Natural Selection Can Act on Human Culture

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that the process of natural selection can act on human cultures as well as on genes. The team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures, evaluating 96 functional features that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the vessels. Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems. 'People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term,' said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford."

Comments

Memetics?

[nickovs]

Isn't this just memetics in action?

Re:Memetics?

[kripkenstein]

Isn't this just memetics in action? Memetics is a fun term. As a qualitative notion, it makes some intuitive sense. But what the article mentions is work that was quantitative (it compared functional vs. decorative features and their rate of change), and hence actually scientific. If you must talk using terms like 'memetics', then you might say that this research is important in that it finally brings some quantitative investigation into memetics instead of the usual 'just-so' stories.

That said, whether the researchers' results can support their wild speculation at the end of TFA (connecting their research to global warming, religious fundamentalism, and what have you) is another thing. Such speculation is silly.

Re:Memetics?

[kripkenstein]

Memetics is a fun term. As a qualitative notion, it makes some intuitive sense. But what the article mentions is work that was quantitative (it compared functional vs. decorative features and their rate of change), and hence actually scientific.

With all respect, what in the hell are you talking about? To paraphrase the Wikipedia entry, Memetics is an approach to creating models for cultural information transfer. You know, just like natural selection is an approach to creating models for evolution. Of course it's not "quantitative"; it's a model for understanding the quantitative data.

The point is that memetics is not amenable to quantitative analysis. In other words, you can't derive hypotheses that you can test, unlike genetic evolution, which has been proven many times over. By studying cultural/mental content, memetics has a far more elusive target.

But it's not impossible. The research we are told about in TFA in fact does that, it (finally) does a serious quantitative study of cultural evolution, a field that until now has been almost entirely about qualitative claims, e.g., "religion is a virus". That might be true, but it isn't testable, hence it isn't scientific in the way that genetic evolution is. (If you believe I am wrong, please supply a reference to a rigorous scientific investigation of memetics, i.e., a quantitative one; thanks in advance.)

I hope this helps.

Re:Memetics?

[It'sYerMam]

You do you realise you can make qualitative predictions, don't you? If I burn calcium, I can predict it will burn red, even if I don't know what wavelength it will be. More relevant, Tiktaalik was a qualitative prediction, as was the appearance of human chromosome 2 - two qualitative predictions very important in the field of evolution.

Hmmm

[dreamchaser]

This almost reads more like a political agenda than a scientific study. "We must return to nature or we are doomed," to grossly paraphrase.

Re:Hmmm

[jellomizer]

returning to your roots is in the step in the wrong direction. We need to dedicate resources to finding better energy solutions and toanahe our human resources better. If we had the population today and everyone has horses it would be even more of an enviromemtal nightmare. The car when invented was considered an enviromemtal inovation.

In the Windoze world

[spammeister]

Does that mean because Windows Vista is an inferior design to XP does that mean natural selection could play a role in "weeding out" this particular direction the Windows world is taking? Definitely an "unsustainable approach" as far as I'm concerned.

Or we just put separate M$ design teams on a deserted islands on the Pacific and whoever can build a canoe to get them back to society wins?

Long-term

[michaelmalak]

Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term.

Oh, it'll work out very well in the long term, that is, assuming the entire race isn't annihilated. The most sustainable cultures on Earth will survive. I think the quoted researcher meant to say medium term.

Re:Long-term

[AikonMGB]

I think you misunderstood the quoted researcher.

Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term.

(Emphasis mine). The researcher is saying that European/North-American/etc. culture is currently operating in an unsustainable way, and that this works in the short-term (i.e. we are "developing" and "improving" our lives), but that in the long-haul, any culture that hopes to survive must operate in a sustainable way. If they don't, they will consume all available resources until their way-of-life disintegrates around them.

Aikon-

Re:Long-term

[Attila Dimedici]

Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term.

(Emphasis mine). The researcher is saying that European/North-American/etc. culture is currently operating in an unsustainable way, and that this works in the short-term (i.e. we are "developing" and "improving" our lives), but that in the long-haul, any culture that hopes to survive must operate in a sustainable way. If they don't, they will consume all available resources until their way-of-life disintegrates around them.

Aikon-

That very quote calls into question the researcher in question as a scientist. There is no evidence that Western Civilization is unsustainable. Intuitively, it seems like it must be. However, Julian Simon made a bet with Paul Ehrlich that resources were becoming less expensive. Paul Ehrlich and several colleagues selected five metals in 1980 that they felt would rise in price over the next decoade. Julian Simon bet them that they would fall or stay the same. Julian SImon won the bet, all five metals fell in price. THis bet does not prove the sustainability of Western Civilization, but it does suggest that the intuitive feeling that it is unsustainable is flawed.

Re:Long-term

[AikonMGB]

Have you taken a look at Western Civilization's fossil-fuel consumption? These are resources that by their very definition are not replenishable. And, quite frankly, all the metals in the world won't do you squat if you don't have the energy to drive them around or build anything with them. Beyond fossil fuels, there are other important resources, such a food. Notice how the deserts (in North America, sure, but in China in particular) are growing? They are losing arable soil at an alarming rate, and yet their population is increasing all the same. Food doesn't grow on trees, you know ;) In all seriousness, what happens when you go to the market to buy food for your family and find that vegetables have gone up in price 10-fold because China has started importing en masse?

These are just two particular examples, but there are many more.. do some research on the renewable water table levels in Asia; you might be surprised how dry some of their mega-aquifers are. There's no point in trying to defend the "sustainability" of a fossil-fuel based society/economy. Even if the space program takes off and we fly to Titan to rape her resources, we're just prolonging the same situation: a dependence on a resource that is fundamentally limited in quantity.

----- Note that the above is the end of my point, and what follows is just additional ranting; do not make reference to it when defending the discussion at hand, as I am well aware that I am now talking about time-scales on the thousands or tens-of-thousands of years. -----

When you get down to it, nuclear power; there is a finite amount of suitable radioactive material in this world that, assuming our use of nuclear power continues to rise, will one day run out (of course this is much longer-span than fossil-fuels, but the time it takes is the only difference).

North-America (which I can speak to directly since I live there) lives in a wasteful, consumerist society. We are wasteful of our environment, we are wasteful of our resources, of our energy, of our food... In the "long term", unless we leave this planet, our energy consumption must be limited to a "solar quota", i.e. the amount of sunlight the Earth receives, as that is the only "input" energy this world has. Everything else is simply consuming solar energy that was stored a long time ago.

----- And now for some wild hyperbole, simply because its fun. -----

Actually, if you really get down to it, there's no point in anything since anything we do contributes to the eventual heat death of the Universe, and there is only a finite amount of energy (assuming a finite Universe) that we can consume even if we had ideal means of obtaining it.

Re:"Natural" Selection

[talljosh]

But seriously, this approach on first glance says to me that these scientists don't understand the word natural in the term Natural Selection, and probably don't understand scientific method very well either.
Based on my understanding of the biological process of natural selection, natural selection would roughly translate in this instance to the boats which are most well-suited for thir environment surviving long enough to reproduce while those less well-suited dying off before they can breed.
I agree: the observations would seem to be better explained by good design practices than by some form of natural selection.

Re:Evolution/design

[Cairnarvon]

That's a beautifully convoluted straw man you have there.

Nobody's saying evolution necessarily implies a lack of a designer.
In the case of the evolution of life, we're saying a designer is not necessary at all to explain what we're seeing, and in fact introducing a designer creates a whole host of new problems that need answering without adding any value.

If you want to imply a designer, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence. Until someone can point to something that couldn't have arisen without intervention from a designer (irreducible complexity in a real sense, I suppose; the examples the ID movement has brought on have all been debunked, though), invoking one is just bad science.

Natural selection avoidance? Nice trick

[Hope Thelps]

People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption.

Nonsense. People haven't "learned to avoid natural selection", they've been subject to it. In the short term natural selection has favoured these "unsustainable approaches" which have helped in providing decent life expectancy and thus breeding opportunities for billions of people, in the long term natural selection may not favour this approach (by definition, it won't if they are in fact unsustainable). That's natural selection at work. There is no avoiding it.

why we invented religion, monogamy...

[airdrummer]

is religion not a collection of survival lessons, wrapped in mnemonic stories to preserve the knowledge across generations? doesn't the bible have helpful hints like "get your drinking water _upstream_ from the latrine"? in a pre-industrial pre-scientific world the only reliable way to avoid STDs is monogamy.

and what better way to ensure compliance than to tap into the natural human spirituality circuits, invoking the authority of the deit[y|ies] spinning tales of eternal damnation for transgressors...hey, whatever works;-}

and handling waste & dead animals isn't really healthy, but a dirty job's gotta get done, so a society could relegate it to a wretched underclass isolated from the larger society...oh, let's just call 'em 'untouchables'...hey, can't argue w/ success;-}

Obviously he's not familiar with the Darwin Awards

[edwardpickman]

Technology has been a boon to nature selection. The less survival worthy seem to find testing the limits of technology irresistable. Their valiant attempts to test those limits is helping to insure the security of the gene pool. If we really want to improve the gene pool we need to go wide with a TV show, "American Darwin". The contestants compete to come up with the most extreme way to commit suicide on national TV. No takers? Obviously you haven't seen Jackass.

Bad Science or Bad Reporting?

[europa universalis]

So if I get this right... the outcome of their research is that over time, pacific islanders tried to make better and better boats?
By not changing features that worked well and changing features that failed?
Doesn't natural selection have to be done by nature for it to be natural?
Isn't this just selection?

For what it's worth, I suspect that the original paper had to do with the applicability of the mathematical models for predicting the rate of change, or something. To imply that divergence was shaped by a winnowing process during migration from island to island, they would have demonstrate that the alterations under consideration actually had improved seaworthiness. Otherwise, the divergence is just random drift, and it's just a demonstration that the pacific islanders knew what the critical elements of outrigger design were, and didn't mess with them too much. Saying that "natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs" is just saying "shucks, we didn't disprove our hypothesis."

[previously on the 'firehose' thingy by accident, whatever that is]

It's called "The Market", dummies.

[argent]

It's amazing how smart people can be so daft. Of course the same forces apply in many fields. In biology it's called "natural selection", in economics it's called "the market", in engineering it's the trend towards a design monoculture (whether it's the internal combustion engine or Windows). Hell, even Rush Limbaugh knows about economic Darwinism.

The study itself is an interesting confirmation that market forces would lead to the same results over a long enough time period even when the available communication channels are biologically slow. But the conclusion that this is some kind of new revelation indicates to me that the communication channels between Stanford and the real world may also be biologically slow.

humbug

[ph0rk]

I am beginning to grow less and less fond of the application of terms from evolutionary biology to the study of culture.

In 99% of instances, cultural schemas do not need to be 'fit' in a darwinian sense to spread through diffusion or other processes - they can be spread due to power imbalance or just because whatever new widgets one makes once they follow the ways of whatever look cool.

I suppose that "cultural evolution" is somewhat shorter than "culture change over time", but that does not mean that when using the former term we should try and treat it like biological evolution - it just doesn't follow. Assuming that getting to the island they can't see over the horizon but know are there is an urgent crisis, then yes, they will probably have a somewhat linear progression of canoe design, keeping the innovations that worked around longer. To assume otherwise is to assume the early Polynesians were idiots. Why this becomes a problem is it is difficult if not impossible to determine what the urgent issues are for past cultures, and you'll need a few more examples to make a stronger case.

Even then, you may have an interesting theory about efficiency of design when under long-term pressure, but how the heck do you apply it to more ephemeral cultural components like religion or etiquette?

Re:Evolution/design

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people seem to be confused about what "evolution" is. Evolution is the theory that, in a population with variation in its traits, any of those traits that are advantageous will tend to be reinforced over time. It doesn't say anything about genetics or mutation, and it certainly doesn't say that monkeys can give birth to humans. It doesn't care what the traits are, as long as they can be passed from generation to generation. If tall people can reach and gather more fruit, then tallness will be reinforced. If short people figure out they can climb the tree and gather even more fruit, then climbing will be reinforced. If some group decides that celibacy is good behavior, they're not likely to pass that trait on to their progeny.

Evolution was scary at first because it introduced a process that could lead to specialization, and speciation, without every organism having to have been created from whole cloth. Now, even the creationists and ID people believe that tall parents will have tall children, and the scary part of evolution is the lie that your great grandmother was a rhesus monkey.

Saying that the preservation of "good traits" canoes is evolution of canoes is silly because it's not the canoes that are evolving. Canoes pass no traits on to their progeny because they don't have progeny. The preservation of canoe traits is evidence of evolution in the creator of the canoe. "Evolution" in this sense is a metaphor.

Re:"Natural" Selection

[26199]

The "natural selection" they are talking about is exactly the same for cultural traits as for genetic traits. Good traits => higher chance of host surviving and passing on said traits. Bad traits => lower chance of host surviving and passing on said traits. This clearly applies to canoe design, regardless of whether other factors are involved because of actual engineering work. It's inescapable that if you do something that kills you then you won't be around to teach others to do it.

The important part is that they compare variation over time of functional and non-functional aspects of canoe design, and show that functional aspects have changed more slowly. They make the analogy to biological evolution where slower change is an indicator that the traits are being selected for, i.e. are subject to evolutionary pressure.

At this point I don't know enough about either field to comment, and apparently it's a controversial idea, but it certainly seems to me to be an argument worthy of attention.

Except

[DynaSoar]

> "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time...

But only if you ignore the fields of evolutionary anthropology, sociocultural evolution and human sociobiology.

Re:In other words

[ultranova]

Umm,no.

Wow that was annoying wasnt it

Um, no :p.

What do you suggest for the 'fine-tuning' protocol?

Natural selection. People who stay in good shape even when eating mainly junk food are more likely to find a mate and pass their genes on than the ones who turn into human balloons while their arteries jam.

and why in hell should we adapt to require less excercise to stay in shape?(that *could* be translated into what the gp problary ment, but im betting thats not your point.)

Because we aren't getting much excercise nowadays, so requiring less of it is an advantageus feature.

The gp suggested that we'd evolve to tolerate the effects of being fat; I suggest it more likely that we evolve to not get fat in the first place, since that would require much less changes to our biochemistry (fine-tuning) than the ones required to support useless (in a post-industrial civilization) fat.

More correctly

[einhverfr]

Postulating a designer poses fundamental problems for scientific epistomology without solving any problems.

This means that the existance of a designer or lack thereof doesn't really have to do with the question of evolution. There may be a designer or not, but one cannot scientifically postulate one way or the other.

ID states that an intelligent designer *is necessary* to explain certain things.
Mainstream evolutionary theory states that an intelligent designer *is not necessary* to explain things. It does not postulate the lack of existance of such a designer though.

Re:More correctly

[einhverfr]

Only within scientific epistomology.

Furthermore parsimony only says that one cannot postulate an intelligent designer without need. It does *not* state that one cannot exist simply because current data doesn't require one to explain. Hence it does not suggest that the matter is closed, just that it is not necessary based on what information we have at present.

Invoking parsimony to attempt to prove the lack of existance of an intelligent designer would be like stating that various quantum particles didn't exist before we had a reason to suggest that they existed. Nothing in scientific epistomology suggests that things we don't have a present need to use to explain things don't exist.

Hence postulating either the existance or lack thereof relating to an intelligent designer is unscientific.

Re:More correctly

[Cairnarvon]

No, it'd be like postulating that anyone believing in quantum theory in, say, the 1600s would have been nuts to do so, which is true. There was no reason to believe they existed at the time, so belief in their existence would have been unscientific. It's perfectly scientific to posit the non-existence of a designer, as there is no evidence.
The fact that you can't be absolutely certain that it's true is a reflection of the fact that our scientific knowledge is always an approximation at best.

The fact that something might be wrong does not make it unscientific; in fact, every single scientific hypothesis might be wrong. That's just the nature of things. It's not possible to know anything for sure.
This emphatically does not mean that all hypotheses are equally valid or likely, though.

Re:In other words

[JavaRob]

Besides we didn't even get ridden of the old useless ones yet... (e.g. the fifth toe) Ah, that's an important fallacy about evolution. Why would we get rid of "useless" features like the 5th toe? It doesn't cost us anything to keep it (unless you account for some women's shoe fashions over the decades...).

Something that's not selected against or selected for will just get carried along (or not) by the more important mutations.

If some other mutation that actually helps us has the side-effect of fusing in the 5th toe, then it'll happen -- but if not, it's probably not going anywhere for a long time. Hell, we might even get 6 toes to a foot (even if the new toe were also superfluous!), if that change was a side-effect of an important mutation... and genetics are complicated enough that this particular genetic mutation could be a tweak that conveys certain disease resistance, or a special brain change.. that just happens to *also* affect foot development.

Re:War

[oliderid]

It was the strategy of the Huns...They occupied almost the whole Eurasian continent? Do you remember anything from them?
Rome was totally different. Rome used to assimilate other people.

Rome used to be stronger : culturally, economically and even military for hundreds of years. Empires raise and die that's a natural process in human history. Rome was different from most Empires. Their main tool was diplomacy, especially during the gauls conquest or in Greece. They used their alliances with local kings or cities to attack/invade the others...Then after few decades the ally was so dependant on Rome that it was de facto annexed.

After the fall of the Empire, most Barbarians litteraly worshipped the Roman culture. Latin was still used (in a vulgar form) as the "lingua franca" in the whole Europe...Christianity the last Roman official religion was practiced by Barbarians rulers because it was Roman, it was politically extremely positive. Even Charlesmagne (XIth) asked the pope to be crowned as the Western Roman Emperor and protector of the holly Church. This title was still used by Austrian Emperor until very recently. The Bizantine emperor, a branch of the original Roman empire was crushed by Otomans in the XVIth. Most continental European rulers like the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, Charlemagne, Charlesquint, Napolean secretly dreamed to revive the Roman Empire....And even in today Russia the Byzantine empire is still used as propaganda by nationalists, an Orthodox empire weakenned by the decadent west.

Rome is a giant in history because it had the ability to choose its policy carefully. Brutal force wasn't the only tool...What is the best result? A totally annhilated country or millions of surviving citizens happily paying taxes to be part of the free trade routes (from the UK to Jordania)? How can you expect the most sincere allegiance? By the fear of your armies? Or by the fear to lose their wealth and trading partners?