NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURE

1. Theory of Knowledge Conference 2002 Eyüboğlu High School, Istanbul NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURE Is there a biological theory of culture? Presented by Gautam Sen

2. WHAT DOES CULTURE MEAN? • Some definitions from Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man: • a way of thinking, feeling and believing • the total way of life of a people • a storehouse of pooled learning • learned behaviour • a precipitate of history Presented by Gautam Sen

3. Clifford Geertz’s definition From The Interpretations of Cultures: The concept of culture I espouse....is essentially a semiotic one. Believing that...man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an an interpretive one in search of meaning. Presented by Gautam Sen

4. WHAT DOES CULTURE MEAN? Are there other ways we can we define culture? Presented by Gautam Sen

5. TWO VIEWS OF HUMAN NATURE • The Enlightenment view: humans are a part of nature, behaving according to immutable natural laws discoverable by the methods of the natural sciences. There is a core human essence which science can discover. • The Standard Social Science view: humans are distinguished from other creatures in being creators and creatures of their social environments and cultures, thus transcending their biological limitations. Presented by Gautam Sen

6. THE ENLIGHTENMENT VIEW • All humans are constrained by their biology and by their evolutionary history. • Our biological inheritance defines our universal and innate capacities hidden beneath our cultural diversity. Presented by Gautam Sen

7. THE ENLIGHTENMENT VIEW • Could the unity underlying our diversity be a ground for universal equality? • Does “an innate human nature imply innate human differences”? • If so, could these innate differences imply that we are irrevocably locked into our positions in racial, gender and other kinds of hierarchies? Presented by Gautam Sen

8. THE SOCIAL SCIENCE VIEW • “Biology is not destiny”. • The mind is not a product of biology, but a “blank slate” onto which the light of experience, filtered through some innate lens, inscribes mental content. Presented by Gautam Sen

9. THE SOCIAL SCIENCE VIEW Since experience originates in the social environment, adherents to the SSV often claim that: • Bad environments create bad people. • A better society ensures better individuals. • Culture, not biology, constrains individuals. Presented by Gautam Sen

10. FROM THE BRAIN TO THE MIND THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY (EP) PARADIGM The EP paradigm attempts to reconcile the two views of human nature by offering a Darwinian explanation of how the evolution of the brain has resulted in a particular architecture of the human mind. Presented by Gautam Sen

11. FROM THE MIND TO CULTURE THE CONCEPT OF MEMES Building on an analogy with the gene suggested by Dawkins (1976) The Selfish Gene, Blackmore (1999) and others developed the idea of a MEME - an idea, a song, an ideology, or a mental product of any kind which spreads by replication of a version selected from a population of slightly dissimilar versions. Presented by Gautam Sen

12. THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM Psychology is an extension of • biology - that studies how the neurophysiology of the brain enables it to process information; • cognitive science - that studies how the processing of information enables the functioning of specialized circuits within the brain dealing with key adaptations. Presented by Gautam Sen

13. THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM Brain’s information processing generates BEHAVIOUR Process information BRAINS Presented by Gautam Sen

14. THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM Psychology of SpecializedAdaptations (e.g., vision, sexuality, reasoning, emotions) Cognitive Science Neurophysiology Presented by Gautam Sen

15. BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM • The brain is a physical system that processes information like a computer, using sensory receptors to pick up information, which is then sent through the brain’s neural networks. • Over the history of the human species, these neural circuits evolved to solve problems that existed in our evolutionary history. This enabled the species to survive. Presented by Gautam Sen

16. BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM • The brain has a modular structure, in which each module has a specialized capacity for solving a different problem which humans have faced in their evolutionary past (e.g., language, reasoning, mate selection, social exchange, etc.). • Each module represents an ADAPTATION that evolved in response to a selection pressure in the ENVIRONMENT OF EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTEDNESS. Presented by Gautam Sen

17. BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM • There are NO abstract, content-independent and general-purpose cognitive abilities such as memory, inference, categorization. • The cognitive abilities that do exist have evolved to adapt to specific factors in the human’s evolutionary environment. • These correspond to what we commonly call INSTINCTS. Presented by Gautam Sen

18. FROM MINDS TO MEMES • The modular mental architecture proposed by the EP paradigm includes a specialised capacity for IMITATION. • This capacity for imitation creates different copies of an idea (more generally, any product of the mind), some of which are passed on (replicated) more successfully than others, creating MEMES. Presented by Gautam Sen

19. UNIVERSAL DARWINISM Evolution by natural selection occurs whenever the following conditions are satisfied: 1) replication: there are things that can be copied. 2) variation: there are dissimilar copies of the same thing. 3) selection: there is an environment where not all copies survive, but only some get copied again. Presented by Gautam Sen

20. SOME EXAMPLES OF MEMES • Stories and jokes • Fashions in clothing • Languages (these are actually large combinations of memes which Blackmore calls memeplexes) • Religions (also memeplexes) • Ideologies Presented by Gautam Sen

21. SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE DARWINIST APPROACH TO CULTURE • Both the EP paradigm as well as Universal Darwinism regard the cognitive process (or the process of meme replication) as ‘computational’ - i.e., a syntactic operation on a local database. Is this an adequate approximation to human thought? • The idea of a meme is itself a meme. Can memetics then be a metaparadigm? Presented by Gautam Sen

22. SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE DARWINIST APPROACH TO CULTURE • How does Geertz’s description of culture as “webs of significance that he himself has spun” relate to memes? Perhaps the webs of significance themselves are memeplexes? Presented by Gautam Sen

23. WHAT HAVE WE GAINED WITH A DARWINIAN PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURE? For me, the chief gain has been a fertile analogy between the BIOSPHERE and the IDEOSPHERE. There is a rich diversity in both, and the Darwinian perspective suggests that there may be a similar dynamic driving both. Presented by Gautam Sen

24. WHAT HAVE WE GAINED WITH A DARWINIAN PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURE? • Is cultural diversity intrinsically valuable and worth preserving? Value judgement - can’t be answered within this or any other scientific perspective! • Does the Darwinian dynamic suggest a tendency towards cultural homogenization? • Can there be an ecology (or indeed a biology) of ideas, just as much as of living species. How can this be further explored? Presented by Gautam Sen