The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Facilitates Evolutionary Models of Culture Change

Abstract

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is beginning to fulfill the whole promise of Darwinian insight through its extension of evolutionary understanding from the biological domain to include cultural information evolution. Several decades of important foundation-laying work took a social Darwinist approach and exhibited ecologically-deterministic elements. This is not the case for more recent developments to the evolutionary study of culture, which emphasize non-Darwinian processes such as self-organization, potentiality, and epigenetic change. Smith et al.: Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Cliodynamics 9:2 (2018) 85 "culture change," we believe that is misleading, for "change" need not be cumulative, adaptive, and open-ended. 1 Critiques of evolutionary models of culture have a long history in the Americanist anthropological tradition (Carneiro 2003; Mace 2014; Perry and Mace 2010), and today there remains question about the appropriateness of the "analogy" between cultural and biological evolution (Claidière and André 2011). While cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, cultural evolution is not merely analogous to biological evolution, it is a genuine evolutionary process, albeit one that uses different information channels, with different properties. Note that while some view the central criterion of evolution to be replication with variation and selection (e.g. Hull et al. 2001), this is but one form of evolution. Evolution can also occur through communal exchange and self-organization (Gabora 2013; Vetsigian 2006) and through context-driven actualization of potential (Gabora 2005, 2006) (for specific and general discussions of this topic see Kopps et al. 2015 and Gabora and Aerts 2002, respectively; see also Appendix 1). This approach is sometimes referred to as Self-Other Reorganization because it involves both interactions within self-organizing structures and interactions between them. We emphasize that for a process to be evolutionary (whether it be Darwinian evolution or not), change must occur on the basis of a fitness function or an environment that confers constraints and affordances. If not, i.e., if change is random, it is not due to evolution but to processes such as drift (i.e., variation in the relative frequency of different genotypes in a small population owing to the chance disappearance of particular genes as individuals die or do not reproduce). Cultural evolution is fueled by the generation of and reflection on creative ideas, which might exist not in the form of a collection of explicitly actualized variants as is required for biological evolution, but in a state of potentiality (Gabora 2017). 2 If an idea in a state of potentiality is considered with respect to one context it evolves one way, whereas if considered with respect to another context it evolves another way; there are no variants that get actualized and selected amongst. The mathematical description of evolution through variation and selection is very

Science-Driven Societal Transformation, Part I: Worldview

“…The separation between self and other also blurs across social organization. Human culture and language are collective cognitive processes and artifacts of niche construction [118][119][120][121]. Personhood, or self-identity, spanning such characteristics as personality, preferences, identity, and worldview, is a social phenomenon molded by culture [122].…”

The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture

“…Others have argued that the general cognitive ability underlying cumulative culture was the onset of a self-triggered recall and rehearsal loop (Donald 1991), relational reinterpretation (Penn et al 2008b), conceptual fluidity (Mithen 1996b), conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2008), or something Chomsky (2008) called "merge." Our own two-step theory attributes cumulative culture to the onset of representational redescription followed by the capacity to shift between the convergent and divergent modes of thought, culminating in the emergence of an integrated internal model of the world (Gabora 2018;Smith et al 2018). Thus, although Osiurak and Reynaud (O&R) position their technical-reasoning theory as the only alternative to social explanations for cumulative technological culture, they fail to consider theories that attribute it to the onset of a more general cognitive ability.…”

An Evolutionary Process Without Variation and Selection

“…We have shown how entities that possess an abstract structure mathematically described by RAFs can exhibit evolution without variation and selection. We refer to this kind of evolutionary process as Self–Other Reorganisation (SOR) because it consists of (i) self-organization of autocatalytic networks, and (ii) interactions amongst such networks that alter their potential for future configurations [19, 20, 23, 69, 77]. SOR involves not competition and survival of some at the expense of others , but transformation of all .…”