When one thinks of theories of culture, the humanities come to mind, as well as disciplines like soicology and anthropology. Mark Pagel is a population biologist who has developed new and creative directions in estimating phylogenetic trees from highly spotty data, using phylogenetic trees using Bayesian Markov process and related methods. What is he doing writing a book on human culture? Well, it turns out that biologists have developed much better models of cultural evolution than sociologists or anthropologists, and it is a crime and a scandal that the latter displines do not simply take over wholecloth the body of research created by evolutionary population biologists and animal behavior theorists.
The basis for the biological approach to culture is to note that culture is information passed from one generation to the next, just as genes are information (coded in DNA strands in our chromosomes) that do the same thing. Indeed, both genes and culture evolve by very similar mechanisms: replication, mutation, and selection. This is by far the most important point to keep in mind in trying to understand human culture and its contribution to the life of our species. Pagels does a very clear, elegant, and creative job in conveying this message even to readers who have never though more about biology than that involves dissecting frogs. Whenever a biological topic comes up, Pagel takes the time to explain the issue clearly and completely non-pedantically, often refering to analogies from music and the movies to make his points clear.
There is a second absolutely central connection between genes and culture: they mutually interact in the two million year history of the emergence of proto-humans and their transformation into Homo sapiens. The connection is called gene-culture coevolution. This term expresses the fact that once culture becomes an important part of our ancestors' lifes (I will call these ancestors hominids), through both tool-making and other forms of technology, as well as through initiating new forms of social interaction, culture determines who gets to reproduce and who does not. Thus in the long run culture produces genes and genes go on to produce new cultural forms. Moreover, both the genes and the culture are constantly subject to evolutionary pressure: a cultural form persists in the long run, just as a gene persists in the long run, only if it enhances the fitness of the individuals in which it resides. Indeed, the very title of the book "Wired for Culture" is a poetic way to express this deep insight.
Curiously, perhaps because it involves a lot of fairly heavy theorizing, Pagel does not present the models that validate gene-culture coevolution, and the biologists who pioneered this approach, including E. O. Wilson, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus Feldmean, Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd and others, are barely mentioned in the book, and when they are mentioned, it is for other things. I wish Pagel would turn his immense expository and literary talent to presenting this body of research to the general public. It is immensely exciting. Pagel suffices with nicely stated but rather cryptic statements like "To make our societies work, we had to acquire the social and psychological systems that would somehow overcome and tame selfish instincts born of millions of years of evolution by natural selection to cheat, exploit, dupe, and even murder one's rivals. The solution was simple in principle but profound in its effects: natural selection found ways that made it possible for individuals to align their interests with those of their group." (p, 72) Pagel summarizes these human propensities by saying that "Humans seem to be equipped with emotions that encourage us to treat others in our societies as if they were 'honorary relatives.'" (p. 81) He calls the underlying cultural forces "cultural altruism."
I heartily recommend this book to novice and seasoned professional alike---the former because he or she will learn much about our species, and the latter because they will learn how to present difficult material in an exciting and literary way without dumbing down the message. However, I do have a major bone to pick with Pagel: he apparently learned all of his cultural biology in the period before gene-culture coevolution in the 1980's, at the hands of the great innovators Richard Dawkins, William Hamilton, Richard Alexander, and Robert Trivers. These were the leading lights in the field when I came to the subject in 1990, but I quickly saw the limitations of their basic models, and got on the Feldman-Boyd-Cavalli-Sforza-Richerson bandwagon, and never got off. So perhaps the reader will indulge me while I express why the old theory has limitations and why our new approach is an important revision of the received wisdom.
Pagel summarizes his argument toward the end of the book as follows: "The fundamental feature of human societies is our cooperation...This cooperation depends upon meeting people repeatedly and on knowing others' reputations." (p. 364) This is of course the reciprocal altruism theory that Robert Trivers developed in a famous 1971 article. And of course, it is quite true that repeated interaction and reputation formation are very important parts of human social behavior and account for a lot of our success as cooperators. Interestingly, Trivers thought that this mechanism would apply to other animals as well (consider the famous cases of mutual grooming in simians and blood sharing of vampire bats), but it turns out that this is not the case. There are almost no confirmed case of cooperation in a non-human species based on reputation and reciprocal helping of the tit-for-tat variety. So it is at least possible that this account fully for human cooperation. But it does not.
According to the reputation theory of cooperation, people acquire a good reputation by exhibiting concerned citizenship, and others prefer to make alliances and transact with "good citizens." Why this preference for civic-minded transactors? The explanation is that such individuals are
likely to be following a long-term strategy of behaving honestly, loyally, and in a trustworthy manner, whether in public or private life. Therefore self-regarding individuals will behave as good citizens, at least when others are looking.
The problem with the reputation theory is that humans behave morally even when no one is watching. If people only cared about reputations, they would rob, rape, and steal as long as they were assured that no one is looking. Moreover, we would teach our kids to do exactly this! But few parents counsel their children in such manner. Probably none of us has ever heard our parents advise us "Now, Johnny, if you see an old lady in an alley or an otherwise empty appartment, knock her out and take her handbag." Moreover, if Pagel were right, we could never ask directions from strangers. Perhaps more importantly, all of modern democracy depends on people acting prosocially even when this is costly. In large democratic elections, the reputation-minded individual will not vote because the costs of voting are positive and significant, but the probability that one vote will alter the outcome of the election is vanishingly small. Nor is there a reputation effect. In fact, almost no one cares whether one's friends, business partners, or tradespeople vote. When one asks the bank for a loan, or when one applies for a job, one is not asked whether one votes. And if asked, one could simply simply lie and say that one voted when in fact one did not, because individual voter behavior is not public information. An individual with a morbid fear of getting caught lying (by it being documented, for instance, that he did not appear at the polling place on election day), could go to the voting booth, but would have no reason to fill out the voting form at all, or in any particular way, as it is costly to spend one's time putting little marks on a sheet of paper, and the voter's choices cannot be traced to the voter himself in secret ballot
elections. Thus the personal gain from voting is also vanishingly small. For similar reasons, if one chooses to vote, there is no plausible reason to vote on the basis of the impact of the outcome of the election on one's fitness or material circumstances. It follows also that the average voter will not bother to form opinions on political issues, because these opinions cannot affect the outcome of elections. Yet people do vote, and many do expend time and energy in forming political opinions. This behavior does not conform to the reputation model, because not being political does tarnish one's reputation. Some people are political and others are not. It is a short step from the irrefutable logic of reputation-based political behavior that selfish individuals who only sacrifice when it can help their reputation will not participate in the sort of collective actions that are responsible for the growth in the world of representative and democratic governance, the respect for civil liberties, the rights of minorities and women in public life, and the like.
Yet we have such political institutions and they are the result to a significant degree of such collective actions. This behavior also does not conform to the reputation model, unless you want to believe that all the heroes who have fought and sacrificed for our freedom and dignity were just enhancing their reputations. Personally, I think the idea is absurd.
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