Populations under mixed selection

The evolution of proto-humanity was based on the self-reproduction of its populations. The ability to reproduce is a property of life, but a cell or an organism can only reproduce as a whole: selection cannot act within them. A population as a collection of organisms of one species in a relatively closed habitat is the actual sphere of action of natural selection: the self-reproduction of a population is not based on the reproduction of the whole, but on self-renewal, on the alternation of generations of individuals (Berg 1993, p. 251).

Early human populations remained at the mercy of natural selection, but with the accumulation of culture, the self-reproduction of populations changed its character: populations became cultures-societies that reproduced themselves not only through natural but also through cultural mechanisms—not only through the transmission of genes and the interaction of organisms with the habitat, but also through the transmission of meanings and interaction of humans with the domus. Natural selection was gradually supplemented and expanded by cultural selection. Modern man is the result of a mixture of natural and cultural selection, he represents the unity of genotype and meaning type.

During the millions of years of mixed selection, the evolution of practices went hand in hand with the evolution of organisms, ensuring the adaptation of proto-human populations to a changing natural and cultural milieu—to changes in climate and natural landscape, as well as to changes in the landscape of meanings. Mixed selection has left clear traces in the human body.

“…Culturally accumulating communicative repertoires put selective pressures on genes for communicating: they pushed down our larynx to widen our vocal range, drove axonal connections from our neocortex down deep into our spinal cords to improve the dexterity of our hands and tongues, whitened the sclera of our eyes to reveal our gaze direction to cue others, and endowed us with reliably developing cognitive skills for vocal mimicry and communicative cueing, like pointing and eye gaze” (Henrich 2016, p. 251).

The brain, as a central part of the nervous system, plays a key role in the metabolism of primates and especially humans, in whom the second signaling system is built upon the first. A larger brain was crucial for the accumulation of culture. The modern human brain consumes 20 to 25 percent of an organisms’ metabolic energy, as opposed to 8 to 10 percent in other primates and only 3 to 5 percent in other mammals. To increase brain mass, it was necessary to reduce the mass of other metabolically expensive tissues—primarily the digestive organs—which was achieved by changing the diet (Smil 2017, p. 23).

Lighting a fire and cooking on it are not instinctive animal actions; they are practices passed down from generation to generation through learning. And these practices, which largely moved the digestion process outside the human body, greatly influenced the way our jaws and digestive system are constructed. Henrich writes (2016, pp. 65-69), referring to the work of Richard Wrangham, that mastery of fire radically reduced the energy used to function the digestive organs, which in turn affected the structure of the nervous system and the volume of the human brain, which was a prerequisite for the further accumulation of meanings. James Scott says, that mastery of fire not only led to changes in the human body, but also allowed man to greatly expand his ecological niche. Humans used fire to modify natural landscapes, thus creating conditions for the reproduction of animals and plants of interest to them. Over time, this led to a concentration of favorable flora and fauna, the emergence of more abundant and predictable food sources within walking distance of human dwellings, and subsequently to sedentarization and domestication (Scott 2017, pp. 58-60).

Mixed natural and cultural selection brought about genetic and meaning changes, shaped the biocultural traits of proto-humans, strengthened some of their aspects and weakened others, resulting in psychophysiological, moral-volitional and cognitive distortions in proto-humans. In short, mixed selection shaped human propensities. The new propensities in turn influenced subsequent selection, which in turn strengthened these propensities. Thus, human domestication gradually took place. Long before humans began to selectively breed animals, they began to culturally select themselves. As Matt Ridley says, humans are self-domesticated apes (Ridley 2003, p. 348).

“… Man of his own accord mediates, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 187, translation corrected).

As a result of millions of years of mixed selection, meanings are inscribed in nature itself, in human genes. With the emergence of culture, it begins to influence nature by creating a cultural environment (domus) within the natural environment and domesticating proto-humans to slowly transform them into the modern type of Homo sapience. “In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself” (Berger and Luckmann 1991, p. 204).

Evolution of learning

The transmission of meanings between people, that is, learning, is based on imitation or mimesis, not on copying. Imitators do not have access to the content of the meanings they must acquire and cannot copy it. Therefore, the learning of meanings relies on active communication with other people, on the acquisition of norms through their expression. From norms, the imitators gradually arrive at the content, that is, understanding. In this way, imitators penetrate new cultural areas and learn meanings that were previously inaccessible to their understanding.

“… The cultural equivalent of the genotype is the information stored in people’s brains that represents their beliefs, attitudes, values, skills, knowledge, and so on. The cultural equivalent of the phenotype is the expression of that information in the form of behavior, speech, and artifacts. It is the latter—the phenotype equivalent—that is copied during cultural transmission: we do not directly acquire neural patterns of activation in people’s brains; we copy people’s behavior, we listen to what they say, and we read what they write” (Mesoudi 2011, p. 44).

In nature, inheritance occurs in a direct order: first, genetic content is copied, and then the genotype, in interaction with the environment, shapes the phenotype, the external characteristics of organisms. Cultural inheritance is indirect: imitation, that is, copying the expression in the plane of norms, precedes the understanding of the content. An idea is passed through the medium. Understanding this difference between the direct transmission of genes and the indirect transmission of meanings was one of the initial problems of memetics, which, starting from the scientific apparatus of genetics arrived at the concept of the meme. “[A] significant worry for memetics is that when the same ideas do spread through a population, it is rarely because they are literally copied from each other” (Lewens 2018).

The evolutionary variation of meanings depends on their correct repetition by successive human generations. The inability of people to authentically repeat a meaning leads to its demise. Therefore, as Henrich shows, people tend to “over-imitate,” mimicking meanings with excessive accuracy (Henrich 2016, pp. 108-109). The ability to improve meanings (or at least not allow them to degrade) depends, all other things being equal, on the size and sociality of the human population. Thus, the size and quality of a society influence the path of its cultural evolution and the adaptive landscape of its meanings.

The difference between indirect cultural transmission and direct transmission of genes means that meanings can negatively affect human survival. If the survival of genes depends entirely on the survival of organisms that possess those genes, then meanings are not strictly tied to their carriers, allowing harmful meanings to spread throughout the human population. “…Oblique transmission opens up the possibility that some traits may spread through a population in spite of the fact that they reduce the fitness of the individuals who bear them” (Lewens 2018). Well-known examples include alcoholism and drug addiction.

The evolution of social learning went through two phases: (1) early social learning, which transmitted simple meanings that each individual could rediscover through individual learning (that is, independent discovery or invention), and (2) cultural learning, which transmitted meanings, that an individual, regardless of his abilities, could not rediscover independently in his entire life.

Social learning is characteristic of the early stages of cultural selection, when meanings were conveyed between hominids on the basis of their herding behavior, that is, their animal sociality. The early meanings themselves were still part of the animal behavior and appeared as animal signals and tools. If meanings got lost in the course of transmission, they could be rediscovered or reinvented through self-learning. In the later stages of cultural selection, meanings had left the realm of nature and formed an independent realm in which active abstractions in their shape of a word and a tool gradually decoupled from immediate animal behavior. Now meanings were transmitted through cultural learning; the complexity of meanings no longer allowed them to be simply reinvented if the community had lost them for some reason. At the same time, cultural learning enabled the transition from the collection of individual experiences to the growing accumulation of meanings from generation to generation.