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For anyone who has been paying attention, it should be obvious that I get a lot of my material from Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex. Optimistically, I take his ideas and expand upon them in an interesting fashion. Realistically, the relationship is more that of parasite and host. But regardless, I bring it up because I am once again going to that well. This time, to talk about a recent series of posts he did on cultural evolution.
What’s cultural evolution you ask? Well in brief it’s evolution that works by changing culture, rather than evolution which works by changing genes, but nevertheless evolution working in service of increased survival and reproduction. That this variety of evolution should exist and be embodied by certain “traditions” almost goes without saying.
(I put traditions in scare quotes because the elements of cultural evolution can take many forms, out of these some would definitely be called traditions, but others are more properly classified as taboos, habits, beliefs and so on. I’ll be using tradition throughout just to keep things simple.)
Some traditions so obviously serve to enhance the survival and reproduction of the people within that culture that their identification is trivial. A blatantly obvious example would be the tradition of wearing heavy clothing during the winter, a tradition which is present in all northern cultures. That such traditions exist is obvious, but for many if not most people it’s equally obvious that not all traditions work to increase survival, that some traditions are useless, probably silly and potentially harmful. That getting rid of these traditions would carry no long term consequences. Given the behavioral restrictions imposed by some traditions, there has been a lot of argument over which traditions should go into which bucket. Which traditions are important and which are inconsequential.
Initially you may be under the impression that it should be fairly obvious which traditions enhance survival and which are meaningless, but one of the key insights contained in Alexander’s posts, an insight based largely on his reading of The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, is that sometimes it’s not obvious at all. As an example, let me quote Alexander’s quote of Henrich (I told you I was a parasite) as he talks about cassava, or manioc as it’s sometimes known:
In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten. Figure 7.1 shows the percentage of cyanogenic content in the liquid, fiber, and starch remaining through each major step in this processing.
Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work. And even if the processing was ineffective, such that cases of goiter (swollen necks) or neurological problems were common, it would still be hard to recognize the link between these chronic health issues and eating manioc. Most people would have eaten manioc for years with no apparent effects. Low cyanogenic varieties are typically boiled, but boiling alone is insufficient to prevent the chronic conditions for bitter varieties. Boiling does, however, remove or reduce the bitter taste and prevent the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting).
So, if one did the common-sense thing and just boiled the high-cyanogenic manioc, everything would seem fine. Since the multistep task of processing manioc is long, arduous, and boring, sticking with it is certainly non-intuitive. Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of their day detoxifying manioc, so this is a costly technique in the short term. Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She’d find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning.
Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque—an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology.
Wait. Maybe I’m wrong about manioc processing. Perhaps it’s actually rather easy to individually figure out the detoxification steps for manioc? Fortunately, history has provided a test case. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese transported manioc from South America to West Africa for the first time. They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques. Because it is easy to plant and provides high yields in infertile or drought-prone areas, manioc spread rapidly across Africa and became a staple food for many populations. The processing techniques, however, were not readily or consistently regenerated. Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa. Detailed studies of local preparation techniques show that high levels of cyanide often remain and that many individuals carry low levels of cyanide in their blood or urine, which haven’t yet manifested in symptoms. In some places, there’s no processing at all, or sometimes the processing actually increases the cyanogenic content. On the positive side, some African groups have in fact culturally evolved effective processing techniques, but these techniques are spreading only slowly.
I understand that’s a long selection, but there’s a lot going on when you’re talking about cultural evolution and I wanted to make sure we got all of the various aspects out on the table. Also while I’m only going to include the example of cassava/manioc, there are numerous other examples of very similar things happening.
To begin with we can immediately see that it’s not easy to tell which traditions are important and which are inconsequential. Accordingly, right off the bat, we should exercise significant humility when we decide whether to put a given tradition into the “survival” or the “silly” bucket. In particular, one of the things which should be obvious is that cause and effect can be separated by a very large gap. Now that we have modern techniques for testing the cyanogenic content of something we can identify how much it’s reduced at each step in the process, but that wouldn’t have been clear to the Tukanoans. Rather they could only go by eventual health effects which could take years to manifest and would be unfamiliar when they eventually did end up appearing. As Henrich points out, you would first have to make the connection between someone’s health issues and eating manioc, and then further make the connection to whatever step you got rid of.
It’s also interesting to note that one tradition can seem to hold most or all of the utility. In the example of the cassava, just boiling it gets rid of all the immediately noticeable issues, it “removes or reduces the bitter taste and prevents the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting).” We can imagine something similar happening with other traditions. Like cassava preparation lots of traditions come as packages, for example there are a whole host of prohibitions and injunctions related to sex contained in most religions. And you can imagine someone saying, oh what they’re really worried about is STIs and unplanned pregnancies, now that we’ve invented latex condoms, we don’t have to worry about any of the injunctions against extramarital sex. We’ve identified the bit that affected survival and now the rest of it is just silly. But all of this might be the same as someone deciding that boiling was the only tradition necessary to make cassava safe, and discarding all other steps as superfluous. When, in reality, the benefits of the other steps are just more subtle.
Finally, there’s Henrich’s point that traditions, and the benefits they provide, are often non-intuitive. Alexander even goes so far as to speculate, in his commentary, that trying to use reason to determine which traditions are important could actually take you farther away from the correct answer, at least in the near term. And this is one of the chief difficulties we encounter when grappling with that initial question. In our determination of whether something confers an advantage to survival and reproduction how long of a time horizon do we need to consider? Henrich points out with cassava that it would take several years before problems were even noticeable. How much longer after that would it take before people were able to make the connection between the problems and the tradition they’d eliminated. Note, that even hundreds of years after its introduction into Africa, cyanide poisoning is still a serious health problem. The fact that the African’s never had certain traditions of preparation to begin with, makes things harder, but you’re still looking at an awfully long time during which they haven’t made a connection between cause and effect.
It seems entirely possible that even if you were being very rational, and very careful about collecting data, that it might, nevertheless, take multiple generations, all building on one another, before you could make the connection between the harm being prevented by a tradition and the tradition itself. Certainly it takes numerous generations to come up with the traditions in the first place.
To sum it all up, when attempting to determine which traditions are important, you’re going to encounter numerous difficulties. Chief among this is just the enormous amount of time it’s going to take before you can say anything for certain. And during this time, when you are trying to make a determination, much of the evidence is going to point in the wrong direction. In particular there will be a bias towards dismissing traditions as unimportant. Modern technology might help (for example knowing cyanide is bad and being able to detect it), but it might also lead to giving undue weight to sources of harm or benefit which are easy to detect.
As I mentioned at the beginning there’s been a lot of arguing over this question. The question of which traditions are important and which are inconsequential. To be fair this argument has been going on for a long time, at least the last several hundred years and probably even longer, but I would argue that it’s accelerated considerably over the last few decades. In particular three things seemed to have changed recently:
First, support for traditional religion has gone into a nosedive. There are, of course, various statistics showing the percent of believers (in the US) going from 83 to 77 and the number of unbelievers rising by a nearly identical amount, and this may not seem like that big of a deal. Though given that this decline only took 7 years, that’s still fairly precipitous. But more importantly with relationship to this topic, even if 77% of people are still religious, the religions they belong to have jettisoned many of their traditional beliefs.
Second, technology has made it easier to work around traditions. For one, survival is no longer a concern for most people, meaning that traditions which increased survival, particularly in the near term, are no longer necessary. As another example, in the past, traditional gender roles were hard to subvert, but now we can go so far as to provide gender reassignment surgery for those that are unhappy. The list could go on and on, and while I’m sure that in some cases the fact that technology can subvert tradition means that it should. I don’t think that’s clear in all cases.
And finally, perhaps following from the first two points, or perhaps causing them, there’s intense suspicion of all traditions, particularly those whose utility is not immediately obviously. This seems particularly true of any traditions which impinge on individual autonomy. But I also have a sense of it being disproportionately applied to anything that might be considered a European tradition.
Pulling all of this together we are confronted with a very important question. The question of which traditions can be dispensed with. Recently, and increasingly, the answer has been “All of them!” And perhaps people are correct about this. Maybe we have ended up with a bunch of silly traditions which need to be gotten rid of, but if we can take anything from the lesson of cassava, it’s going to take a long time to be sure of that, and reason isn’t necessarily going to help.
If, in fact, the normal methods of collecting and evaluating evidence in a scientific manner take too long to operate effectively with respect to traditions, you might be wondering what other tools we have for deciding this question? I would submit four for your consideration:
- The duration of the tradition. How long has it been around?
- The strength of enforcement for the tradition. How severe are the penalties for going against it?
- The frequency of the tradition among the various cultures. How widespread is it? Is it present in many different cultures?
- The domain of the tradition. Is the tradition related to something which could impact survival or reproduction?
To the above I would add one other consideration which doesn’t necessarily speak to the intrinsic value of any given tradition, but might suggest to us another method for choosing whether to keep or discard it. This is the issue of tradeoffs. How costly is it to keep the tradition? How much time are we potentially wasting? What are the downsides of continuing as is? Reversing things, if we abandon the tradition what are the potential consequences? Is there any possibility of something catastrophic happening? Even if the actual probability is relatively low?
You might recognize this as a very Talebian way of thinking, and indeed he’s a pretty strong defender of traditions. He would probably go even farther at this point and declare that traditions must be either robust or antifragile, otherwise they’re fragile and would have “broken” long ago, but I spent a previous post going down that road, and at the moment I want to focus on other aspects of the argument.
So enough of generalities, starchy tubers and Taleb! It’s time to take the tools we’ve assembled and apply them to a current debate. In order to really test the limits of things we should take something that has recently been declared to be not just inconsequential and irrelevant but downright harmful and malicious. With these criteria in mind I think the taboo against Same Sex Marriage (SSM) is the perfect candidate.
Before we begin I want to clarify a few things. First it is obvious that historically gay individuals have been treated horribly. And I am by no means advocating that we should return to that. Honestly, I really hope that traditions and taboos around homosexuality and SSM can be discarded and that nothing bad will happen, but I can’t shake the feeling that these traditions and taboos were there for a reason. Also given that two-thirds of Americans support SSM not only is this a great tradition to use as an example for all of the above, it’s also very unlikely that anything I or anyone else says will change things. Finally my impression is that many people offer up homosexuality and SSM as the gold standard for where reason came up with the right answer and tradition came up with the wrong answer. And speaking of which, that’s a great place to start.
One of the key arguments in the broader discussion is that past individuals did things based on irrational biases, but now that we’re more rational, and can look at things in the cold light of reason, we can eliminate those biases and do the correct thing rather than the superstitious thing. But considered rationally what is the basis for SSM?
(I should mention I’m mostly going to restrict myself to the narrower question of SSM, than homosexuality more broadly).
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the moral argument, and it’s a powerful one, but I’m not sure I understand the argument from reason. Rationally, as a society there’s lots of things we should be encouraging, and though there are some arguments over what these things are, reproduction would seem like something most people can agree on, and whatever other arguments you want to make about SSM, reproduction is not its strong point. In other words it would seem that arguments in favor of SSM are mostly moral, which is fine, but in our increasingly post-religious world you have to wonder: Where is that morality coming from? What’s it grounded on? This is obviously a huge topic, my key point is: I think the case for SSM from reason is weaker than most people think.
Moving beyond that most SSM proponents seem to argue from a lack of harm. That it’s not only immoral to withhold marriage from individuals who want it, but that it doesn’t harm anyone else to give them this right. Here’s where I think the question of time horizons brought up be Henrich is particularly salient. He offers plenty of examples of traditions where the harm prevented by the tradition will only manifest many years later. And even without those examples, I think the idea that it could take a generation or two for certain kinds of harm to manifest and that the connection between cause and effect might not be clear even when it does, is entirely reasonable. (There’s that word again.) To put it another way, it’s impossible to know how long it takes for something to manifest, or to be entirely sure that we have “waited long enough”. As a reminder, Obergefell is still a few days away from its fourth anniversary. That definitely does not seem like long enough to draw a firm, and final conclusion.
To return to my parasitism, Alexander just barely posted about one explanation for the more general category of all sexual purity taboos (including homosexuality) and that’s to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). A couple of selections:
STIs were a bigger problem in the past than most people think. Things got especially bad after the rise of syphilis: British studies find an urban syphilis rate of 8-10% from the 1700s to the early 1900s. At the time the condition was incurable, and progressed to insanity and death in about a quarter of patients.
—
[T]he AIDS epidemic proves that STIs transmitted primarily through homosexual contact can be real and deadly. Men who have sex with men are also forty times more likely to get syphilis and about three times more likely to get gonnorrhea (though they may be less likely to get other conditions like chlamydia).
In the previous thread, some people suggested that this could be an effect of stigma, where gays are afraid to get medical care, or where laws against gay marriage cause gays to have more partners. But Glick et al find that the biology of anal sex “would result in significant disparities in HIV rates between MSM and heterosexuals even if both populations had similar numbers of sex partners, frequency of sex, and condom use levels”.
This is probably part of the explanation for the taboo, and I would direct you to Alexander’s post if you want more detail. For my part I worry that uncovering the STI link is akin to finding out that boiling cassava “remove[s] or reduce[s] the bitter taste and prevent[s] the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting)”. That in both cases it will lead someone to feel that they have uncovered everything they need to know about the reason for the taboo. That in the same way they might decide other parts of the cassava preparation tradition are unnecessary, they might also decide that if we have other ways of avoiding STIs that there’s no need to continue to worry about taboos around sexual purity either.
Thus far, regardless of the tools we’ve applied, we’re not really any closer to a definitive answer to our question: Did historical taboos against same sex marriage serve to increase survival and reproduction or were they just silly superstitions? Having examined the ways in which Henrich’s book might help, let’s turn to the standards I suggested:
1- The duration of the tradition. How long has it been around?
I’m not an expert on historical homosexuality, but it seems pretty clear that taboos against SSM have been around in one form or another for all of recorded history. Wikipedia’s Timeline of Same Sex Marriage dedicates 4% of it’s space to everything before 1970, and the other 96% to stuff that happened after 1970. So yes, it wasn’t entirely unknown, but there was definitely a taboo against it at every historical point you care to imagine.
2- The strength of enforcement for the tradition. How severe are the penalties for going against it?
Historically punishments for homosexuality have been severe. I assume that, at least on this point, I won’t get much of an argument from anyone. Though it is true that the most severe punishments seem to have been in Europe and the Middle East, severe punishment wasn’t limited to those areas either. Where the taboo existed (nearly everywhere) it was very strong. And even in times and places where the taboo against homosexuality was not particularly extreme it was still strong enough that it was extraordinarily rare for people to be in a position to confront the, yet further still taboo, against SSM.
3- The frequency of the tradition among the various cultures. How widespread is it? Is it present in many different cultures?
As I mentioned a taboo against SSM was basically present at all times throughout human history, but it’s clear that further it was present in nearly all places at all times as well. It should be noted that even today 75% of the world’s population still live in countries where it’s illegal.
At this point if I were on the other side of that argument (and I am, a little bit, but it’s also apparent that that side doesn’t need any help) then I would use the ubiquity of the taboo to argue that it’s not cultural, it’s technological. It’s not that everyone had the same culture, it’s that everyone still had the same, relatively primitive, technology. I’m not sure current technology makes as big of a difference to this sort of thing as we think, but there’s at least an interesting discussion to be had on the topic.
4- The domain of the tradition. Is the tradition related to something which could impact survival or reproduction?
I would argue that this is the point that most people overlook or at the very least minimize. If culture evolves to enhance survival, then you would expect a lot of what comes out of cultural evolution to involve things which directly impact not only survival but reproduction, since that’s what you’re selecting for. Meaning that, when you’re trying to decide whether a given tradition is important or not, asking whether it has any impact on those two things would be a good place to start. And clearly the traditions we’re talking about do. Up until the very recent past there were a lot of people who were born who otherwise wouldn’t have been, had there been no taboos. Anecdotally, I have four cousin in-laws who wouldn’t have existed if Stonewall had happened 20 years earlier.
I’ve been conflating and separating SSM from other taboos against homosexuality more or less as it suits me, and with, admittedly, less rigor than would be ideal, but it occurs to me that on at least one point the seperation is very clear. In terms of behavior, SSM doesn’t allow for behaviors that much different from general taboos against homosexuality, but it’s very different in terms of societal norms. With most taboos, there are always going to be significant violations that end up being overlooked. Where you might say an “understanding” exists. If the violation of the taboo impacts what’s considered publicly sanctioned behavior, then that’s more difficult to overlook and the taboo is both different and stronger. SSM definitely falls into this category, in that it intrinsically has to be both public and sanctioned. That the Rubicon we’re crossing (for good or ill) is not in what behaviors we overlook, but in what behaviors we sanction.
Because we are crossing a Rubicon, and there would appear to be a lot of things indicating that this crossing is not inconsequential. For reasons of charity, I hope I’m wrong about this, but also because I don’t see any chance of things reversing themselves, if I am right, and we are headed for a bad outcome. There is some chance I’m right about the role of these traditions, that they were important, but recent technology has changed them to being inconsequential. But given all of the above, I think the entire issue should be approached with more humility. That at a minimum we should back off from people who want to maintain the taboo, both practitioners of religion and bakers of cakes. Particularly if there’s nothing resembling coercion in the way they want to maintain those traditions.
In the end I keep coming back to a point I’ve made in the past. You have two options: You can assume that the vast majority of people in the vast majority of places throughout all of history down to the present day were hateful, irrational bigots, or you can assume that maybe somewhere in all of this that there was some wisdom, and we should attempt to understand what that wisdom was before we abandon it.
You know what else has broad historical precedent? Patronage. Yep, the practice of rich and powerful people supporting art they appreciated. This isn’t exactly art, and you’re probably not exactly rich and powerful, but consider donating anyway.
Reading this reminded me of so many nineteen century Russian novels. They all complain about the same litany: the youth of ‘today’ don’t respect the traditions of the past, people want to use reason to solve all problems, after all aren’t we in a more reasonable age now?, we’re really just experimenting with things we don’t fully understand, etc.
The point of biological evolution is that it can change. The point of cultural evolution is that it can change faster than biological evolution (for multi-cellular organisms). Looking across centuries, the following appear fairly constant:
1. The old guard insist on tradition as they fear tradition’s demise.
2. The rising generation discounts tradition and is more willing to experiment.
3. As some traditions are rejected, the old guard predicts disaster.
4. The rising generation predicts Armageddon regardless of what going on around them, and seeks ways to prepare for the worst.
5. All these fears are rarely realized. When they are, the side who got it wrong gets the blame
5a. If only we’d stuck to tradition we’d have avoided this disaster.
5b. Those stodgy traditionalists nearly ruined us with their steadfast determination not to adapt to modern problems.
I feel like this pattern must be adaptive. It feels like a way to weed out some traditions and replace them with new ones. There’s a constant experiment of crafting new traditions and changing old ones.
Of course there’s always the possibility that some tradition is fundamental to all society functioning and we toss it out as unimportant. I think biology (and culture) is complex enough to work around that kind of problem. It’s a long-run system, and the concerns you present are not new, so presumably it’s antifragile.
I certainly don’t think the link between SSM and fertility is enough to worry about. Yes, fertility rates fall, but they’ve been falling since long before SSM. Indeed, I think to the extent you can assign a share of the blame to SSM, it’s a very small share. Certainly not where I’d start my focus if I were concerned about it. (I’m not concerned. Voluntary self de-selection is not a major societal problem, and will fix itself over time. Bio 101.)
And besides, the whole point of strongly adhering to tradition is that you can’t know the true cost to tashing tradition. Attempting to predict it is boiling manioc.
Few thoughts about evolution as a model:
1. Evolution works by making random changes and testing them.
2. Established traits are often difficult to explain since the number of variables in play is huge. Maybe not infinite but close enough.
3. No individual established trait can be trusted either way. One trait might be useful because other traits are in play. The moment those other traits vanish, the usefulness of that trait vanishes. Fashion and other market forces are very similar. You can try to sound smart by making statements like “we need to wear clothes to protect us from the elements” but beyond that you can’t predict fashion in the future or even explain it in the past (the 70’s, for example).
4. Some optimal paths cannot be discovered by evolution. For example, evolution only allows positive steps. A group of cells that is sensitive to light is useful. A group that is sensitive to more resolution is useful. That is allowed by evolution but what isn’t allowed is something like….”Human eyes are suboptimal, it would be efficient if we lost them and then had evolution rebuild them”. That might be but since that doesn’t help survival for the generations that lose eyes, evolution can’t explore that path.
(aside here, some intellectuals once defended communism in the USSR by trying to argue a generation or two needed to go backwards in order for the future to be all the better. Since evolution is at play, though, this was pretty fatal for the theory. Given how many possible paths there are, what mechanism could one possibly have to say ‘one step back two steps forward’ could work?)
Here are some things that fall out of that:
1. You don’t ‘choose to get rid’ of some tradition.
2. You don’t get to defend traditions, they are constantly being tested by people making random variations on them. If you see a tradition declining, it’s a sign it no longer contributes to survival. Since, as you say, it is so complicated that knowing why a tradition works is often impossible to determine, that would apply to any attempt to defend a declining tradition.
3. Cultural evolution should, therefore, always work. If you’re trying to get to higher ground but can’t see the landscape, only taking steps in directions that are higher than your current one will work. It may not land you at the highest peak, though.
However because traits that may be useless or harmful in many contexts can be useful in another, it’s quite possible if there are any ‘killer apps’ out there they will be stumbled upon giving a ‘quantum leap’ to the culture that adopts them. When that happens the culture will probably take not only the ‘magic trait’ but all other traits that happen to be in play for the escalator ride up.
I think there’s a definite corollary between traits that evolve alongside one another – where one trait is adaptive and the gene for it sits near another that is inconsequential – and the idea of cultural evolution pulling forward traditions that provide no benefit because they’re entwined with traditions that do.
However I noticed you’ve skipped a step in your corollary between biological evolution and cultural evolution: selection. In biological evolution, just because some mutation changes a trait doesn’t mean that change will be beneficial. Most of the time it will be benign, with a minority of the time the mutation being maladaptive. A tiny minority of the time the mutation is actually beneficial.
We don’t know whether a change is beneficial until/unless we encounter a selection event. Sometimes those selection events reveal a trait to be benign, sometimes maladaptive, sometimes beneficial. For example, say there’s a mutation on the gene for storing fat, increasing fat stores in certain areas (steatopygia). If there’s a famine as a selecting event, this might provide an adaptive advantage. Or perhaps due to Sir Mix A Lot comes the trait has a reproductive advantage. There are multiple potential survival advantages. However, there are possible disadvantages to hanging on to all that extra junk in the trunk. Perhaps this is selected against in certain regions (and in some regions it might be adaptive while in others maladaptive and in others benign).
The point is that BEFORE the selecting event, we don’t know whether the mutation is good, bad, or neither.
If we take that same lesson over to cultural evolution, we have to do so without making false equivalences. An individual does not a culture make. Thus, while traits are inherited and passed down among individuals in biological evolution, traditions are inherited and passed down among groups in cultural evolution. A group that increases its representation in the population over long periods of time can be said to have developed ‘successful’ traditions. It’s not possible to say anything about the success of a recent innovation any more than we could say the same thing about a trait when talking about biological evolution.
Take an example from biology: an avian version of influenza is endemic in the bird population for thousands of years. The genes of this influenza virus are successfully perpetuating themselves down through the millennia (ignore the debate about whether viruses are alive). The flu mutates and jumps to humans. This is a new strain, with a gene that is slightly different from the original virus in a way that expands its influence. The mutated virus spreads quickly through the naive human population, infecting billions of people. It is also very deadly to human hosts, killing 95% of those infected. At one snapshot in time the mutated virus looks more ‘successful’ than the original virus, with many more individuals infected and more copies of itself on the planet. This is deceptive, though, because the humans will respond by actively fighting the virus, or they will die off – or a combination of both.
The best long-term survival strategy doesn’t necessarily match what looks beneficial in the short-term. Groups of humans are always experimenting by changing their cultural norms. Sometimes this results in a greater representation of one tradition or another in the population. Whether that change is beneficial long-term is not something we can make a judgement about in the short-term, regardless of the new tradition’s current representation in the population.
One final example from cultural evolution. The Romans in the early first millennium AD/CE knew about the concept of quarantine, and employed it to great effect when epidemics came around. They didn’t know anything about germ theory, but they still got that right. Christians came along and jettisoned the idea of quarantine. They obeyed the Christian mandate to administer to the sick, and contracted diseases at a much higher rate than the Romans practicing quarantine.
It looked like a case of a bad adaptation coming in. However, Christians survived epidemics at a much higher rate than other Romans – because they had help through the illness. It’s hard to tell what is beneficial and what is not just by looking at short-term trends.
There’s obviously another post in this which once again will borrow heavily from SSC, but he makes a distinction between cultural evolution and memetic evolution. It’s obvious that cultural evolution at it’s traditionally understood, even though it’s faster than biological evolution still takes an awful long time. And it’s still very much tied to survival. As I mentioned (though not at great length) survival isn’t really a concern, certainly not in the developed world. Meaning we can kind of do whatever sounds good. Now memes will still have to battle to sound good, for space in the discussion. But It feels like we are very much past the point where survival has any impact on new culture.
Also, Mark, I would be very interested in a citation for the Romans vs. Christians thing.
Can’t remember where I saw it, sorry. I think maybe one of those SSC links posts a year or two ago?
Meanwhile, survival isn’t the only form of selection. Anything that increases/decreases a gene’s representation in the population will have an evolutionary impact.
If cilantro eaters had a birthrate of 5, while anti-cilantro eaters had a birthrate of 1, we’d all eventually eat cilantro. There’s a genetic component to that (some people think cilantro tastes like soap) but you could also have cultural selection from the same trait. Imagine two societies with no genetic predisposition to hate cilantro. One has a cultural taboo against cilantro and another favors it. The one population will grow and the other will shrink.
This gets more complicated when individuals can shift from one group to another at will, but mostly trends will win out long-term.
There are other ways to increase your selective advantage by increasing your genetic representation. Its important to remember that long-run selective events can be invisible to us short-term. Especially as they become more rare or taboo to even contemplate. Rape during conquest (increase), genocide (relative increase?), physical population isolation (decrease – it’s complicated).
I mentioned reproduction on several occasions, but yes technically anything that affects the presence or absence of genes will have an evolutionary impact.
The cilantro example is pretty extreme, I’m wondering, particularly if we are in the Long Peace, and wars are a things of the past, how big would the difference have to be to matter? What if cilantro eaters had a birthrate of 2.22 and anti-cilantro eaters had a birthrate of 2.21? Would you eventually see the manifestation of that as part of the culture? If so how long would it take?
And of course we have examples of birthrates that are much different, for example the birthrate between the religious and the irreligious… To say nothing of the difference between developed and less-developed countries.
Speaking of which I’m not quite convinced of this:
“So, if one did the common-sense thing and just boiled the high-cyanogenic manioc, everything would seem fine. Since the multistep task of processing manioc is long, arduous, and boring, sticking with it is certainly non-intuitive. Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of their day detoxifying manioc, so this is a costly technique in the short term. Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc.”
Did they ask them? Perhaps, being huge manioc eaters, they can taste even a slight bit of bitterness and know the difference in taste between properly prepared manioc and improperly.
” What if cilantro eaters had a birthrate of 2.22 and anti-cilantro eaters had a birthrate of 2.21? Would you eventually see the manifestation of that as part of the culture? If so how long would it take?”
The question isn’t how many kids cilantro and non-cilantro eaters have. The question is how often does a cilantro eater convert another person into a cilantro eater.
Boonton has it right here, I think. The difference between cultural and biological evolution is the possibility of interconversion among cultures.
Also, there’s an intellectual tendency to want to reduce everything to the One True most adaptable culture. You want to look forward to the time when one strategy ‘wins out’ and defeats another. That’s not a good long-term survival strategy. A species that will persist through whatever unpredictable circumstances come its way will simultaneous have multiple contradictory survival strategies – even somewhat suboptimal ones – in case a selection event randomly selects one or the other survival strategy. What works well today may kill you tomorrow, and vice versa.
This should be true with either cultural or biological evolution. It’s fine to laugh at the doomsday preppers, because the probability they’ll ever use their ridiculous setup is miniscule. But it’s still not zero. That doesn’t mean I’m going to go off and doomsday prep, or that I’d recommend it to anyone, but I understand the human urge to do so in a tiny minority of the population. There are plenty of things that make no sense for most people to do that make a lot of sense for someone in a society to do, just in case.
Thus, it’s not only irrational to expect a homogenous adoption of any cultural innovation – whether cell phones, cars, religion, atheism, acceptance of SSM, meditation, exercise, marriage, etc. – it’s maladaptive to expect conformity. For anything.
Consider the ‘tenth man theory’ that says if 9 people in a room all agree the tenth person should disagree. I strongly suspect there’s a type of ‘tenth man trigger’ in our heads. The more people agree upon one thing the higher the chance that the trigger will be pulled in somone’s head who will disagree just for the sake of it. No fact will ever get 100% agreement no matter how true it is or how much support it gets. The moment 99.9% of people agree on something the odds that the remainder will veer against become 100%.
Is this a helpful trait for individual survival? Probably not. It means there’s a chance you will end up rejecting something that has a tremendous amount of proof . If 99.9% of survivors take the anti-zombie vaccine, that trigger might go off in your head and make you a sudden vax-denier and your brain gets eaten.
I suspect this trait isn’t great for cultural survival either. But it is good for its own survival.
Something I think we all missed is that evolution is not about survival advantages. At least not of the host organism, but about survival advantages of the trait itself. The flu virus isn’t doing anything good for pigs, birds or people but it’s making out great for itself. A cultural trait’s survival advantage is quite likely for the trait itself.
Another quibble. I don’t think there’s a taboo against SSM in history. Taboos are not simply things that aren’t done but things that are thought about a lot. Consider incest, for example. It’s not just rejected and frowned upon but also contemplated quite a bit. Not so much as a hidden desire IMO but as something people obsess about. For example, it’s commonly used to apply to any group that’s viewed as an ‘other’ either in real life or fiction. Was there a taboo against SSM for much of human history or was it simply not done just as for most of human history we lacked paper money or corporate ownership….even though we can find examples dating far back in history it would be strange to describe the absence as a ‘taboo’.
Third, I would agree that evolution is a good model for culture but I’ll come back to the flaw here is assuming we ‘decide’ things. That’s simply not how it works. All cultural traits are under random pressures to be bent and modified. For example, it is the custom at your office to give secret santa gifts at Christmas time. But you want to save your money. Hence you try to figure out how much you can skimp on the gift without it becoming a scene. All cultural traits have these random pressures on them so they are like mutations. In biology a trait has to be ‘conserved’, because mutation is always chipping away at it, in order for selection to preserve the trait the advantage must be intense. A declining or changing trait, then, is actually evidence that it either never did or no longer carries survival advantage. Rather than being conservative, then, trying to preserve the trait may actually be foolish and harmful. Kind of like insisting on using the old antibiotic you learned about in med school when the medical journals say bacteria has long since developed resistance to it.
That being said I’ll just add there is no ‘oppression’ going on. The cake shops and clerks are more or less scams by the right wing, mostly to rip off other right wingers.
Yes, preservation of the gene is key in biological evolution. I was careful to stipulate ‘increases its representation in the population’ so I don’t think this was overlooked, but it’s always good to call it out. It’s an interesting question whether cultural evolution preserves the tradition, rather than the group that espouses it, since you can choose to adopt new cultural norms when they compete against other norms.
And I do think individuals can choose to align with one or another competing cultural trend. I don’t think society as a whole often ‘chooses’ a tradition so much as gradually transitions. Even so, you do get clear ‘choice’ events. Sometimes you have something like Brown v. Board of Education, where a governance decision impacts cultural norms. Another example I was reading about today: in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930’s Jews were a normal part of society, fully integrating in neighborhoods and communities. In a complicated series of events the local government caved to pressure by Germany and stated they would not defend their Jewish population. Overnight the nation converted to harsher treatment of Jews than in Germany, with ten times the deaths after two weeks as had occurred in Germany in the previous five years. It’s an interesting, complicated story in which the majority of the population would have voted to defend their Jewish neighbors, but the vote was cancelled last minute and the whole society turned on a dime.
Either way, culture was transmitted within the lifetimes of individuals, not across lifetimes as with genes. That’s the whole point of cultural evolution granting a huge adaptive advantage. I think most cases of saying people ‘choose’ culture in the discussion above are alluding to this fundamental dynamic, not like a college student sitting down with a guidance counsellor and choosing a major.
Again, I’m not saying this is the norm. I’m saying we do see decisions to adopt one or another culture made on both individual and group levels. Sometimes due to ‘selective’ pressures, sometimes not.
I agree that there’s no sense in talking about opposition to SSM prior to common awareness of it as a thing people might do. Homosexuality has deep historical roots, but to my (very limited) knowledge, the idea of marriage in same sex partnerships is very new. As such you can talk about homosexuality in a historical sense, but if you conflate it with marriage you’re committing an anachronism.
As to the baker thing, I think it gets too much hype. Still, it seems clear that on both sides there’s an idea that competing cultural ideas must be at war with each other and may the best culture win, and the other culture most be annihilated or else. Yes, most of it is overblown. But from what I’ve seen it’s overblown on both sides. On the right there’s fear the government is going to mandate conformity to cultural acceptance of homosexuality, reaching into homes and indoctrinating children. If the right doesn’t win this fight they’ll take your children away from you if you let your daughters play with dolls!
On the left there’s fear a backlash movement will make homosexuals second-class citizens. If they don’t win, the right will arrest homosexuals. They’ll blacklist and boycott them as individuals, not allowing them to work or earn a living. Gay ghettos and a permanent underclass, is that what you want?
Thus the constant drumbeat from the right about forcing bakers to bake a cake. And on the left, why take one stupid baker to court to force him to conform? It’s all fear-mongering on both sides.
Pluralism seems to have been a strong meta-cultural adaptation, where multiple cultures are allowed to exist simultaneously. It never worked perfectly, or even well, but it worked. However it also appears unstable, as people on both sides trend to reject pluralism outright, choosing instead to fight each other on the basis of culture in the mistaken belief one side has to be victorious for the good of society. I think the opposite is true. When cultures war like this, we all lose.
I know that some people probably think I’m some kind of raging homophone, but in reality, most of my interest is intellectual. The idea that SSM never even occurred to anyone before 1970 would probably be more interesting than there being a strong taboo against it. The latter has plenty of company, the former would be nearly unique I think.
Also I don’t think I’ve given any indication of wanting gay ghettos, nor do I think it has the slightest chance of happening in modern America.
But overall, I think you touch on the key point. I’ve very worried about pluralism. Something seems to be driving us to increasingly make one culture dominant and all other cultures unthinkable. If nothing else this makes it more and more important that our one culture has to be the correct one.
I pictured a ‘raging homophone’ and laughed out loud. 🙂
I get that your concern is more about the potential long-run impact of recent cultural innovations. A few decades ago you’d be writing about the pill or no-fault divorce. And indeed, I think you have written about the pill (possibly divorce?) before, so my sense is the SSM focus is more of a recency bias than intentional targeting.
My point about gay ghettos was that the claims of what the other side wants to do in the culture wars often seems far beyond either the claims of said villains’ intentions, or their ability to achieve such outlandish outcomes. People on the Right (not necessarily you) often make equally outlandish claims about the Left’s ‘true intentions’ with SSM.
Finally, there is no ‘correct’ culture. Just a culture that is more adaptive to the conditions we find ourselves in. Our ideas about due process don’t work in primitive Stone Age conditions for all sorts of practical reasons. Tomorrow’s conditions will be different, and culture will change again – though likely not back to what it once was but instead to something new. If we eliminate all other cultures, we either deprive ourselves of the benefits of cultural adaptation, or we assure our eventual demise.
I don’t think you’re a homophobe. But as Jeremiah has multiple meanings in literature you may in fact be a homophone. I suggest getting tested.
” The idea that SSM never even occurred to anyone before 1970 ..”
Funny thing about that. Being in my mid-40’s, the 70’s were my infancy. But speaking with people who were very old when I was still somewhat young, I notice a bit of a disconnect.
Some people seem to have perceived of gays as being something invented, perhaps by Phil Donahue, in the 70s and 80s. Others seem to have always been aware. For example, my late father-in-law knew when he was young certain bars and even certain bus lines late at night in Newark were where gays congregated.
I suspect the difference between today and the ‘Mad Men’ and earlier epochs was a type of collective cognitive dissonance. Society was fine with contradictory mutually exclusive narratives running at the same time. In public a man might praise marriage and family while having a mistress on the side. The two ‘worlds’ were kept apart and mostly not allowed to overlap. For example, one episode of Mad Men featured a new credit card whose selling point was that the statement could be sent to the office, hence the man’s would have ‘privacy’ from his wife opening the mail and perusing where he spent money and time. It was perfectly easy to go thru life living in a tv world mindset of happy families where such things were rare events or go thru life where ‘the real world’ was here and the story was some type of collective mask everyone wore. Perhaps this was a type of compensation for low divorce rates (“look do what you want but you can’t divorce your wife that would ruin her and your kids and you’d be labelled bad”).
We of course play the game of mutually exclusive narratives all the time. You praise your boss but make fun of him among your peers when he isn’t around. But mass media and exhibitionist culture made it unworkable. A trait that had survival advantages (staying with your wife while having things on the side) became disadvantages (you’re living a lie) in a different age where marriages based on honesty suddenly became a trait with more survival advantages.
“Sometimes you have something like Brown v. Board of Education, where a governance decision impacts cultural norms.”
Or another way of reading that is segregation imposed by whites was the tradition that was being chipped away. First by Reconstruction, then by the industrialization of the economy and the rise of the administrative state in the two World Wars. Brown was less the gov’t impacting norms as the gov’t reflecting norms that had long since been declining, Jim Crow & such were more like protectionism trying to shield traditions from the market.
“As to the baker thing, I think it gets too much hype. Still, it seems clear that on both sides there’s an idea that competing cultural ideas must be at war with each other and may the best culture win, and the other culture most be annihilated or else. Yes, most of it is overblown”
Consider the case of the pizza place. After the SSM decision was announced, the place speculated *if* a gay couple wanted to have a reception at their place *maybe* antidiscrimination laws would prohibit the place from saying no. Of course no actual couple was asking to do a reception, and while I”m sure it happens who has a wedding reception at a pizza place? Nonetheless, the non-event coupled with a ‘threat’ that the owner might shut down least it might come to pass ended up with $100K being raised on GoFundMe for the place. Not bad, how many pizzas does a place have to clear $100K after expenses? The right is littered with scare mongers running games raising money to fight this or that culture battle with the money siphoned away on ‘consultants’, ‘advisors’ and a permament class of right wing grifters running game on their voters. See, for example, the recent National Review article bemoaning how much right wing donations ends up in the hands of scammers with only a tiny bit actually going to real campaigns….just enough to keep the organizations within the law.