Cultural Evolution —part 3 of 3: Entangled layers of organizing and the implications for a post-covid world.
In the first two parts of this series, we explored dual inheritance, a theory I learned of from researcher Michael Muthukrishna. The basic idea is that genetic evolution and human cultural evolution form interactive strands. Though the mechanisms & timescales are different, both genes and culture change slowly over time, playing out as the result of transmission, variation, and selection.
Transmission serves to spread some existing genes and behavior. When new possibilities enter the fray, they increase variation, showing up as novel deviations due to accident or invention as well as recombining, re-purposing & transferring into new contexts.No matter what context we look at, when we look, or the scope of the lens we look through, we’ll find a mix of convergent and divergent features, mechanisms, & systems. We’ll find some stable stuff, some other stuff that is becoming more prevalent, and also stuff that is atrophying and dwindling. Which things are which is the result of all the rich and varied ways that organisms, environments, and resources are affecting one another. The results can be bundled together under the label selection.
These three aspects of evolutionary change form a kind of meta-pattern — one that describes not only biological & cultural changes over long time-scales, but also the ways individuals & social groups [teams, organizations, societies] change and grow over their life-spans. If we could really get a handle on the way this meta-pattern works, perhaps we could mine these principles for ideas on how to influence the most resistant change efforts we face– things like kicking a sugar habit, navigating social conflict more wisely, or shifting the really big challenges we face collectively such as poverty, pandemics, & climate change.
Whether looking through lenses of chemistry, biology, or sociology, more elaborate things build up through the combining of existing things, resulting in hierarchies of organization. In his article Graceful Extensibility, David Woods calls these self-organized hierarchies Tangled Layered Networks — a label that highlights their messiness, providing a contrast to the neat taxonomies and org charts we often use to describe them. Within these tangled layered networks selection is going on everywhere, at multiple levels simultaneously.
Michael tells me that, as a rule, lower levels of organization are typically more resilient than higher ones. They often try, and sometimes succeed, in undermining higher layers. Single-celled organisms such as germs are an example of a lower level of organizing that can undermine what is effectively an ecosystem, you. Cancer is another example of this: some of your cells going rogue and multiplying out of control. The same dynamics happen at a societal level. Corruption is a lower scale of cooperation undermining a higher scale. Michael argues that the way we usually think about corruption is totally wrong. We ask, why some places are corrupt, but it’s actually harder to explain why some places are NOT corrupt. For higher levels of cooperation to emerge, lower levels need to be reined in. For instance, a true meritocracy cannot exist in a society plagued by nepotism and racism.
When our conversation circled around to the implications of all this in light of the current pandemic, Michael shared that what worries him is that we knew something like this pandemic was coming and yet, we weren’t ready for it. Game-changing shifts like the industrial revolution and the advent of the internet often open up a brand new space for innovation. Similarly, dramatic game-changing shocks like covid-19 disrupt our usual ways of living and working so radically that they demand innovation.
What is needed during these times is not only the exploration of new possibilities [variation]. To flourish we also need to let others in on what we’re trying and what’s working [transmission], because in a hyper-connected world, other people’s problems are our problems, but their solutions might also be our solutions.
There are other planet-wide challenges that we know are coming but are unprepared for, for example, mass migration resulting from climate change. Global challenges like these put into high relief that sometimes the adjacent possible includes outcomes that are neither win-lose nor win-win — they are “lose-lose” for us all. With stakes this high, we can’t wait for a bunch of people to chance independently upon solutions, we need to share what we’re learning right away [rapid and wide-spread transmission of ideas] so that others can build on it. That’s a recipe for rapid cultural evolution — one we might well need for us humans to stay in the game.
For more information check out Michael Muthukrishna’s research as well as David Woods’ Theory of Graceful Extensibility.
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This animation was created in collaboration with Michael Muthukrishna. Michael is an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics (LSE). His other affiliations include Associate of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, and Technical Director of The Database of Religious History.
Michael’s research focuses on answering three broad questions: (1) Why are humans so different to other animals? (2) What are the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and social change, and how is information transmitted, maintained, and modified? (3) How can the answers to these questions be used to tackle some of the challenges we face as a species? He uses a two-pronged methodological approach to answer these questions, combining mathematical and computational modeling (evolutionary models, social network models, etc.), and experimental and data science methods from psychology and economics. He uses the “Theory of Human Behavior” that emerges from this approach to tackle a variety of related topics, including innovation, corruption, the rise of large-scale cooperation, and the navigation of cross-cultural differences.
