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When I started my last post I had intended to examine the various ways in which humans adapt to their environment. Four thousand words later, and I’d spent all of them on a defense of cultural evolution/tradition, which is of course just one of the ways we adapt to things, and probably (based on the comments) more interesting when considered in connection with other methods of adaptation than when considered in isolation. Though I still think my last post was important because there’s not nearly enough attention paid to cultural evolution as compared to other methods of adaptation, so establishing some kind of grounding there before proceeding will probably turn out to have been useful. But in any event, I didn’t even get to a discussion of other ways in which humans can adapt to their conditions, so I’m going to take another shot at it and see if I can do better this time. That resolution in place I’m going to immediately go in the opposite direction and spend just a minute or two clarifying some things left over from the last post.
I ended up posting a link to the last post in one of the SSC open comment threads. In addition to the link I laid out my four alternative criteria for judging a tradition. In response to this someone pointed out that in addition to being applied to same sex marriage that these criteria could also be applied to slavery:
- The duration of the tradition. –> Slavery was around for millenia
- The strength of enforcement for the tradition. –> Escaped slaves were punished by death.
- The frequency of the tradition among the various cultures. –> Slavery was very common
- The domain of the tradition. Does it relate to survival or reproduction? –> “The Confederacy decided slavery was so vital to their survival, they went to war for it. See again the Spartacus rebellion.”
To begin with, I found his response to the fourth point not very on point, and probably even a little flippant, but that still leaves the other three. Obviously it’s hard to talk about slavery in any fashion other than righteous flaming denunciation without it getting messy, but I guess I’m going to try it anyway. First, we need to remember that cultural evolution doesn’t care about morality, it cares about survival. Essentially what he’s arguing is that nothing immoral could possibly also be important for survival, which doesn’t follow at all. Second, this is precisely why the fourth point is important, I don’t think slavery does have any relationship to survival or reproduction. Finally, if we are going to add morality to the criteria, as this person seems to be doing, slavery has always provoked intense moral debates, while such debates over SSM are very recent.
In fact everything about SSM is very recent, which leads to the other observation I wanted to make before we move on. After finishing the last post, and discussing it a bit with some people, I realized I left out one of my main motivations. Given that it makes me look better (I think) it seemed wise to include it. I imagine that a lot of people would take that last post as evidence that SSM keeps me up at night, particularly if they also know that I’m religious. They might even assume, despite my many statements to the contrary, that I’m an extreme homophobe. But honestly, my interest is largely intellectual. I know I shouldn’t put too much weight on any one piece of data, but I keep coming back to the content disparity present in the Timeline of Same Sex Marriage article on Wikipedia. How is it that evidence before 1970 could be so slim? Not only does it represent a mere 4% of the article, but it’s clear that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel to get even that. If you haven’t bothered to check out the article here are some examples of evidence for SSM before 1970.
- They mention a single marriage in Spain from 1061.
- There’s a paragraph on it being referred to in a derisory fashion to describe political opponents during the Roman Empire.
- It appears to have been legal in ancient Assyria.
- The emperor’s Nero and Elagabalus married men.
- It was part of the culture of an oasis in Egypt of about 30,000 people (that is its modern population, I assume anciently it was even less).
Reviewing this list you might assume that I cherry picked the least impressive examples, but actually the list I just gave is more or less comprehensive. These are essentially all of the examples they could come up with. How is it that something which was so incredibly rare in the past has become such a huge deal in only the last few decades? One of my commenters suggested that perhaps it had just not occurred to anyone before 1970. I suppose that’s possible but if anything that just makes things more interesting. We have lots of examples of historical taboos, I can’t think of another example of something never even being considered before the present, certainly not outside of new technology, which SSM is not.
If my interest in SSM is mostly intellectual, you might wonder if I can provide any more visceral examples, reports of traditions under threat where my reaction involves more anger. I can. In particular I remember being very annoyed by the story making the rounds last month about training being given by the New York City Department of Education where things like “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word,” were labeled as “White Supremacy Culture”. This is only one data point, but it was a piece of data that fed into a feeling I’ve had for awhile. While I mostly talk about the erosion of moral traditions because that erosion is so obvious, it feels like there’s something deeper going on. I’ve had the sense for awhile that the attack on traditions might not stop there. And when I hear someone label objectivity as “White Supremacy” it seems to confirm those deeper fears.
With the last post put to bed let’s finally turn to a discussion of the various ways humans can adapt to their environment.
The first and most obvious method of adaptation is evolution through natural selection, which is a large topic unto itself, so for our purposes I just want to point out a few key features. To begin with, it operates through genetic mutations, which occur randomly. Most of the time these mutations are benign, some of the time they’re maladaptive and a tiny minority of the time they’re actually beneficial. (Commentators may notice that I borrowed some of their wording.) Despite the fact that these mutations are beneficial only a tiny minority of the time, the vast majority of what we see when we look are beneficial mutations, because that’s what’s being selected for, and is in fact the definition of beneficial since in this context that just means it makes the organism more likely to reproduce in such a fashion that the gene is transmitted to the next generation. To boil everything down, at this level adaptation:
- Is initiated randomly.
- Is tested in the crucible of genetic reproduction and survival.
- Takes a very, very long time.
The next method of adaptation, is the one I discussed at such length in the last post, that is cultural evolution. I obviously spent quite a bit of time on it in the last post, so you would expect there wouldn’t be much left to say on the subject. But I think it’s important to draw some sharp lines about what it is and what it isn’t. To begin with, while evolution through natural selection operates on the level of genes. Cultural evolution operates at the level of practices that can be transmitted by language. Which I shorthanded as traditions, and it makes having a common language pretty important (though being able to translate might get you most of the way.) The first thing that’s interesting about this, is that it makes culture harder to transmit in some respects, but easier in others.
Genes represent a common language for everything, meaning we get them from all over the place, not merely from Neanderthals, but from viruses as well. The same can not be said for traditions. We didn’t get any traditions from viruses, and it seems pretty unlikely we got any from the Neaderthals either. This is where traditions and culture are harder to transmit, but if you speak the same language, they suddenly become much easier to transmit than genes. Which makes it faster as well. So then how is it tested? This is the part of cultural evolution where all the debate is happening, and where I spent a lot of time in the previous post. But certainly survival has to be in there, and not merely survival of individuals, but survival of the whole culture. In fact I would argue that humans being what they are, that if your culture, taken in its totality, can’t survive conflict with other cultures (i.e. war). Then sooner or later your culture isn’t going to be around and there will be no traditions left to transmit.
Beyond survival, if traditions are the unit of evolution they have to be easily transmissible as well. They also have to be sticky, otherwise they wouldn’t be around long enough to have any effect. That makes traditions sound like memes, but I think there is one big difference. I think for a tradition to be considered part of cultural evolution it has to be attached to its host’s reproduction and survival. I think a meme just has to be able to ensure its own survival. This takes us to the final and weirdest way for humans to adapt. But before we go there let’s summarize the attributes of cultural evolution:
- Is initiated with some thought. “Hey, what if we tried this?”
- Is tested in the crucible of cultural and individual reproduction and survival
- Is much quicker than genetic evolution, but still kind of slow.
At last we reach the final method of adaptation, memetic evolution, and yet again I’m indebted to Scott Alexander of SSC for so clearly identifying it and I would encourage you to read the original post he did on it. But I also think there’s more to the story than what he points out, in particular I think he undersells the role of survival as the key differentiator between cultural and memetic evolution. But before we jump ahead I should explain the differences between the two as Alexander sees them. For him it mostly revolves around the idea of “convincingness”. That memetic evolution is about doing what sounds good (with competition happening around what that is at any given moment) while cultural evolution is about doing what worked in the past.
As you can see from the previous list, cultural evolution probably starts in very much the same way. Despite this there are at least two significant differences in how this process works for each. To begin with, in cultural evolution, the space of things eligible to be considered “good ideas” is much smaller, both because of greater resistance to change and because, due to technology, the list of things which could possibly be changed is also vastly smaller. The other difference is that at some point or another the “good idea” is going to be tested to see whether it actually improves the culture’s fitness or makes it worse. Neither of these things is true when it comes to memetic evolution. In the first case it’s a difference of degree, resistance to change still exists, but it’s decreased while the list of potential good ideas just keeps growing. But in the second case it’s a difference of kind, and I would contend that with memetic evolution we have reached a point where “good ideas” are completely disconnected from fitness. The test never happens. Accordingly the attributes of memetic evolution are:
- Entirely idea based, with a large potential space for generating those ideas.
- Ideas don’t need to provide any survival value for the humans which hold them. It’s all about idea propagation, and “mindshare”.
- Much quicker than cultural evolution, and it can be made quicker still by technology.
While we have mostly covered the first point, the remaining two require further discussion. While I think point two is self evident, it immediately leads to a very important follow-up question, how can we get away with no longer worrying about survival? There are three possibilities:
- We have progressed to the point where survival is no longer in doubt, therefore we can safely ignore it. The old rules really don’t apply. Perhaps because everything promised by the advocates of posthumanism is coming to pass.
- Survival and reproduction and evolutionary fitness still lurk in the background, but we have managed to make significant progress in lessening their importance, allowing us to profitably focus on other things, perhaps in something akin to Maslow’s hierarchy.
- We can’t get away with it. Survival and reproduction are just as important as ever, but they’ve been completely overshadowed by the variety and speed of memetic evolution. That eventually cultural evolution will still be important.
You can probably guess which possibility I favor, but I’m not the only one to notice that we have developed lots of behaviors that have little to do with ongoing survival. Robin Hanson calls it Dreamtime, and describes it thusly, “our lives are far more dominated by consequential delusions: wildly false beliefs and non-adaptive values that matter.” But I’m jumping ahead, each of these possibilities has some interesting and possibly disturbing implications.
The first possibility represents the most extreme shift. Because, as I said, the old rules don’t apply. Under the old rules it was all about us, the humans, and whether we continued to exist or not. With possibility number one it’s all about ideas, and humans are just a place for ideas to reside, and not even a particularly good place now that we have computers, which takes us to my posthuman reference. If ideas are all that matter what’s to say we even have a role in the world of the future. Certainly there are lots of posthumanists who worry that we don’t.
Under the second possibility, one imagines that, civilizationally, we’re perched near the top of Maslow’s pyramid in the areas of love, esteem and self-actualization, and that this is a good thing. But in this model the bottom level with the physical needs of food and water is still down there. Is there ever a point where we forget how to supply those needs? Certainly on an individual level, almost no one in the US knows how to grow or kill enough food to feed themselves for an extended period. We still possess this knowledge at a civilizational level, fortunately, but it’s unclear how robust this knowledge is. I say this, primarily, because it hasn’t been put to the test recently, There are lots of ways for something like this to be tested, but if nothing else in the past there were frequent wars which acted to test the mettle of a civilization. We haven’t had one of those recently, and to be clear, that’s a good thing, but it also seems like the kind of thing where the longer you go without one, the worse it is when it finally happens. And I’m by no means convinced that there will never be another great power war.
Turning to the third possibility, the first thing we need to do is decide what it means for survival to be “just as important as ever”. From one perspective, of course it’s as important as ever, as I frequently point out, if you can’t survive (and reproduce) you can’t do anything else either. So on reflection, it’s more accurate to say that the third possibility asserts that survival is just as difficult as ever. Stating it this way I assume a lot of people are going to immediately dismiss it as obviously incorrect, since that’s not what the numbers show at all. Rather they show a huge increase in life expectancy and vast decreases to most of the causes of death people had to worry about historically, like infant mortality or infectious diseases. This is a pretty good argument, but let me offer at least one counterargument (there are many).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the point that technology and progress have not created any decrease in fragility, that rather, if anything, they have increased it, which would mean that, currently, survival is not merely as difficult, it’s more difficult. But what about the numbers? Here Taleb argues that though technology doesn’t decrease fragility it does allow you to dampen volatility, particularly in the short term. I say in the short term because what we’re really doing is postponing volatility and making things that much worse when whatever tools you’ve been using eventually reach the limits of their effectiveness
You can see how this all might play out using the example of nuclear war. It is widely agreed that a large part of the reason for the Long Peace is the horror of nuclear weapons. This is the low volatility. However if war ever does come the eventual volatility will be far greater than any previous war. Additionally, while no previous war ever threatened the survival of humanity, a nuclear war very well might, leading to exactly the situation I described. Survival isn’t just as difficult, it’s actually much more difficult.
The last issue we have to deal with is the speed of memetic evolution. Recall the title question, “How do we adapt to things?’ Or to take it from another angle, what are we adapting to? In the past all adaptation was in service of survival and reproduction, and the fact that cultural evolution was faster than genetic evolution allowed humans to adapt more quickly to a variety of conditions. Certainly I’m not aware of any other animals which have adapted to live nearly anywhere. But if we’re not adapting to survive in changing conditions because our survival is no longer in question than what are we adapting to? And how does doing it faster help? If anything it appears that things are reversed. That the changes brought about by memetic evolution aren’t helping us to adapt they’re what we have to adapt to. In which case, the fact that it just keeps going faster isn’t a feature, it’s a bug…
If we have passed into the era of memetic evolution. And if it has the qualities I describe. Both of which seem very likely. Then there doesn’t seem to be much of a silver lining. It would appear that the best case scenario would be to hope that we have progressed into a new and better world where ideas are the only thing that matters, and then to further hope that we can manage to find a place in that world. The other possibilities all seem to boil down to a rapidly changing world where survival is still important but the conditions we’re trying to adapt our survival to are changing with ever greater rapidity.
These ending blurbs are actually examples of memetic evolution. No, really. I never said they were good examples, in fact they’re more akin to the random mutations of genetic evolution. But maybe this is the random mutation that will work, and you’ll be convinced to donate.
“To begin with, it operates through genetic mutations, which occur randomly. Most of the time these mutations are benign, some of the time they’re maladaptive and a tiny minority of the time they’re actually beneficial.”
Something about this struck me as off, then I heard a little trick a person did on the 80,000 hours podcast.
Ad audition was being done to cast dancers. The audition gave the candidates this set of rules:
First, when the music starts, improvise what you think are the best moves. When you find a phrase, keep doing that move.
Second, keep an eye on the other dancers. If you see someone with a move better than yours, copy them.
The audition ends when all dancers are doing the same synchronized move. In four and a half minutes, 50 dancers were in sync.
Lay out here what’s wrong then with the common view of mutation. If you carefully studied video of each dancer you can probably catalog each ‘mutation’ (shift or change in their move). You could also, probably, group these moves into harmful, benign and helpful in terms of whether a mutation brought the dancer closer to the final ‘ultimate’ move.
But at the same time you probably also see if you put together the same dancers and music and did it again, the end move could easily be something completely different. To paraphrase Obi Wan-Kanobi, “these are not the traits you’re looking for”. Perhaps the moves themselves are irrelevant and the ‘trait’ is the ability of a dancer to get other dancers to follow their lead. In terms of society, then, non-SSM and SSM societies may be exactly the same in that they quickly come to an agreement on marriage law. Here the ‘trait’ may simply be that marriage laws and customs are simply not open for debate for extended periods of time. Hence the rapid move away from arranged marriages, towards accepting divorce as a common state of affairs, towards allowing SSM, could simply be seen as an example of very traditional society. Our tradition is we do not book extended debates about marriage and settle the issue very quickly while some other issues like abortion or tax rates never seem to be settled.
Also note that grouping the ‘mutations’ into harmful, neutral and helpful is a bit of a tautology. Since all the dancers ended up in sync, the history of their ‘move mutations’ will always be one of ‘good’ moves winning the struggle of survival among a larger sea of bad and neutral moves.
But this only works if you consider the end move to be some type of ultimate goal hence every change in moves can be ranked on whether it brings you closer or further away from that end point. But the ultimate end point here was synchronization, not any particular move.
Here I think your ability to measure ‘survival’ starts to fall apart. The game is much, much more subtle and complicated than counting birth rates or trying to deduce whether some movement or idea adds subtracts from that. Remember LDS had polygamy not so long ago, Christianity in its beginning emphasized full celibacy and even had it’s most intense followers practicing self-castration. If you were a pundit in a UFO commenting on Milky Way Fox News, would you be telling investors to buy stock in humans on Earth?
I like this example, but I also think it’s lacking something. First off no one is going to perform a dance move that’s outright dangerous, like falling over in a way that smashes their skull. But with random mutations you could end up with something like that.
Outside of obviously harmful moves, the space of “fit” moves is very large, there’s very little selection pressure. A better example might be if the stage was covered in ice. Some moves would work and some moves wouldn’t, or perhaps even better what if the floor was covered in a dense fog and various obstacles were hidden in the fog? If you did multiple version of this experiment in those conditions the moves everyone arrived at would be very similar each time.
In the above situation you could imagine foot movements would be very similar every time, but the way people moved their hands would be different every time. Which brings us back to the question, which traditions are ways of moving your feet, which if changed will cause catastrophe and which traditions are moving your hands?
“I like this example, but I also think it’s lacking something. First off no one is going to perform a dance move that’s outright dangerous, like falling over in a way that smashes their skull. But with random mutations you could end up with something like that.”
Well don’t be so sure, there’s a reason performers say ‘break a leg’. The peacock, putting so much resources into looking outrageous, is trying to get as close as possible to living dangerously evolution wise, no?
I think what we’re looking at here is an ‘idea space’. The set of all possibilities is very large, but bounded. The role of mutations then is to probe and explore that space and the role of selection is to process the results of that probing.
An example of just randomness without the selection might be lottery tickets. People buy hundreds of thousands of them more or less selecting random numbers. Since there’s no selection process, there’s no real converging upon equilibriums or shifts from equilibriums to new ones. Each lottery sale looks more or less like the others.
“which traditions are ways of moving your feet, which if changed will cause catastrophe and which traditions are moving your hands?”
None. If there was a catastrophe, say a hidden button on the floor that would blow up all the dancers if stepped on, it would have been tripped long ago. What you define as a catastrophe may simply be an equilibrium that is long established changing. Another analogy here that might be helpful is fashion. It’s bounded by physics and chemistry. There’s a limited range of possibilities since, well, human anatomy remains pretty stable. Yet it can shift radically over time.
The assumption here is the ‘idea space’ is roughly continuous. Wearing a button down shirt over a t-shirt is like wearing two shirts. Putting two times as much salt on a dish makes it twice as salty. It doesn’t generate a singularity that swallows up the solar system. Since all rituals and traditions are bounced around within the ‘idea space’ bounded by real world physics, chemistry, and resource limitations, I would say catastrophes are pretty much impossible unless you start going into singularity type events (the transhuman meaning here, not the black hole type).
Short term, perhaps this is knowable in advance. A better analogy is that you put the same dancers on stage and keep changing obstacles/dangers over time. The only dancers to survive will be those able to adapt on the fly, changing their styles to fit the circumstances that work right now. Because in a competitive environment what works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow.
Some things are always a good idea, like not smashing your skull against the floor. I think what you’re arguing is that we want to avoid doing just that. And since innovation is random, it may not be obvious when our dancing society is about to do a face plant. It sounds like you’re arguing that we need to be careful not to adopt new cultural ideas broadly because we might accidentally pick up a lethal face plant move and then it’s over for us. (Correct me if I’m off here.)
I think there’s a balance to both selecting necessary new innovations while not grabbing new fatal ones. Perhaps it’s easier to see the fatal ones that cause you to faceplant than the ones that run you into the new acid pit on stage. For example, somehow the American colonies figured out a secret sauce that worked in the face of revolution against a monarchy.
The French weren’t so lucky. Same with the Vietnamese, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, etc. In those revolutions they had to do more than nothing, and when they didn’t the radicals took control anyway. The American founders did just enough of something to make it work. It didn’t solve the problems brought about by revolution, but it kept them in check.
Was revolution itself avoidable in all these circumstances? I don’t think so, but many royalists at the time thought it could be rolled back. Sometimes cultural innovations impact many other innovations that all compete against each other simultaneously. Systemic shocks aren’t always external. Sometimes they come from the other dancers.
“Some things are always a good idea, like not smashing your skull against the floor. I think what you’re arguing is that we want to avoid doing just that. And since innovation is random, it may not be obvious when our dancing society is about to do a face plant. It sounds like you’re arguing that we need to be careful not to adopt new cultural ideas broadly because we might accidentally pick up a lethal face plant move and then it’s over for us. (Correct me if I’m off here.)”
I think you’re off here. You’re thinking of it from the POV of the dancer(s). From their POV, perhaps the best solution would be a dancers’ guild that would provide producers with a preset selection of very safe moves…dancers would be insured for long term joint damage and have extensive health coverage that includes plenty of rest between events and massage and physical therapy. Any ‘exploration’ of ‘unorthodox moves’ outside the cannon of pre-approved moves would come with extra hazaard pay and would have to be vetted after study by a safety committee.
Of course producers of shows are not looking for comfortable performers. They are looking to explore the ‘idea space’ as rapidly as possible and quickly converge upon the ‘next big thing’ to sell tickets. Hence even though the performing arts centers in the US (NY and CA) tend to be very liberal, the industries themselves are probably the most free market based than anything the world has ever seen (I’m not sure capitalist is quite the right word here as the word usually means ‘the means of production’ as distinct from labor although ‘human capital’ can make that definition a bit fuzzy).
Here I think we get at an issue in cultural evolution. I think the risk of catastrophe is probably nill for the species. Nothing that happens in that hyper-competitive dance audition is going to destroy the performing arts industry. The risk for individual actors, though, is high. Looking at a world that has just accepted SSM and transgender advocates, you may think the time has come for you to venture out in public wearing pants made out of ice cream to see if finally the time has come for society to accept your ‘big idea’…and you are likely to fail pretty badly. Cultural stability offers you, at least, the security of knowing what will work.