Evolution and Culture

Evolutionary Psychology and Culture
Culture through an evolutionary perspective refers to evolutionary psychology theories in which the basic cultural preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success. In accordance with the traditional social science model, culture is a product of the human mind and not vice versa.
Capacity for Culture
Humans are unique in comparison to other species in their capacity for non-kin-based cooperative societies and wide-ranging and cumulative culture. The formation of culture can be described as an evolutionary adaptation for survival. The human ability to learn from others and transmit knowledge, technology, skills and ideas through cooperative communication (transmitted culture) has allowed generations of humans to convert new lands and resources into more humans in almost every environment on earth. These abilities have allowed humans to surpass other species confined to the environments their genes have adapted them to.
Two major concepts give humans the unmatchable upper hand in evolutionary potential: Social Learning Theory and ‘Theory of the Mind’ . Comparatively, human societies evolve steadily through cumulative cultural adaptation. Primates can discover and learn a behavior through trial-and-error learning, insight, local enhancement, imitation, etc., but afterward individuals must test and evaluate learned behavior through their evaluative brain structures, and they can choose to adopt or reject the behavior that they have learned . Knowledge, technology, and skills accumulate improvements as human copy each other and produce variety. This cumulative characteristic makes human culture an evolutionary process . Just as genetic evolution involves the selective accumulation of beneficial genetic mutations over generations, so too human culture involves the selective accumulation of beneficial cultural variants.
Society of Cooperation
Our capacity for culture also rests on our ability to cooperate with non-kin group members. Theories of indirect reciprocity hypothesize that language allows cooperation to be maintained in human groups through the formation of reputations, and cooperation can also be maintained through altruistic or punishment of noncooperators.
According to traditional Darwinian Theory, humans are unnaturally group-focused. Humans help strangers, cooperate with non-relatives and frequent crowded places. Humans have denied the usual genetic constraints on altruism. In order to survive in this ‘ultra-social’ environment, humans evolved psychological and social rules for the proper sharing of ideas, technology, skills and innovation without exploitation or inner and outer group warfare. The key social technology that had aided this process is the development of language.
Some unique features of human evolved psychology include norms and morality. The expectation of fairness and human tendency towards ‘moralistic aggression’, punishing people who violate social rules, are emotional and social mechanisms that evolved to police those who might be tempted to exploit fragile cooperative systems of culture
Memetics
Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with evolution, originating from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. . In his novel, Dawkins draws similarities between genetics and cultural evolution. Under an evolutionary model, genes are selected by nature to form the basis by which life evolves. Dawkins proposes that culture evolves in a similar manner through an ideological replicator named the meme. A meme is the, unit of cultural transmission in the form of an idea, belief, or other information that can spread from one person to another . One variable triggering communal food sharing appears to be high variance in the food resource. Under high-variance conditions, there are tremendous benefits to sharing. You share your meat today with an unlucky friend who failed, but next week, you might be the beneficiary of reciprocity when you come back empty-handed. Under low-variance conditions, on the other hand, the benefits of food sharing are far less. Because gathered food depends on individual effort, sharing merely entails giving by those who work hard to those who are lazy. Another example of evoked culture comes from an analysis of cultural differences in the importance attached to physical attractiveness. Because parasites are known to degrade physical appearance, people living in ecologies with a high prevalence of parasites should place a greater value on physical attractiveness in a mate than people living in ecologies with a low prevalence of parasites .
Transmitted Culture
Transmitted Culture refers to representations or ideas that originally exist in at least one mind and are transferred to other minds through observation or interaction . The hula hoop craze, changes in clothing style or fashion, beliefs about alien beings, and jokes that are passed from one person to another are examples of transmitted culture. There are mechanisms in the brain that process, weed out and choose what information to let in, keep, and dismiss. There are procedures for selectively attending to some ideas and ignoring others; selectively encoding some in memory and forgetting others; and selectively transmitting some to other people while failing to transmit others . Presumably, these mechanisms are highly saturated with content that determines relevance to the person—relevance on dimensions that would have affected survival and reproduction in ancestral environments. Consider the tendency of humans to imitate the clothing styles of high-status members of their local social groups or the groups to which they aspire to belong. These cultural phenomena are examples of transmitted culture. But these phenomena rest on a foundation of evolved psychological mechanisms that cause people to attend to high-status people more than low-status people, encode in memory their clothing styles, and access such memories when shopping for clothes.
Cultural transmission in our species works most of the time as a cumulative inheritance system allowing members of a group to incorporate behavioral features not only with a positive biological value but sometimes also with a neutral, or even negative, biological value. It is theorized that the simple act of imitation is only one part of the transmission of culture. The key factor in the accumulation of an advantageous culture is the development of the capacity to approve or disapprove of another’s learned behavior. This capacity makes learning both less costly and more accurate. .
The display hypothesis can account for several known facts about the patterning of cultural displays. First, it can account for the sex differences in the production of cultural products. Men historically have produced more art, music, and literature than women across a wide variety of cultures. Women had less to gain by cultural displays, according to this argument, simply because increased short-term sexual access was rarely a goal for them. It is interesting to note that many major works of art and music are created by men in young adulthood—the time when men are most intensely engaged in intrasexual mate competition
Dual Inheritance Theory
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene-culture coevolution, suggests that cultural information and genes co-evolve. Marcus Feldman and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (1976) published perhaps the first dynamic models of gene-culture coevolution. These models were to form the basis for subsequent work on DIT, heralded by the publication of three seminal books in 1980 and 1981. Charles Lumsden and Genes, Mind and Culture (1981). also outlined a series of mathematical models of how genetic evolution might favor the selection of cultural traits and how cultural traits might, in turn, affect the speed of genetic evolution. Another 1981 book relevant to this topic was Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman's Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Borrowing heavily from population genetics and epidemiology, this book built a mathematical theory concerning the spread of cultural traits. It describes the evolutionary implications of vertical transmission, passing cultural traits from parents to offspring; oblique transmission, passing cultural traits from any member of an older generation to a younger generation; and horizontal transmission, passing traits between members of the same population.
Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process presents models of the evolution of social learning under different environmental conditions, the population effects of social learning, various forces of selection on cultural learning rules, different forms of biased transmission and their population-level effects, and conflicts between cultural and genetic evolution.
Along with game theory, Herbert Gintis suggested that Dual Inheritance Theory has potential for unifying the behavioral sciences, including economics, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology and political science because it addresses both the genetic and cultural components of human inheritance. Laland and Brown hold a similar view.
Cross Cultural Aesthetics
Included in the evidence for Evolutionary Psychology with regards to cultural universals, are cross cultural aesthetics. There is no known human culture that does not display some form of creative expression Art evokes powerful emotions of pleasure and pain, including experiences of attraction, revulsion, awe, fear and loathing, and has adaptive importance to evolutionary psychology.
All cultures do not have all forms of arts and can be extremely varied; some examples being the East African Dinka who have highly developed poetry, with almost no visual art, while the Sepik River people of New Guinea are carvers of solid forms. However, our ability to identify each different medium as a form of art cross culturally suggests a relationship to evolutionary psychology.
This connection arrives from the ability of art to stimulate emotion upon human beings. It is a postulate of evolutionary psychology that pleasures, pains, and emotion-including experiences of attraction, revulsion, awe, fear, love, respect, loathing-have adaptive relevance.
Landscape and Visual Preferences
An important consideration for the survival of any organism is habitat selection. Humans have been found to have aesthetical preferences for landscapes advantageous for the ancestral environment. When young children cross culturally were asked to indicate their preference from a selection of standardized landscape photographs, a strong preference for savannah environments was found. The East African savanna is the ancestral environment in which much of human evolution is thought to have taken place. There is also a preference for landscapes with water, with both open and wooded areas, with trees with branches at a suitable height for climbing and taking foods, with features encouraging exploration such as a path or river curving out of view, with seen or implied game animals, and with some clouds. These features of habitat are also often used in calendar art and in the design of public parks. .
Modern Day Culture
Pop Culture and Evolutionary Advantages
In evolutionary psychology, popular culture cannot reflect context-based socialization agents, as in the Social Science Model under the nature/nurture debate. Instead, biological realities shaped by the environment of our ancestors that reflect the evolved human mind account for similarities across cultures . The study of evolutionary concerns such as differential sexual selection for men and women, kin selection theory, and sexual signaling produce culture as evidenced by collective wisdoms. For example, the proverb that, “Blood is thicker than water" relates to tenants of the kin selection theory to put one's family over others. An example that relates to human sexuality is that men are more preoccupied with attaining great wealth and status, the physical attributes of women, and paternity uncertainty . Group behavior allows better acquisition of resources, acquisition of mates, and defense against predators. Evolutionarily, the benefits of sociality greatly outweigh the costs. Online networks are a part of popular culture because of social benefits that they incur, and such benefits are dictated by the ancestral past. In line with this thinking, Facebook has become universally used, with 8.5% of the population (500 million users) using the online form of social networking for over 700 million minutes per month. Also, online dating now accounts for 1/5 of all marriages today, generating 4 billion dollars in revenue.
Consumer behavior can similarly be accounted for by an evolutionary perspective. Researchers found that consumers tend to have uniform color preferences across cultures. These universal preferences are such that blue is the most preferred color across cultures and yellow is the least preferred. This universal preference for blue is possibly linked to the color of sky and water—dominant parts of our evolutionary past <ref name="Saad"/>.
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