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An Assessment of Cultural Evolution and a New Synthesis

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An Assessment of Cultural Evolution and a New Synthesis tapraid5/a5-cplx/a5-cplx/a50403/a50094d03a royerl Sϭ18 10/23/03 12:51 Art: SU03-496 Input-DCT-msh From Behavior to Culture: An Assessment of Cultural Evolution and a New Synthesis AQ: 20 Kinship Systems: A Culturally Constructed Reality DWIGHT READ Received December 9, 2002; accepted August 19, 2003 INTRODUCTION tion of conditions and consequences B1 ulture provides for the members Three approaches to cultural external to the individual or whether of a society a conceptual universe evolution—sociobiology, dual behavior already presupposes culture AQ:21 C that both frames and constructs inheritance, and memes—are so that behavior can be seen as arising patterns of behavior. As one anthropol- reviewed and it is shown that from enactment of actions appropriate ogist has recently phrased it, “Culture each makes use of an incomplete to the cultural identity the individual and society . are mutually constitu- notion of what constitutes takes on [5]. The first position implies AQ: 2 tive. Culture provides the shared culture. that theories of cultural evolution knowledge system that enables mem- should focus on behavior, with cultural bers of a society to recognize fellow evolution viewed as more or less syn- members and to coordinate their actions with one another, onymous with change in the variety and frequency of be- while society provides the communities, and thus the pat- haviors in a given society. The analogy with biological evo- terned interactions and experiences, out of which individ- lution with its focus on change in the variety and frequency AQ: 1 uals construct their representations of culture” ([1]; see also of alleles in a species immediately comes to mind. The other Romney et al. [2] and Berger and Luckmann [3]). This con- position implies that cultural evolution needs to be under- stitutive property of culture underscores the reason that stood in terms of the structuring processes for cultural theorizing in anthropology has focused on culture as central phenomena where those structuring processes cannot be for understanding the nature of human societies. Despite reduced to patterns of behavior alone. Culture, in this view, the centrality of culture as an organizing concept, though, is in some fundamental way extrinsic to the individual even satisfactory theory about the relationship between behavior though the locus of culture is in the minds of individuals. and culture has remained elusive. Consequently current Culture, it is argued, is composed of conceptual systems theories of cultural evolution are incomplete because “no that share with language the property of being grounded in theory of sociocultural evolution can claim completeness if commonly understood and shared symbolic systems that it is not able to define the generating logic of society and sociocultural evolution” [4, p. 32]. AQ:22 Theoretical positions differ on even a basic issue such as Dwight Read is with the Department of Anthropology and whether we understand culture as arising from human be- Department of Statistics, University of California-Los Ange- havior taken to be actions made in response to the evalua- les, California 90095; e-mail: [email protected]. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Vol. 8, No. 6 COMPLEXITY 1 tapraid5/a5-cplx/a5-cplx/a50403/a50094d03a royerl Sϭ18 10/23/03 12:51 Art: SU03-496 Input-DCT-msh provides the basis for inter-individual comprehensibility of the biological evolution of our species, Homo sapiens. Cor- the social meaning of individual actions. Whereas the first responding to these three components are three distinct position lends itself to modeling cultural evolution in anal- modes of evolution, each with a different time scale. The ogy with Darwinian evolution, the second position leads to complexity of human societies is due, I argue, not just to the modeling culture and cultural evolution in analogy with number and variety of the constituent elements of human linguistic theories of syntax and semantics and changes in societies, but to this multilayered interrelationship of di- syntax and semantics. In this article I discuss a way to mensions ranging from the abstract to the concrete. Any resolve this dichotomy about the relationship between cul- satisfactory theory of cultural and social evolution must ture and behavior by formulating a more comprehensive explicitly address and take into account this multilayered- view of their relationship and examining the implications ness of human societies. B2 this has for modeling the evolution of culture. The article is divided into two parts. In the first part I PART I critique three current approaches to modeling cultural evolution derived from Darwinian evolution: sociobiol- Sociobiology ogy, dual inheritance, and memes. I argue that these each What constitutes cultural evolution depends on claims of these approaches uses an incomplete view of what made about what constitutes culture. Although anthropol- constitutes culture as all three ignore the way in which ogists have long considered culture to be an information anthropologists have argued that a “human group creates system distinct from the genomic information system [10], its own reality, a shared culture” and so “we live in cre- sociobiological arguments view culture differently and have ated worlds of culture” [6, p. 6, emphasis in the original]. framed arguments about cultural evolution using two as- This perspective implies that culture is not part of the sumptions: (1) culture is indexed by human behavior and phenomenological domain (2) cultural evolution can be to which Darwinian evolu- subsumed under the basic tion refers. Instead, culture . cultural evolution has to be considered in paradigm for biological evolu- is “a picture of the ide- terms of at least three dimensions, each with a tion with only minor modifi- ational world of a people” different time scale: evolution of a system of cation. With regard to the first [7] and “we are thus speak- symbols, evolution in the instantiation of a system assumption, culture is some- ing not of ‘material culture’ of symbols, and evolution of behavior framed by a times seen as another way or ‘human behavior’ but system of symbols and its instantiation. The that the environment affects about the ideas behind such complexity of human societies lies in the the expression of behavior. events and manifestations” interrelationship of these three dimensions. For example, Flinn and Alex- [8, p. 24, emphasis in the ander argued that “No ratio- original], for “human beings nale has ever been advanced are not simply instruments for the replication of culture; for regarding the influence of culture on the development rather they use their culture. .as a vehicle for living, for and expression of behavior as other than a special subset of the mutual creation of themselves” [9, p. 319, emphasis in the environment” ([11, p. 391, emphasis added]. Others re- the original]. I end the first part of this article by intro- lated culture directly to behavior. As noted by Durham ducing a culturally constructed reality— kinship sys- “. .culture has been viewed as [a] set of specific behaviors tems—fundamental to the interaction of individuals in or ‘traits’ of a population” [12, p. 18] by sociobiologists. Yet human societies and even to the formation of human others considered culture to simply be the outward mani- societies. festation of “whisperings within” [13] or the “self-interpre- In the second part of the article I consider the symbolic tation” of biological propensities [14, p. 29]. But whether it basis of human kinship as it is culturally constituted in the is aspects of the environment influencing behavior, specific form of a kinship terminology and outline current work on behaviors, or a more conscious expression of propensities, formally modeling the underlying logic of the kinship dis- culture in this framework is considered to be an aspect of tinctions embedded in a kinship terminology. The modeling the genotypically constructed phenotype observed through makes evident three components that need to be taken into a trait called behavior. account in any theory of cultural evolution: (1) culture as an The linkage of cultural evolution to the paradigm for abstract, the conceptual system, (2) cultural rules for linking biological evolution immediately follows once behavior is that conceptual system to individuals and their behavior included as part of the phenotype that develops from the through instantiation of the underlying abstract conceptual genotype of an organism. As an aspect of the phenotype, system, and (3) behavior viewed both as action taken in cultural viewed as traits/behaviors/outward manifestations accord with one’s cultural domain and its instantiation and would be as subject to modification through genetic fitness as action arising from propensities that owe their origin to as is the case for any other aspect of the phenotype that 2 COMPLEXITY © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. tapraid5/a5-cplx/a5-cplx/a50403/a50094d03a royerl Sϭ18 10/23/03 12:51 Art: SU03-496 Input-DCT-msh develops from the genotype. Although the extent and degree such as feedback that may occur between the phenotype to which human behaviors are directed by the genome are and the environment, epistatic effects among traits that debatable, common to these arguments is the presumption make it difficult to treat any single trait in isolation from that models of behavioral evolution (hence by extension other traits [16], and so on. Nor does Figure 1 take into models of cultural evolution) differ from models of morpho- account heritability measures based on the relative im- logical evolution mainly in the details and not in the under- portance of environmental effects versus genetic endow- lying paradigm used to account for changes in allelic fre- ment on the phenotypic expression. Rather, Figure 1 quencies through differential fitness values of unlike schematically merely identifies the core elements of a phenotypes across generations. Whether the genome di- biological fitness model for evolution driven by change in rects behaviors or merely provides propensities for behav- allele frequencies (including mutations) in a breeding iors as argued by Wilson [15], the underlying assumption is population.
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