5.1.1 Defining Cultural Transmission

For all its versatility the Theory of Options is not intended as a theory of history. It might be that. It might be possible to explain history in terms of people exercising options, but it was bad precedent from this type of generalization that led to the new theory in the first place. Before this, overly enthusiastic advocates of Darwin's Theory increased its scope from a theory of natural selection in the wild, first to a theory of human behavior, then to a theory of human cultural or historical events. Yet, natural selection in the wild cannot explain something as complex as human behavior. Plus attempting to graft Darwin's Theory, about selective struggle between individuals, onto concepts like race or state has led to grossly faulted ideas such as the racial state. So, even if the Theory of Options correctly explains individual human behavior, we must be careful about individual motive as history. The decision by Genghis Khan to sack half of Asia and Europe might be explained in terms of him individually seeking increased options, but it does not explain how humanity's options were increased at that time by his actions in any meaningful way.

A similar caution applies to discussion of culture, which can mean many things. In personal refinement culture means one thing, and as a geographical feature culture means something else. When discussing evolution culture has a specific meaning related to passing on acquired characteristics. In nature learning offers a rapid method of adaptation to change, only in biological evolution the learned skills are not passed on. That is, no matter how many survival skills an individual (the phenotype) acquires in a lifetime these will not be passed on to progeny via the genotype. Briefly, phenotypes do not alter genotypes. Moreover, any creature can only learn a limited amount in a lifetime. As explained reflex circuits provide safety, so if the ratio of learning to reflex circuits is too high the creature will be born with few in-built natural survival skills. Here cultural evolution offers an advantage over learning by individuals. By leveraging culture learning is passed on, so more than one lifetime is available to learn new skills. This is why all higher creatures have small amounts of culture. An individual chimp using a stick to get termites is part of that chimp's learned behavior, and if the trick is passed on it forms the culture of those chimp groups who acquire this trick. Because using sticks is not an inherited characteristic of chimps though, only some groups know about this trick and other do not. If anything, there is quite a debate now over just how much chimps do pass on as culture, compared to humans.

Culture then, in an evolutionary sense is the passing on of acquired characteristics. This is outside of biology in terms of the genetic code. Each generation the DNA of parents is passed on to offspring, but that DNA is not altered during single lifetimes by any habit or characteristic the individual acquires. Humans learned to use tools, and tool making needs a larger brain. During a lifetime heavy use of brains, especially in the early years increases the number and sophistication of the synaptic connections in the brain. Profuse brain use plus a protein rich diet would tend to make some brains physically larger and more versatile during an individual lifetime. But that is not the genetic reason that large brains evolve. Instead, somewhere over the whole selective struggle individuals with genes for larger brains passed on more offspring. Possibly, because learning capable brains can nurture into larger types that are more versatile during single lifetimes, this was a factor favoring the selection of pre-humans with learning capable brains. In other words, like with body fat, there is an "opportunity factor" to possessing genes for large brains, in that phenotype brain size can be nurtured by environment to adapt a size suitable to the circumstance. Only while physical characteristics acquired by brains in single lifetimes would favor individual fitness, it is only when the genes that can nurture large brains are passed on that brain size will statistically increase within the species. The theory that the acquired characteristics are passed on directly is called Lamarckian evolution after the great French scholar who proposed it, though for different reasons as an early theory of evolution. Only while instances of it are occasionally reported there is no hard evidence of Lamarckian evolution in a genetic sense, though many interactions of genes to environment, like with brain size, are not totally understood.

However, once brains are already large and the body is versatile biologically in other ways, acquired characteristics are passed on as culture. This has several advantages, including that characteristics and knowledge acquired in single life times are not lost to the next generation, which speeds up adaptation. And faster adaptation is a general trend of evolution. Microorganisms can adapt rapidly to change because they are small with huge populations and short generation times. Yet large animals tend to have smaller litters and much longer life times, plus they are more sensitive to drastic changes of environment. This means that large animals must find ways to adapt "faster" than normal biology can allow. For example, one method adopted by mammals but not reptiles, is internal regulation of body temperature, so sudden changes of temperature will still give such animals a chance to adjust. More important is learning and behavior, which allows animals to adapt "behavior first" to a change, then let Darwinian selection catch up. So despite that Lamarckian does not occur in the misunderstood sense, early giraffes in fact did stretch their necks, just as early human individuals acquired large brains in single lifetimes through rich diet and increased brain use. Only these Lamarckian style "behavior first" adaptations did not change the genomes within single generations. By stretching necks giraffes as a population can eat leaves from taller trees, so they will survive if tall leaves are the only available food source. Only over time, individuals within that population born with naturally longer necks will do better, and pass on more offspring. By use of tools and activities that overwork their brains, pre-humans as a population can adapt faster in changing environments. But within those new conditions of struggle, individuals naturally born with larger brains will tend to survive better and pass on more offspring. Only what we see with humans is that this process once begun did not stop half way. Unlike giraffes, merely adapting to the niche of taller trees, pre-humans were adapting to change in all environments. The result was evolution of a species that tended to shift all adaptation outside of biology. People often say, more with metaphor than precision, that biological evolution is Darwinian and slow, while cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast. There is a quote by Wilson given in Chapter 3.2, saying that almost exactly.

So, what are the main methods of cultural transmission in humans?

Broadly, there are three;

1. learning
2. use of artifacts
3. language

Learning is the oldest form of cultural transmission. It began about 200 million years ago when species first needed more information in their brains than could be passed on by genes alone. This age corresponds to the first mammals emerging, though there was possibly some learning in reptiles. Still, most natural learning is only simple imitation, so only a small amount of cultural transmission will be available by this method. For example, because some birds learn songs genetically we can assume originally all birds learned songs this way. It is doubtful that after nature had already devised learning circuits it would take the trouble to genetically program something as complex and variable as a song! But today many birds also learn songs that must have once been transmitted by genetic memory only. So because songs are a survival skill in birds, for attracting mates, learned songs are culturally transmitted behavior.

Even so, learning in small-brained creatures is often by imprinting, learning the first song (or whatever) that happens along. Like ducklings following the first object they see which moves, it is hardly learning in an analytical sense. However, the next form of learning, imitation, is more versatile. Perhaps the outstanding example of imitation learning in any species is the human 'crawl' stroke in swimming. All through emergence and for thousands of years of civilization, humans did not know a basic survival skill of how to swim at speed over distance in water. Yet, once the skill was demonstrated to other individuals (by movies, newspapers, and TV) it was rapidly copied. To biologically evolve the human species to swim at a speed over distance the 'crawl' stroke allows would take thousands of generations, if achievable. Thus, the 'crawl' stroke is a culturally transmitted behavior of humans, and a recent one, although it is a basic survival skill.

Mostly with the human species however, learning is not just by imprinting, or imitation, but the entire human biology is adapted for cultural transmission. A striking example is the human birth process. The human female is very vulnerable during pregnancy, so it would not be possible for birth to proceed safely without a culturally learned midwifery, existing for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet, in Darwinian selection safe reproduction is a fundamental requirement. The first time in raw nature the birth process became so complex it could not be safely achieved individually, that variation would terminate automatically because no offspring would survive. So, what happened with humans? The complication to human birth is the large cranium in proportion to body size. Today this is about 200% higher in a human than in a chimp, but half a million years ago it was 100% higher and 2.5 million years ago it was about 50% higher (in Homo Habilis). There is not much theory on this, but at some ratio of cranium to female pelvis size, assistance with the birth process would become a culturally transmitted behavior in humans, one assisting further evolution. Learning assists evolution by allowing the brain to acquire more information than genes can transmit. But in humans, transmitted learning assists evolution of a bigger brain directly, by allowing the learned behavior of midwifery to be passed on. This learned transmission of a basic midwifery must have continued, and had to continue, in an unbroken line over thousands of generations! (No doubt sociobiology has a 'gene' for assistance in the birth process. But as assistance today is cultural, it would have been a poor investment in evolutionary design for nature to not need a gene for birth assistance for millions of years. Then to suddenly require one, but only to abandon the design later anyway when the birth process became too complex altogether!)

Yet, many human behaviors are predominantly transmitted by culture. Gathering and sharing food, nurturing the young, sexual courtship, seeking shelter, organizing the social group, even personal hygiene are culturally learned in humans, in ways affecting basic human biology. Again, the 'learning ratio' of higher cortex to reflex brain mass is very high in humans, about eight to one. But this means a long learning period for the human infant and juvenile, so if early humans lived until 30, about half their life was involved with learning. Human children do remain vulnerable until about late-teens. But if the learning process itself is so complex as to involve half a lifetime, there will be little evolutionary pay back for such a long individual learning if it is not passed on.

It is similar with the tribal organization, which allows a long nurturing and learning process for children. Sociobiologists delight at how males in other species kill offspring of rival males when they take over another individual's mate, but this would be poor evolutionary pay back in the human species. Human males must hunt together, even risking an individual's life for the success of the hunt. So if genes are as selfish as Dawkins et al assure us they are, they will ensure that before a hunter lays down his life for the group a social system will be in place to ensure his orphaned offspring will be raised to maturity. Similarly, the human female, who makes a heavy investment in time and energy to procure offspring will protect her own offspring against attack from other grown males within a group. And whatever her social position today, in evolution the human female has a significant biological 'arsenal' of sexual attributes for influencing male behavior, including concealed ovulation, female orgasm, and the intimacy of face to face copulation. Only again, there is quite a debate here. It seems that one trick for a female to avoid rival males killing her offspring, is to share her sexual favors around. This way, no male is sure of the paternity, plus a group of males interested enough in the paternity stay around, offering additional protection against total strangers. Only again, while this evolved attribute might help explain concealed ovulation in human females, most of modern behavior we observe at the social level, in both sexes, is cultural. Yet, in the basic human biology of the reproductive process, we see a long-term evolutionary commitment to extended learning, group cooperation, and biological modification to meet the needs of cultural adaptation.

The next method of cultural transmission is use of artifacts. Again, many animals use artifacts within a single lifetime, such as chimps using a stick, or birds building a nest. The use of artifacts moreover, does modify biology, especially say with nest building, and this might have begun 150 myrs ago with early birds. In human evolution however, we must look for not only artifacts which will be acquired in a single lifetime, but artifacts being 'passed along' from one generation to the next in ways affecting biology. We are not sure when this process began. Australopithecus, the walking chimp, could have been using opportune tools of stones, sticks, or bones from four million years ago, but tool making, shaping a tool and keeping possession of a good tool and passing it on began about 2.5 million years ago, with Homo habilis, the handy man. Tool making caused considerable biological modification, the most striking being that humans do not have any good natural weapons, such as armor, body fur, claws, or ripping teeth. Instead, human use of tools allowed human biology to be modified in a direction away from biological weaponry. This allows great optimization of function. Claws would reduce the delicacy of the hand for tool making, assistance with birth, grooming, and manipulation. But even the best designed natural claw would not be as effective a weapon as a well made tool, nor as versatile for grasping different weapons for different situations. Yet, the modern human form would appear almost useless in the wild without a collection of artifacts, developed over millions of years of human evolution.

Still, despite their obvious human use, learning and artifacts are still forms of cultural transmission throughout much of the modern large animal kingdom, though notably among birds and mammals. Birds and mammals also use language, and language that is learned and adaptable rather than just reflexive aural communication like the chirp of a cricket. Humans however, take this one step further. They acquire a structured language itself highly adaptable, so that information can be passed on directly as acquired attributes.

The final method of cultural transmission is language. Again, other species to use language and forms of audio warning and mating calls existed since the Age of Dinosaurs. But for human use of language we are looking for at specific mode of cultural transmission. Until humans reached their present "end point" of adaptation, biologically they still kept evolving. So, it must have only been the most recent biological adaptations in humans that resulted in true cultural evolution, and brought a halt the biological modification process. Features possessed by early hominids, like walking upright, allowed for greater cultural transmission than previously, but not sufficient to dispense with the need to biologically modify further. During emergence humans modified at a faster rate than any large animal achieved, but as little as 20,000 to 50,000 years ago major modification ceased. Also, within a short evolutionary time of humans ceasing further major modification, humans seemed to have quickly settled all the major continents on Earth. Plus by whatever means, they successfully displaced all the other intermediate subspecies. So whatever the final adaptation of humans, it provided some overwhelming advantage to the new mode of evolution, eventually stabilizing it.

This was almost certainly language. Ability to walk comfortably upright and use tools existed for about 2.5 million, without eliminating subspecies or preventing further modification. About 1.5 million years ago humans invented fire, but still only as a human subspecies, Homo erectus, who had only about 70-80% present human brain mass. Unfortunately, we cannot tell from the fossil record when humans developed language or in cultural terms what we mean by it. All higher mammals and birds have some form of language, but it does not help them abstract. Moreover, the human vocal chords are highly developed, being able to sing. But because there is no complex vocal system in other primates for human evolution to quickly copy, the human vocal system must have developed over long evolutionary times, at least hundreds of thousands of years. But we cannot imagine complex vocalization developing for no reason. Early humans must have been practicing some form of vocalization for a long time for it to yield a fitness advantage, even if for a pre-adaptation like a melodious voice making partners sexually attractive. Especially, in view of the earlier theories of this book, a melodious voice might be very attractive to humans because it would demonstrate evolutionary distance from an ape. Significantly then, humans gained large distance from ape morphology in stance and appearance before they acquired the super-large brain. Perhaps, then language was potentially available to humans as vocalization for hundred of thousands, or even millions of years. Only vocalization is not abstraction. The ability to fully abstraction seems to only occur above a critical threshold of neural mass, which did not come till almost the end of human evolution. Or maybe everything just came together at once, 15,000 to 35,000 years ago, biologically and culturally humans were ready to "emerge".

From a philosophical viewpoint, the feature that makes language potent is grammar, some philosophers even contending that philosophy be nothing but a study of grammar, and the syntax of propositions. Without going to extremes, powers of communication increase dramatically with sentence structure, but especially for sequencing of events. Words; "bushes", deer", "run", "tiger", "hide", "call", "river", "danger", "wait" all mean something by themselves, and are useful shouted as single words at the appropriate time. But consider the power of these words strung into a sentence which other members of the tribe understood. Especially, sentence language in these terms provides the means to socially direct behavior, in ways that would be not comprehensible to a species that had not mastered it. To other species, a small group of humans might appear easy prey, or no danger. But once humans have sentence language, a small group can be a scouting party, or bait for a trap, or any number of "surprises" there can be no naturally learned way to anticipate. We might suppose that until sentence language developed, no hominoid subspecies enjoyed any advantage great enough that one group could eliminate the others, so in the African boiling pot splitting of subspecies continued. But once groups learned to string words into sentences, the new skill offered such overwhelming advantages that those groups who had it could resist further encroachment by other sentence language endowed 'equals'. While those groups who did not have this skill were rapidly displaced everywhere.

When did sentence language develop?

The adjunct to sentence language was a form of symbolism, and this must have come from early art. We wonder about the significance of early art, but maybe paintings of deer and bison are symbolic representations of them, and symbolism is what we manipulate in a sentence. This goes back to the much-maligned Platonic concept of an idea. A large, living creature running in the forest is a bison, but lines sketched in ochre by human hands deep inside a cave wall is also a 'bison'. Even more complex an idea is that of the hunt, because the hunt consists of many things. But again, once the animals, hunters, and weapons are sketched on a cave wall, the hunt exists also as an idea, abstracted from physical reality, and available for symbolic manipulation in a sentence. We know this occurred at least in Western Europe 35,000 years ago. Only we are not sure if occurred because of some last piece of late evolved biological 'enabling' technology, or the biological technology might have been there for 100,000 odd years already, and a cultural breakthrough led to a simultaneous emergence of language, art, and abstraction. In other words, while vocalization, listening, and memory are biological attributes of being human, we take the philosopher's view that stringing words together in a sentence is a cultural attribute. This might have emerged some time, not a lot, after the biological ability was already there. The argument is that by sentence structure must be symbolic manipulation, in which the vocabulary of the words in the sentence must be known beforehand before the sentence can have meaning. Yet, while speech is biological, human vocabulary is cultural, because in all human cultures different sounds (of significant words, not 'mama') have different meanings.

Only again, there are huge debates over this. Language is an amazing attribute, and with many other attributes allegedly only explainable by genes, 'evolutionary' explanations have now befallen language. Obviously, like everything else there must be a very complex interaction between learning and biology. Where the trait, like vocalization, exists universally and biologically, it can only have arisen by evolution. Except there might be other, straightforward fitness explanations of why this trait arises, such as the sexual attractiveness of a voice which can demonstrate distance from an ape, which could also explain why we can sing, not just use language. Humans also have a good mechanical brain, which might have evolved for other fitness attributes such as throwing or acrobatics, and was only pre-adapted to sentence structure later. This author tends to see any rigid connection between sounds as in speech, thoughts as in language, and symbols as in logic, as a tedious, cumbersome and slightly annoying relationship. If our thoughts do not express what we cannot say, or symbols express what we cannot think, we are not using our brains to their capacity. "Words cannot utter it." Only unfortunately, language leaves no fossil record, so we must infer all these ideas.

Even so, there is one more explanation of cave paintings, or all primitive art, which must not be overlooked. This is the role of social consciousness, or a consciousness that arises among individuals by sharing comparative experiences. Every creature is self-conscious, and is aware of world filled with sense-impression information. Such awareness gives rise to individual consciousness. Humans are aware not only of an individual sense-impression experience of reality, however, but a shared one. The reality any individual sees, touches, tastes and smells is not the totality of reality, because reality exists in other times and places, in the experiences of other individuals. Perhaps then the early paintings played another role. The men went on a hunt as individuals. When they came back, they painted their experiences on the walls, and everyone agreed that they had all seen the same thing. So, even if an individual was not there -or died- the events that everybody else saw in common were there as part of a "common" reality. The hunt would thus become a socially conscious event in the life of the tribe, because it would exist in common consciousness, even for tribal members who did not go on the hunt. This social consciousness would become a high level of primitive abstraction, because it would create a concept of events occurring freely in time and place, without a consciousness individually present to witness it. Such events occurring outside of immediate time and place, might be another important abstraction for planning the hunt.

Cultural transmission is not something fortuitous then, happening when humans learned a few tricks, which could be passed on. Cultural evolution was from the outset an "end point" of human evolution assisting the evolutionary process. Beyond this, the next step is abandoning the single environment adaptation mode, and changing to adapt the entire biology not just to an environment, but to adaptation by cultural evolution itself. Over the last few million years humans did evolve very rapidly in large animal terms. But it was evolution towards an end point where once reached, humans would solve the biological problem of adaptation. They would achieve the maximum possible rate of evolutionary change, by not having to biologically evolve at all.