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Though we often think of evolutionary processes as either matters of bones (i.e., paleontology) and genes (i.e., evolutionary genetics), that is not strictly true. There are other domains of study where evolutionary thinking and frameworks have been applied. In particular I’m thinking of evolutionary thought in the context of culture. This has a long history, and evolutionary models as metaphors are commonly bandied about, from Herbert Spencer to Richard Dawkins. But the reality is that there is little systematic and formal investigation of the topic. In the late 1970s to the middle 1980s six scholars attempted to change this. First, E. O. Wilson and Charles Lumsden in Genes, Mind, And Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Arguably the most ambitious of the projects, Wilson and Lumsden have moved onto other things. Next you have L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman with Cultural Transmission and Evolution. By and large both authors have moved onto other things, though Feldman at least still produces some research in the area of cultural evolution. I asked Cavalli-Sforza about cultural anthropology’s reaction to this book in 2006. He responded:
I entirely agree that the average quality of anthropological research, especially of the cultural type, is kept extremely low by lack of statistical knowledge and of hypothetical deductive methodology. At the moment there is no indication that the majority of cultural anthropologists accept science – the most vocal of them still choose to deny that anthropology is science. They are certainly correct for what regards most of their work.
His pessimism about cultural anthropology was warranted in my opinion.
Finally, you have Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Both these authors were explicitly influenced by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman’s ideas (I believe they also took courses where Feldman was an instructor at Stanford to get up to speed on formal evolutionary modelling). But they’ve continued to extend the ideas they outlined in Culture and the Evolutionary Process, and given rise to a whole school of thought (e.g., Joe Henrich, author of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, and now a professor at Harvard, was Robert Boyd’s Ph.D. student at UCLA). A popularized version of their ideas can be found in Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution . The fact of the vitality of this research program is evidenced in part by how cheap copies of Culture and the Evolutionary Process are in comparison to the other two works. I have all three, but the first two I grabbed at used book stores where I stumbled upon them and immediately realized that they were listed far cheaper than they’d be online, because copies are so much rarer.
If you are interested in the above topic, you should get a hold of at least one of the above books. For those with some background in evolutionary genetics modeling, you’ll feel very comfortable (I recommend Mathematical Models of Social Evolution: A Guide for the Perplexed for an up-to-date take). But today I bring this all up because Peter Turchin has just announced the birth of a new organization, Cultural Evolution Society. In describing the backstory of how this society came about Peter references a visit to Davis in 2014. I happen to have been there, and had good fun with with both Peters (Turchin and Richerson) dining on Korean barbecue and downing red wine. The precis for Ultrasociety was already present in Peter’s mind at that point, but I don’t recall talk about a society for the study of cultural evolution. That may be due to the fact I wasn’t privy to all the conversations, or, that I was rather inebriated soon enough as there was no way I could keep up with Peter Turchin!
I sincerely hope more students interested in evolution will begin to look to cultural processes as well. If you are a human evolutionary geneticist it strikes me as not just something that would be a bonus in terms of insight, but a necessary aspect of the field. For the past generation there has been a emphasis on culture alone, as the co-evolutionary ambitions of Wilson and Lumsden in their original groundbreaking work have been somewhat set to the side. I think that will change in the near future, as many of the thinkers who are pushing the field forward know that at some point cultural evolution and evolutionary genetics will fuse again….
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Genes, Mind, And Culture: The Coevolutionary Process can be had cheaply at a number of sites: https://goo.gl/bu6a0z
Razib, are you familiar with Franco Moretti? His work at the Stanford Literary Lab, though lacking statistical sophistication, has nevertheless inspired recent attempts to model literary history in an evolutionary framework. Moretti even inspired Alberto Piazza (who worked with Cavalli-Sforza on HGHG) to write an excellent afterword to one of his books, exploring the points of contact/divergence between evolutionary biology and cultural evolution. Cosma Shalizi has written about him, too.
Right now, most of us modeling literary evolution are using methods from natural language processing, which is great for descriptive classification but not so great for a theory of diachronic change. We have turned thousands and even millions of books into numbers and aren’t sure what to do with those numbers. The McElreath/Boyd book looks like a good guide to help us step up our game.
this is turchin's primary critique of big data humanistic studies (the stuff that's come out of ngram). no theory.
Henrich talks quite about about gene-culture coevolution in his new book. I am partway through Peter Turchin’s book but I find it more uneven than Henrich’s, which was top quality throughout.
thanks! i need to hit the henrich book. not a big surprise, as he and richerson have been talking about how genomics is going to impact the field.
Right now, most of us modeling literary evolution are using methods from natural language processing, which is great for descriptive classification but not so great for a theory of diachronic change. We have turned thousands and even millions of books into numbers and aren't sure what to do with those numbers. The McElreath/Boyd book looks like a good guide to help us step up our game.Replies: @Razib Khan, @Razib Khan
We have turned thousands and even millions of books into numbers and aren’t sure what to do with those numbers.
this is turchin’s primary critique of big data humanistic studies (the stuff that’s come out of ngram). no theory.
Right now, most of us modeling literary evolution are using methods from natural language processing, which is great for descriptive classification but not so great for a theory of diachronic change. We have turned thousands and even millions of books into numbers and aren't sure what to do with those numbers. The McElreath/Boyd book looks like a good guide to help us step up our game.Replies: @Razib Khan, @Razib Khan
i’ll check out moretti.
I just finished the Secrets of Our Success. I liked it and found the arguments very compelling. I would certainly love to hear Razib’s review of it when he gets a chance. The one element that bothered me is his claim that traditional racial categories don’t tell us much because there has been so much evolution within race. Seems unlikely to me since I would presume that the different environments (which drive culture and evolution) containing one racial group are more similar to each other than the environments where other racial groups live . Is Henrich just being overly PC here?
well, i try and get cult evo ppl up to date on latest pop genomics when i can. a lot of it is not knowing the latest in a lateral field. though arguably many ‘traditional’ categories are pretty misleading (e.g., the ‘black’ people of asia are as distant from ss africans as the white people of europe).
Interesting, I was thinking that one test of the theory that environment drives cultural/genetic evolution would be to compare two unrelated groups that are in similar environments. For example Melanesians live in environments that are like sub-Saharan Africa. They look like Africans but are more closely related to Asians. The question I would have is are their societies more like African societies or more like other Asian societies?
Thanks for providing more detail on the Cultural Evolution Society, plus the related book recommendations.
One obvious question here is how David Sloan Wilson’s Social Evolution Forum fits into this. I know Peter Turchin is on the board of directors for that, and that David Sloan Wilson for the past decade or so been pushing an evolutionary approach to solving social problems. Though of course he has a tendency to interpret evolutionary theory from the perspective of his version of group selection. Plus of course economics, aka “evonomics”. I’ve been reading that site off and on, as some articles are quite good, though the overall quality varies quite a bit.
Link to Evolution Institute site
https://evolution-institute.org/about/who-we-are/
So my question: are Turchin’s Cultural Evolution Society and Sloan Wilson’s Social Evolution Forum parallel efforts, intertwined, separate?
Maybe that’s not clear or somewhat still under discussion before they can share. So you left it out on purpose. But if there’s public information on how these two groups will work together that would be interesting to know.
One obvious question here is how David Sloan Wilson's Social Evolution Forum fits into this. I know Peter Turchin is on the board of directors for that, and that David Sloan Wilson for the past decade or so been pushing an evolutionary approach to solving social problems. Though of course he has a tendency to interpret evolutionary theory from the perspective of his version of group selection. Plus of course economics, aka "evonomics". I've been reading that site off and on, as some articles are quite good, though the overall quality varies quite a bit.
Link to Evolution Institute site
https://evolution-institute.org/about/who-we-are/
So my question: are Turchin's Cultural Evolution Society and Sloan Wilson's Social Evolution Forum parallel efforts, intertwined, separate?
Maybe that's not clear or somewhat still under discussion before they can share. So you left it out on purpose. But if there's public information on how these two groups will work together that would be interesting to know.Replies: @Razib Khan
agree it’s confusing. ds wilson’s area of inquiry is much broader i think than turchin, richerson, etc.
The trouble I have with attempts to apply the quantitative methods familiar to evolutionary biologists to cultural topics is that unlike in biology, is that it is rarely obvious where one ‘generation’ begins and another one ends. This was a problem I ran into when I tried to apply Darwinian logic to state formation in ancient China and early modern Europe–my initial idea was to calculate something like “fitness” of various institutional models using the standard measurement for relative fitness, but you cannot get W without separating the data into a parent generation and an offspring generation. I couldn’t think of any generational divide for the political units in the population that was not completely arbitrary (every ten years? Every time a new ruler ascends? etc.). I imagine a similar problem occurs in quite a few cases where quantification would be useful.
I am writing a book, titled “ON Social Evolution”. The book is to sort out many things concerning social evolution (the evolution of the human society), beyond what has been written on this subject so far. Suffice to say here that cultural evolution is only a dimension (though a critical dimension) of social evolution. To get a glimpse of what I have in mind, you are encouraged to read two of my books that deploy Social Evolution Paradigm (SEP). One of them received a major book award.
A review of Henrich book https://evolution-institute.org/article/are-humans-really-that-smart-a-new-book-says-its-complicated/