, Kevin Laland, Andrew Whiten, and Michael O’Brien have been particularly important in shaping my thinking on many of the issues covered here. I am also grateful to the following people for reading and commenting on one or more chapters, and whose advice has undoubtedly improved it: Robert Aunger, Elodie Briefer, Kevin Laland, Stephen Lycett, Michael O’Brien, Alan Mc Elligott, Richard Nelson, Peter Richerson, Jamie Tehrani, Peter Turchin, and Andrew Whiten. Finally, I thank my editor at University of Chicago Press, David Pervin, who provided unwavering support and a much-needed outsider’s perspective.

1    A Cultural Species

Humans are a cultural species. We acquire a multitude of beliefs, attitudes, preferences, knowledge, skills, customs, and norms from other members of our species culturally, through social learning processes such as imitation, teaching, and language. This culturally acquired information affects our behavior in quite fundamental ways. People who grow up in different societies exhibit measurably different ways of thinking and behaving because they acquire different cultural norms and beliefs from other members of their societies. Culturally transmitted technology, from stone tools to automobiles to the internet, and culturally transmitted political, economic, and social institutions have drastically changed our environments and our lives in a relatively short period of time. No other species on the planet exhibits such rapid and effective cultural change.

As a result, any explanation of human behavior that ignores culture, or treats it in an unsatisfactory manner, will almost certainly be incomplete. Yet a large number of social and behavioral scientists—many psychologists, economists, and political scientists, for example—either implicitly or explicitly downplay or ignore cultural influences on human behavior, instead focusing on the behavior and decisions of single individuals with little or no consideration of how that behavior and those decisions are affected by culturally acquired norms and beliefs. Other social scientists—many cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and historians, for example—do acknowledge the importance of culture, yet their methods and approaches often lack the scientific rigor and precision needed to satisfactorily explain how and why culture is the way that it is and how it affects behavior in the way that it does. Consequently, while the natural and physical sciences have made huge progress in the last century or so in explaining the hidden mysteries of life, matter, and the universe, the social sciences have failed to provide a unifying and productive theory of cultural change. The different branches of the social sciences remain fractionated, each speaking their own, often mutually unintelligible, languages and holding assumptions and theories that are mutually incompatible. Indeed, a good example of this mutual incompatibility concerns the very definition of culture itself, which varies greatly from discipline to discipline. It is necessary, then, to clearly specify the definition of culture that will be used in the rest of this book, before going on to demonstrate the extent to which culture shapes our behavior.

What Is Culture?

Culture is one of those concepts, like life or energy, that most people use in everyday speech without giving much thought to its precise meaning. In fact, people often use it in several different, but overlapping, senses. For example, it might be used to identify a specific group of people, usually within a single nation, such as French culture or Japanese culture. Or it might be used in the sense of high culture, such as literature, classical music, and fine art, as is the focus of many culture sections of Sunday newspapers. Or it might be used to describe a seemingly shared set of values or practices within a group or organization. For example, during the financial crisis that began in 2007, many commentators lamented the culture of greed that seemed to be prevalent within the banking industry, as it emerged that CEOs were still receiving huge bonuses even as their banks were being bailed out using public money.

When scientists use the term culture, they usually mean something broader, something that encompasses all three of the definitions above. Although literally hundreds of definitions of culture have been proposed across the social sciences over the years, the definition that I will adopt in the rest of this book is that culture is information that is acquired from other individuals via social transmission mechanisms such as imitation, teaching, or language.¹ Information here is intended as a broad term to refer to what social scientists and lay people might call knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, norms, preferences, and skills, all of which may be acquired from other individuals via social transmission and consequently shared across social groups. Whereas genetic information is stored in sequences of DNA base pairs, culturally transmitted information is stored in the brain as patterns of neural connections (albeit in a way that neuroscientists are only beginning to understand), as well as in extrasomatic codes such as written language, binary computer code, and musical notation. And whereas genetic information is expressed as proteins and ultimately physical structures such as limbs and eyes, culturally acquired information is expressed in the form of behavior, speech, artifacts, and institutions.

This definition of culture encompasses in one way or another all of the colloquial uses of culture noted above. Culture includes the Japanese grammar and vocabulary, Japanese norms, and Japanese customs that a Japanese child acquires that contribute to maintaining the specific Japanese culture. The skill required to use chopsticks, for example, is stored in the brains of virtually all Japanese people, is acquired from other people via imitation or teaching, and is expressed behaviorally in the form of chopstick use. Cultural groups are not always the same as nation-states, though: there is substantial variation in the customs and values of people living in different regions of Japan, while Japanese customs such as chopstick use have diffused to many other nations. Culture also includes the literature, music, and art that make up high culture, although it is by no means limited to this. Celebrity gossip about the latest relationship problems of Hollywood movie stars is just as much a part of human culture as are the works of William Shakespeare. And culture includes those norms and practices that may have been transmitted from banker to banker via imitation or direct instruction that create and maintain selfish behavior within an organization.

According to this definition, culture is defined as information rather than behavior (in anthropological jargon, it is an ideational definition of culture). Restricting our definition of culture to information does not mean to say that culturally acquired information does not affect behavior. Of course it does, otherwise it would be a useless concept for explaining human behavior. However, as anthropologist Lee Cronk makes clear, it is important to distinguish between culture and behavior for two reasons.² First, if behavior is the thing we are trying to explain, then including it in the definition of culture makes cultural explanations for behavior circular. A thing cannot explain itself, at least not in any useful sense. And second, there are other causes of behavior besides culture. In fact, this is a useful way of defining culture: by what it is not. First, as noted above, culture can be distinguished from information that we acquire genetically, from our biological parents, which is stored as DNA base pair sequences and expressed as proteins and, ultimately, as entire organisms. Second, culture can be distinguished from information that we acquire through individual learning, which describes the process of learning on our own with no influence from other individuals. While individually learned information, like culturally acquired information, is stored in the brain, it is not acquired from other individuals via cultural transmission. This distinction between genetically, culturally, and individually acquired information is important, because even if we observe variation between people and groups in some behavioral practice, we cannot automatically assume that the explanation of this behavioral variation is culture. Take variation in alcohol drinking, for example. Some variation in alcohol drinking is most likely cultural in origin, for example, resulting from the culturally transmitted norms prohibiting the drinking of alcohol found in religions such as Islam, or the more informal prodrinking norms found in certain social groups such as university fraternities and sororities. But some variation might be the result of individual learning, where a person independently decides to drink (or not to drink) alcohol because they like (or dislike) its taste or its effects. Other variation in alcohol drinking might be genetic. Indeed, certain genetic alleles have recently been found to increase a person’s risk of alcohol dependency such that people with these alleles have higher alcohol intake than people without these alleles. Many East Asians, on the other hand, lack a different genetic allele that would allow them to digest alcohol, potentially decreasing the frequency of alcohol drinking in that group.³

How Important Is Culture?

Given these alternative explanations for human behavioral variation, how can we be sure that culture really is important, compared to genes and individual learning? Here are three examples, one from political science, one from economics/cultural anthropology, and one from psychology, that illustrate the importance of culture in shaping our behavior.

Civic Duty: From Europe to America

It is often said that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Leaving aside the issue of the several million Native Americans who already lived on the continent, the early European settlers of North America did indeed come from various countries, including Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. As anyone who has traveled across Europe will be aware, while the inhabitants of each of these countries are broadly similar in their beliefs and attitudes (at least compared to, say, Japan or India), there are also significant differences between European countries. One such difference relates to values and attitudes concerning civic duty. These include various traits that can be considered beneficial to a liberal democratic society, such as the tendencies to donate to charity and conduct voluntary work, to vote in elections, to organize local pressure groups and labor unions, to regularly read newspapers (and thus be able to make informed democratic decisions), and to support social equality and representation for minorities. Some countries, such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, are high in average civic duty. Their inhabitants willingly donate to charity, vote, volunteer, and so on. Other countries, such as Italy and Spain, rank somewhat lower in average civic duty. Their inhabitants are less likely to, among other things, donate to charity, vote, and volunteer.

To political scientists Tom Rice and Jan Feldman, this cultural variation in civic duty presented a natural experiment that could test to what extent cultural differences persist over time.⁴ Rice and Feldman reasoned that if values related to civic duty are faithfully passed via cultural transmission from parent to child and teacher to pupil, down the generations, then perhaps the civic duty of contemporary Americans could be predicted by the specific European country that their settler ancestors came from. So Rice and Feldman calculated the civic duty for Americans of various European ancestries. They did this using the answers to such questions as Do you regularly read a news paper?, Did you vote in the last presidential election?, and Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?, and whether they agreed with such statements as Most public officials are not really interested in the problems of the average person and Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men.

Rice and Feldman’s results were just as they predicted. Americans who claim to be descended from settlers from European countries that have high civic duty, such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, themselves have relatively high civic duty. Americans who claim to be descended from European countries that have low civic duty, such as Italy and Spain, have relatively low civic duty. This can be seen in figure 1.1. Rice and Feldman’s explanation for this match is that values related to civic duty, such as beliefs that voting or donating to charity are important and desirable things to do, have been culturally transmitted by imitation or teaching from parent to child or teacher to pupil over the several successive generations from original European settlers to present-day Americans. This would have occurred despite extensive interaction with other Americans of different descent, despite a declaration of independence and a civil war, and despite differences between Europe and the United States in geography and ecology. And a subsequent study by Tom Rice and Marshall Arnett showed that values related to civic duty can have important consequences.⁵ They found that the average civic duty measured in different states at several points during US history significantly predict later socioeconomic development. For example, states that scored highly in civic duty in the 1930s were found to have relatively higher levels of personal income and education in the 1990s than states that scored low in civic duty in the 1930s. The reverse was not true: socioeconomic performance in the 1930s did not predict civic duty in the 1990s. So civic duty seems to be responsible for later socioeconomic development. The way in which it did this is not entirely clear, but we might imagine that states in which the residents more strongly value representative democracy elect more effective and honest public representatives, or perhaps rich residents of such states give more to charity, thus reducing inequality and raising average income. In any case, Rice and colleagues’ work illustrates how people’s cultural values can persist over several generations and significantly shape people’s behavior and the society in which they live.

FIGURE 1.1 The correlation between civic duty of European populations and the civic duty of contemporary Americans who claim to be descended from those European populations. Values are composite z-scores from various measures of civic duty. Data from Rice and Feldman 1997.

Is Fairness Universal?

Rice and colleagues’ studies are intriguing, but limited somewhat because they rely on self-reported measures of civic duty. Someone who says that it is important to vote