Views from Crestmont Drive

Chapter 7, From Genes to Culture

This chapter is about “gene-culture coevolution.” Also, this is the point in the book where Wilson mentions C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” (which I discussed here almost six years ago.)

Key points in this chapter:

• Wilson defines culture: The total way of life of a discrete society—“its religion, myths, art, technology, sports…”
• Genes don’t prescribe culture; they prescribe behavior, which in turn, along with history and environment, create culture, in a back and forth process called gene-culture coevolution, a concept Wilson (and his collaborators) had developed since the 1980s, particularly in Promethean Fire (with Charles J. Lumsden) in 1983;
• We’ve found specific genes that affect some diseases, like schizophrenia;
• The hereditary basis of human nature comes in three parts: the universals of culture; the epigenetic rules of social behavior; and through behavioral genetics;
• The universals of culture include a tendency to break all relationships into two-part classifications, e.g. in group/out group, child/adult, kin/nonkin, married/single, sacred and profane, good and evil; and how moving from one division to another is invariably marked by ceremony; with a note about “structuralism” (a 20th century philosophical movement) and mythic narratives;
• A well-known genetic example is how different cultures have different numbers of words for colors — in a predictable sequence, from black and white in cultures with only two color terms, with red being the third, etc., to the eleven color terms present in English.

Comments:

• The way Wilson describes how populations can be assessed, but not individuals, echoes Isaac Asimov’s notion of psychohistory, which applies to entire peoples but not individuals. An example of how intellectuals of various sorts have long intuited the principles later developed by scientists.
• And the tendency to break relationships into two parts might seem simplistic, but complex thinking had to start somewhere, and making distinctions of any kind from within a complex landscape was the inevitable start. Still, as I’ve pointed out many times, this black and white thinking is retained by today’s conservatives, who fail to realize that the actual world is more complex than black and white (or good vs. evil); this is what I’ve called the savanna morality, here identified as base human nature, seen in the most primitive cultures whose only words for color are black and white. While some of us intuitively realize that the world is not only black and white, but shades of gray and many colors!
• Also, Wilson mentions, in one paragraph, “structuralism,” which has a similar flavor, in which virtually everything can be seen as one side of a dichotomy. (Coincidentally I’ve read a bit about structuralism elsewhere, which I’ll report on soon.)
• And not that Wilson engages in special pleading, since the evidence is overwhelming, but he does point out that for his grand scheme of consilience to work, the mind must be materialist, with no supernatural counterpart involved.
• (What if that were not true, and different rules of reality applied in different realms? A common fantasy scenario. Magic, and all that. And a default religious thesis.)

Summary:

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Chapter 6: The Mind

Here’s the chapter in Wilson that corresponds to Pinker’s entire book. There are ideas here that reflect some of Nagel‘s topics, as well, and some of the thoughts I had while reading his book.

Key points in this chapter:

• The mind is the brain; Cartesian dualism has long been abandoned;
• The brain evolved for survival, not to perceive the world accurately;
• Emotions are not something extraneous; they evolved to enable humans to focus mental activity;
• We can understand concepts like meaning, decision making, and creativity as effects of neural networks;
• Wilson dismisses the supposedly fundamental philosophical problem about whether other people perceive as we do;
• Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive; thus in a useful sense, we do have free will;
• Wilson is skeptical about our ability to create artificial minds.

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