Evolution and Culture

Source: Joseph Henrich

There is an area of research in biology called niche construction theory that is focused on how evolution has been shaped by the way living organisms manipulate their environments. For example, consider how beavers and earthworms engineer the ecosystems in which they live. Through a process of reciprocal causation, over time these changes in turn re-shape the selective contexts and the course of evolution itself. In the same way, human nature and human cultures have co-evolved. Our shared objectives facilitated the evolution of cooperative problem solving and cooperative behaviors which enabled our ancestors to prosper and ultimately colonize new environments. Steven Pinker called this the "cognitive niche." Peter Corning returned to the subject of culture-gene coevolution, or culture-driven genetic evolution (also called dual inheritance theory) several times within his book Synergistic Selection and referenced two others on that subject: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich (2015), and Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? by Jonathan Kingdon (1993). Corning writes:

Henrich's book shows that the secret of our success lies in our collective brains--on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. He demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.

In Self-Made Man, Kingdon offers a radical new interpretation of the role that new tools and technologies played in driving human evolution. "Modern humans are truly self-made" argues Kingdon, because even the most strictly biological of adaptations was profoundly influenced by technological innovations, distinguishing our evolutionary path from that of all other animals. "All animals adapt to circumstances, and for humans, by definition tool-making animals, circumstances have become more and more self-made."

Source: Joseph Henrich

Our cultural evolution has had one major unintended side effect: it has created opportunities for exploitative hierarchical systems which have led to greater social inequality, political conflict, and today, the emerging environmental crisis, by undermining the more egalitarian social contract which had sustained our ancestors for millions of years. We have not yet developed the means for dealing with with these consequences. So it is now possible to see how these three things are connected at a deep level: (1) the existential threat posed by an unsustainable economic system, (2) the role of countervailing political powers within a functioning reverse dominance hierarchy, and (3) culture-gene coevolution, which is ultimately foundational to understanding the parts of these systems and provides a toolkit for reconfiguring them as needed.

Lest it be forgotten, the biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have argued that the evolutionary dynamic which drove the major transitions in the history of life developed safeguards to prevent one from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole. From which Corning deduced, "the next major transition in evolution must sustain and enhance our interdependent collective survival enterprise.” Speculating on the next major transition, Szathmáry writes: "It was language, with its unlimited hereditary potential, that opened up the possibility of open-ended cumulative cultural evolution... The biology of humans has become gradually de-Darwinized. It is culture where the main action is going on [my emphasis]."

There is no sharp line to be drawn between human and animal behavior except that evolution operates in humans overwhelmingly as a cultural process, through the accumulation, organization, and application of experience in a system of shared material, mental, and social constructions. This has allowed us to become the principle agent of the evolutionary process on this planet, and the instrument for realizing new possibilities for its future, at once an inspiring and a sobering conception. In the partnership between humans and nature, a joint enterprise, our futures are interlocked.
Source: Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (1957)

We get by with less fixed programming because we have added a new twist to the traditional Darwinian machinery of self-replication: a symbiotic relationship with culture that has liberated us from cognitive isolationism.
Source: Merlin Donald, "The central role of culture in cognitive evolution: a reflection on the myth of the isolated mind"

There is a chapter in The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment titled "History as Cultural Evolution" (p158). In a separate article titled "Why History and Cultural Evolution Are Natural Allies," Peter Turchin writes "what most people don’t realize is that cultural evolution allied to history has the potential of yielding immense practical benefits." Broadly speaking, this has always been the implicit understanding of historians, but the wider perspective of culture-gene coevolution adds more depth and the possibility of drawing a longer arc with greater explanatory, and possibly, predictive power (as was the hope of E.O. Wilson [1], not to mention a source of creative speculation for Asimov in his Foundation series). Insofar as we are evolving with our planet, it will be increasingly important to understand the dynamic by which this occurs. Joseph Henrich outlines the field of action:

Humans are very dependent on culture and cultural learning for very basic things — like how to find food, how to organise our societies, how to make the tools which allow us to survive. Human invention has always been a product of the interaction of minds. So if you want to energize innovation, you should create larger "collective brains" — in other words, interconnect more minds and allow information to flow more freely among people with diverse areas of knowledge and expertise.

We can think about culture as a genetically evolved cognitive adaptation for learning from other people. Natural selection is operating over generations to make people better at learning from the other members of their social milieu — figuring out who in their environment they should tune in to, what kinds of ideas they should pay attention to, and how they should integrate information across diverse people. Genetic evolution is shaping us to be cultural learners, but then the interesting part is that that turns around, and cultural evolution begins to shape our genetic evolution.

After reading Peter Corning, Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry, and now especially Joseph Henrich, I can't help but think that most of what I typically associate with "me," my personal identity, I owe to numerous other people. Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success really spells out in detail how, as individuals, we are virtually helpless. Our strength comes from our association with countless others, both formerly and now. A month ago when I asked Corning about how the individual parts of the human superorganism relate to one another, I had in mind some sort of theory of mind incorporating elements of enactivism or externalism. Now with Henrich, the extent of our "collective brain," as he calls it, is spelled out. Corning would caution against reifying these notions, emphasizing the synergistic effects as opposed to the means by which they are achieved, but nonetheless the picture that emerges is clear.



7/5/2018:

I believe women will guide our cultural evolution to become more responsive to the biological health of the planet. Carlos Perez recently wrote: "Women have a natural inclination to focus on the important things that make us human. To maximize the benefit of technology we must focus on how it improves our humanity and therefore we need to understand, at the very least, what makes us human and not what makes us machines." I've got some influential people in mind: Molly Crockett, Manuela Veloso, Margaret Boden, Rachel Armstrong, Radhika Nagpal, and Heather Marsh. But before I describe why I agree with Perez, we need to see the symbiotic relationship between culture and biology in the same way that they do. 

As Nicholas Christakis put it, culture is the earliest sort of intelligence outside our own minds that we humans created. We create culture, interact with it, are affected by it, and can even be destroyed by it. Culture applies its own logic, has a memory, endures after its makers are gone, can be repurposed in supple ways, and can induce action. These are also attributes of artificial intelligence, so after a manner of speaking, culture is a kind of "natural artificial intelligence." And seen in this way, culture-gene coevolution can provide a model for AI-gene coevolution. ...Now take a deep breath, because these women are helping to guide the direction of this coevolutionary process into the future, and they see good reasons to believe it will be a very human process. Here's just a few of the reasons they've provided.  

Margaret Boden believes that once we understand how it is possible for a representational system to be embodied, and how representations can be constructed, stored, accessed, compared, and transformed, we will have greater freedom and greater incentive to concentrate on what is most fully human. Manuela Veloso echoes this, "In some sense, the humanism of AI will eventually be what brings us together. ...focus on education, people knowing each other, caring for each other." I believe this is the direction in which our cultural evolution is headed. 

Rachel Armstrong sees a beneficial fusion of nature and machine in synthetic biology and living technologies. She believes that "technology is the way the mind becomes embodied in the process of problem solving. ...Human development is now enabled to synergistically evolve with the biosphere and help us coauthor an ecologically engaged future. Our task in a living culture of materiality will be to remain engaged and 'conversant' with those agencies that we rely on." ...I hope you are asking yourself right now, as I am asking myself: Is our culture engaged and conversant?

Molly Crockett describes some of the possible benefits that this synergy will allow: "Human brains are incapable of solving the interpersonal utility comparison problem. ...Bridging the empathy gap would require a way to quantify preferences and translate them into a common currency that is comparable across individuals [and] could be used to create better social contracts. Machines that can bridge the empathy gap could also help us with self-control. In addition to the empathy gap that resides between self and others, there exists a similar gap between our present and future selves. Self-control problems stem from the never-ending tug-of-war between current and future desires. Perhaps AI will one day end this stalemate by learning the preferences of our present and future selves, comparing and integrating them, and making behavioral recommendations on the basis of these integrated utilities. Think of a diet that is healthy enough to foster weight loss, but just tasty enough so you're not tempted to cheat, or an exercise plan that is challenging enough to improve your fitness, but just easy enough that you can stick with it." 

This reminds me of John Rawls "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, but it combines an objective approach to intimately subjective preferences in a unique way. It also includes elements of proactive (predictive) AI in that it provides "actionable intelligence." If we can predict the three factors of culture, genes, and environment, we will have fulfilled E. O. Wilson's hope of turning ecology into a predictive science.

Marshall McLuhan wrote “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” …And then we repurpose our tools, and share them, and others reconfigure them, and they reshape our sociocultural fabric. And all along, we evaluate their impact for good or ill. But our tools for bridging the empathy gap are still inadequate. We need to be better empathizers. Neuroscientist Molly Crockett knows all about this and how critical it may be for our collective survival enterprise – a term frequently used by Peter Corning. 

If we could bridge the empathy gap, then achieving the level of cooperative relations required for pursuing the great human projects of our time is not out of reach. Philosopher J. D. Trout wrote a book called “The Empathy Gap,” that describes some of these tools and approaches. Crockett could write the sequel. As she says, “We've already built computers that can see, hear, and calculate better than we can, [but] creating machines that are better empathizers is a knottier problem.” Maybe not. We don't necessarily need empathizing machines. The process has already begun with us, aided by the prosthetic devices everyone carries in their pockets. It's still too early to tell, but I think we've already started down the path toward narrowing the empathy gap. The quest to create an interpersonal-intertemporal lingua franca capable of making explicable utility comparisons (an empathic bridge) is a long journey, and an immense project of human culture.

Further Reading:
Robert Boyd 
Nicholas Christakis

[1] In his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand recounts that E.O. Wilson once told him "Ecology needs to be a predictive science." (p267)