Cultural evolution, on the opposite side of the evolutionary spectrum from galactic and stellar evolution, has brought us to us—third-millennium Homo sapiens sapiens and its intricate society—the most complex cluster of natural matter yet known. This is no anthropocentric statement; no evidence whatever implies that humankind is the pinnacle or endpoint of cosmic evolution, nor are we likely the only sentient beings in the Universe. Yet, while pondering the grand synthesis of radiation, matter, and life in our undoubtedly incomplete inventory of Nature writ large, today’s technological society is now poised at an extravagant extreme of the cosmic-evolutionary scenario. That’s not to say that the evolutionary process is done, or the scenario fully told, if ever it will be. Nature continues to write the story and we continue to unravel it.
Cultural evolution tracks the changes in the ways, means, actions, and ideas of society, including their transmission from one generation to another. Called “memes” by some, in loose analogy to genes, these are cultural replicators, such as a new word or song invented by one person and mimicked by others. To be sure, many of the cultural traits already noted, including the construction of useful tools, the teaching of elaborate language, the practice of viable agriculture, and not least the discovery of controlled energy, have been imitated and refined over scores of generations. The bulk of this new-found knowledge was transmitted to succeeding offspring, not by any genetic-directed inheritance, but by the use and disuse of information available to intelligent beings.
Larmarckism A mostly Lamarckian process (based on the ideas of the 19th-century French evolutionist, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck), cultural evolution proceeds via the passage of acquired attributes. Like galactic, stellar, and planetary evolution before it, cultural evolution involves no molecular reactions as in chemical evolution and none of the genetic inheritance typical of biological evolution. Culture enables animals to transmit favorable traits and survival skills to their offspring by nongenetic routes. Information gets passed on behaviorally, from brain to brain. Human culture itself is shaped by the sum total of human minds, often acting imitatively and cooperatively, sometimes over the ages but at other times in a single generation.
The upshot is that cultural evolution acts much faster than biological evolution. Genetic selection operates little, if at all, in the evolutionary realms sandwiching neo-Darwinism, where adaptive and selective pressures clearly dominate. Even so, a kind of selection was, and is, at work culturally. The ability to start a fire or throw a spear, for example, would have been major selective assets for those hominids who possessed them, assets transmitted not by genes but by memes. Perhaps more than anything else, memes are what sets us apart from other species.
As different as they are, biological and cultural evolution are not unrelated, as might be expected for two adjacent phases of cosmic evolution. Somewhat surprisingly, though, these two phases enjoy a subtle reciprocal interplay. Discoveries and inventions may well have been made by talented individuals having the “right” combination of genes, but once made, an invention such as lighting a fire or sharpening a tool would have, in turn, granted a selective (i.e., reproductive) advantage to those better endowed genetically to handle the skill. These two kinds of evolution thus partially complement one another, although in the recent history of humankind, Lamarckian (cultural) evolution has clearly dominated Darwinian (biological) evolution. Cultural acquisitions spread much faster than genetic modifications. Our gene pool differs little from that of the Cro-Magnons ~20,000 years ago, yet our cultural heritage is a good deal more robust in the knowledge, arts, traditions, beliefs, and technologies acquired and transmitted during the past thousand or so generations.
That cultural changes have produced the most complex systems in the known Universe is undeniable. Human behavior, now engulfed by heavy energy use and rapidly changing environments, is what makes social studies so difficult. Unlike in much of the physical and biological sciences, experiments in cultural evolution—humans interacting (social psychology), cities functioning (urban planning), or nations warring (political economics)—are virtually impossible to model objectively. Just observing social behavior, let alone experimenting with it, is vastly harder to accomplish than probing molecules in a chemistry laboratory or sending spacecraft to the planets. Likewise, the number and diversity of factors influencing the outcome of a human interaction is far greater than those affecting the birth or death of a star. Although a physicist or chemist might never have a concern for an individual atom or molecule, sociologists often treat the human behavior of a single individual as paramount—and that’s what makes their task all the more difficult, and complex, for not even statistical analyses can help much.
A few examples of Lamarckian-style cultural change toward greater complexity will suffice. Consider first the earlier-noted and paramount exemplar of culture: language. Language is transmitted largely through the media of teaching and schooling, ensuring that knowledge and experience stored in the brain as memory is accumulated by one generation and transferred to the next—not perfectly but adequately (including imitatively) over the years. Not only do we transfer knowledge to our children in this way, but the body of available knowledge itself also grows with the acquisition of new ideas, data, and stories. And because that knowledge accumulates faster than it’s forgotten (especially with the onset of recorded history), the sum total of culture passed along builds, indeed grows copious yet convoluted. That’s why it now takes a third of a human lifetime to train for a doctorate in science, despite narrow specialization. Human knowledge today far exceeds that of any one individual. Hardly any of our cherished educational facts, models, and methods are transmitted via biochemistry of the genes. Those genes do grant a hard-wired ability to learn from other human beings, but learning itself is often a surprisingly long, tough struggle, usually overcome by hard work—which is energy expended. The story of cosmic evolution itself is a cultural narrative hereby told in the form of this Web site—a narrative because it’s admittedly an overarching simplification of an extremely elaborate approximation of reality.
Industrial development is another cultural practice that increases order locally in the form of artificially manufactured products, yet only with the sweat and toil of spent energy, which inevitably increases the disorder (entropy) of the larger environment of raw materials used to make the goods. Modern automobiles, for instance, are better equipped, sounder mechanically, and basically safer than their decades-old precursors, not because of any internal tendency to improve, but because manufacturers have constantly experimented with new features, keeping those that worked well while discarding the rest—a clear case of acquiring and accumulating successful features from one generation of cars to the next. A kind of selective pressure functions by means of dealer competition and customer demand in the social environment—selection as human preference in the economic marketplace—the evolutionary mechanism being more Lamarckian than Darwinian. Lamarckian tinkering can surely improve technology: Use and disuse engenders gradual change in automotive style, operation, and safety, all of which feed back to increase the pace of our lives and the thrust toward even more complexity. Would anyone deny that today’s gadget-filled Mercedes (with computer-assisted fuel injection, electronic valve timing, and microprocessor-controlled turbochargers, not to mention all those widgets on the dashboard) is more complicated than Ford’s Model-T of nearly a century ago—or that more energy is expended (per unit mass) to drive it?
Energy Use Cultural evolution, though richer and more complex than either physical or biological evolution, need not be treated any differently than for any other aspect of cosmic evolution. Energy flows through open systems help to create and maintain rising complexity throughout our fast-paced human society. Cultural evolution occurs mostly when societies alter their organizational posture while responding to changes in the use of energy, for it’s increased order that helps dynamically stabilize a far-from-equilibrium society such as ours. Energy expenditure per capita clearly rose in relatively recent times—from hunter-gatherers of ~2 million years ago, to ancient forebears who managed to control the use of fire ~500,000 years ago, to pioneering agriculturists ~10,000 years ago, to industrial revolutionists of ~250 years ago, in turn to our fossil-fuel-driven society of today. Per capita energy use has increased by nearly a factor of 100 during the past few million years, much of that change in fact occurring during just the past few millennia.
The rise in normalized energy flow has been an evolutionary, competitive process in which selection has once again played a role. New technologies drove older ones to extinction, thereby benefiting humankind over the ages. Throughout the past few centuries, for example, businessmen chose shorter travel times, lower transportation costs, and heavier shipping loads; steam-powered iron ships replaced the wind-powered clipper ships, and now air travel has replaced them both. Likewise, “horsepower” provided literally by horse and mule was first marginalized and then eliminated as steam and eventually gas engines became the impetus on most farms the world over; people elected to concentrate their energy for greater efficiency. Typewriters, ice boxes, and slide rules, among many other innovative advances in their own time, were selected out of existence by the pressures of customer demand and commercial profit, often replaced initially by luxuries that eventually became necessities, such as word processors, electric refrigerators, and pocket calculators. Yet all this progress, which did better the quality of life (as measured by health, education, and welfare), came at the expense of greatly increased energy consumption and its consequent toll on the environment. Figure 7.24 typifies today’s machines, and the copious energy they consume (per unit mass), that drive our modern civilization.
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FIGURE 7.24 — Silicon chips are now the symbol of our modern, energy-consuming society. There are probably more such computer chips functioning in today’s world than bricks in all the world’s buildings and walkways. (DoD) |
Cities, states, and nations can be treated in thermodynamic terms, for these are also open structures regulating the flow of energy in and out. They acquire and consume resources, produce and discard wastes, all the while employing energy for a variety of services: transportation, communication, construction, medicine, comfort, and entertainment, among a whole host of maintenance tasks. Modern cities are as much a product of evolutionary events as any galaxy or organism, and many are still developing, seeking to establish dynamically stable communities within our planet’s larger, vibrant, ecological system. Their populations are dense, their structures and functions highly complex; cities are voracious users of energy.
Economies, too, are products of evolution. They are social organizations that seek to manipulate the environment for increased resources, enhanced efficiency, and greater productivity. The emerging interdisciplinary subject of ecological, or evolutionary, economics highlights the celebrated concept of energy flow (including material resources), much as energy flow commands the interdisciplines of astrophysics and biochemistry. All such ordered systems exist uneasily “on the edge” of stability, from unstable giant stars to struggling life forms to endangered ecosystems. This is precisely the way that all physical, biological, and cultural systems act as dynamic steady states—as sources of novelty and creativity, enabling them to take advantages of opportunities to advance along the arrow of time and the scale of complexity. The twin elements of randomness and determinism, once more, is also why realistic economies (including democratic markets) will never be predictable in detail, but will remain largely dynamic, flexible, and always evolving. Chance and necessity mix yet again, much as they’ve guided perpetual change from the big bang to humankind.
Change Agents Throughout the past tens of thousands of years, biological and cultural evolution have been inextricably interwoven. Their interrelationship is natural, much as particulate and galactic evolution interacted, stellar and planetary evolution overlapped, and chemical and biological evolution too, for the development of culture admits heavily one of those key factors affecting all of evolution—the environment. Here, though, cultural inventions enabled our immediate ancestors to circumvent some environmental limitations: Hunting and cooking allowed them to adopt a diet quite unlike that of the australopithecines. Clothing and housing permitted them to colonize both drier and colder regions of Earth. Tools and equipment enabled them to explore places for which they were not biologically adapted. Increasingly so, human life forms learned to manipulate their localities—to alter the environment as much as the environment altered life—a hallmark of the CULTURAL EPOCH.
Likewise, cultural innovations now enable present-day humankind not merely to end-run the environment but also to challenge it directly. Indeed, to expand our environment, for we’re not only an exploratory species, but an expansionary one as well. Technology allows us to fly high in the atmosphere, to live deep within the oceans, to probe the subatomic world, to communicate across continents, even to journey beyond our home planet. Change now quickens yet more and with it the pace of life. Culture, it would seem, is a catalyst, speeding the course of evolution toward an uncertain future.
What’s more, not only does change on Earth continue, it has recently done so more rapidly than a lifeless Nature would have. Humankind itself has now become part of that change—altering it, selecting it, accelerating it. We are now less at the mercy of the environment than conversely, for technological beings have gained some mastery over matter. We have become the agents of change, the drivers of cultural evolution.
If any one factor has characterized the evolution of culture, it’s probably an increasing ability to extract energy from Nature—not merely to capture energy, rather to store it, to transfer it, to use it more efficiently. Over the course of the past 10,000 years, humans have steadily mastered wheels, agriculture, metallurgy, machines, electricity, and nuclear power. Soon, solar power will emerge in its turn; all intelligent civilizations, anywhere in the Universe, likely learn to exploit the energy of their parent star. Each of these cultural innovations has channeled greater amounts of energy into society; energy use grew 16-fold during the 20th century alone, not merely because population increased but also because each person individually uses increasing amounts of energy.
The ability to harness energy and thus order our daily lives are defining characteristics of modern society. Yet energy use is also a source of rising disorder in our surrounding environment—global pollution, waste heat, social tumult, among other societal ills. Ironically, the need for increased energy and natural resources so vital to our technological civilization is also a root cause of many of the sociopolitical problems now facing humankind early in the new millennium.
Earth now finds itself in a delicate balance. Our planet harbors a precarious collection of animate and inanimate systems on localized scales amid a complex web of global energy flows in a larger, cosmic setting. All these systems—whether entirely natural or humanly built—need to heed the laws of thermodynamics as an unavoidable ground rule. Consciousness, too, including societal planning and technological advance likely to dominate our actions well into the future, must embrace an evolutionary outlook, for only with an awareness and appreciation of the bigger picture will we likely survive long enough to have a future.