Culture

Clearly culture is an entity emergent from the biological realm whose evolution is subject, at least in part, to its own emergent laws.

The prior knowledge from which culture emerged is huge, and encompasses both chemistry and biology. Numerous subconscious mental processes, illuminated by the Bayesian Brain theory, provide components used in cultural processes; of these, consciousness seems the most essential.

Consciousness, specifically that denoted by qualia (the subjective experience of consciousness, for example the experience of “redness” by a visual system) is deemed 'the hard problem' by philosophers.[i] From a functional point of view, consciousness may have arisen from a need to bring a kind of “meta-order” to mental mechanisms that are rapidly evolving in complexity. At least the degree of consciousness in animals seems to parallel their mental complexity as exemplified by humans. Some recent research suggests the purpose of consciousness and qualia may be to flag and thereby differentiate between both current sensory information from the environment, and mental models such as memories, plans and day-dreams.[ii]

Try looking intensely at some distinctively coloured object, such as a red tie. Then close the eyes and imagine the tie. Surely the vivid qualia are suddenly far dimmer in imagination. To reverse the experiment, imagine the object, then open the eyes and look at it. The qualia of the visual now are startlingly vivid by comparison with the memory. So perhaps what qualia do is flag the present so that we do not get confused with remembered past or anticipated future.

Another widely accepted precursor of culture is the related abilities to imitate and learn. Cultural processes evolve overtime as they are passed from generation to generation through a process of learning or imitation. Again humans excel at the ability to imitate:

Brain imaging techniques allow the mapping of cognitive functions onto neural systems, but also the understanding of mechanisms of human behavior. In a series of imaging studies we have described a minimal neural architecture for imitation. This architecture comprises a brain region that codes an early visual description of the action to be imitated, a second region that codes the detailed motor specification of the action to be copied, and a third region that codes the goal of the imitated action. Neural signals predicting the sensory consequences of the planned imitative action are sent back to the brain region coding the early visual description of the imitated action, for monitoring purposes ("my planned action is like the one I have just seen"). The three brain regions forming this minimal neural architecture belong to a part of the cerebral cortex called perisylvian, a critical cortical region for language. This suggests that the neural mechanisms implementing imitation are also used for other forms of human communication, such as language. Indeed, imaging data on warping of chimpanzee brains onto human brains indicate that the largest expansion between the two species is perisylvian.[iii]

The centrality of imitation to culture is conveyed in its Wikipedia article:

Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation.[iv]

Given that imitation is central to culture we can easily see that cultural processes might often involve Darwinian processes:

1) Copy - imitate

2) Variations in the copies - learning and imitation does not involve perfect duplication but produces some variable perspectives.

3) Variations in the characteristics of copies influence their survival - sometimes the new perspective is superior or better adapted and becomes more widespread; sometimes the new perspective has inferior survivability and is not long retained.

This model has been widely adopted in the social sciences and fields of study with 'Evolutionary' in their title abound: Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Archaeology, Evolutionary Linguistics, Evolutionary Epistemology, Evolutionary Economics etc. The school of Memetics views cultural evolution in general as based on a Darwinian process involving memes as the unit of replication.

The concept of an adaptive system is similar to that of systems that evolve through the operation of a Darwinian process. A Darwinian process is after all a means of evolving adaptations and thus many cultural processes may be included in this description.

As pointed out by Plotkin, adaptation and knowledge are equivalent.

This direction can only result if adaptations are ‘in-formed’ by features of the world; they are highly directed kinds of organization and not random, transient structures that may or may not work. Adaptations do work, and they work precisely because of this in-forming relationship between organismic organization and some aspect of the order of the world. This in-forming relationship is knowledge.[v]

Thus if we consider cultural processes as adaptive systems we might expect to find our model of 'knowledge mechanisms' applicable.

Science

Science may be culture's most powerful 'knowledge mechanism'. Its evolution by means of a Darwinian process has been well documented within the field of Evolutionary Epistemology.[vi]

The historical achievements of science provide prior data that through the Bayesian process of inference confer varying degrees of plausibility to a range of scientific hypotheses. New experimental data is generated and compared to the scientific model composed of these various hypotheses. The models are updated or revised in the light of any discrepancy or 'surprise' between the model and reality, as revealed by the new data.

The principle of Maximum Entropy, that entities will evolve to states of higher entropy subject to scientific law, tells us much about scientific law. Specifically it provides us with a measure of the completeness or 'truth' of scientific law. If a theory or scientific law is probed by a range of experiments and none of the new data represents a 'surprise' to the theory then that theory may be said to be objectively true and we may be confident that no additional unknown scientific laws exists that might influence the outcomes under the conditions probed.

This does not mean it is absolutely true in all circumstances, only in the circumstances that have been explored and verified by experiment. Given the nature of objective reality experiments are repeatable; they will provide the same results over all time given the same set of circumstances. It is in this sense that the predictions of the theories can be considered true.

[i] Shear Johnathan (Editor) (1999), Explaining Consciousness: The "Hard Problem" , The MIT Press; New edition (Jan 30 1999)

[ii] Gregory Richard (1998), Brainy Mind, Brit. Med. Journal 1998 317:1693 - 5

[iii] Iacoboni, M. (2005), "Understanding others: imitation, language, empathy" In: Perspectives on imitation: from cognitive neuroscience to social science, Hurley, S., and Chater, N. (Eds), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

[v] Plotkin, Henry C. (1993). Darwin Machines. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts.

[vi] Campbell Donald (1974), "Evolutionary Epistemology." In The philosophy of Karl R. Popper edited by P. A. Schilpp, 412-463. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.