IV

Granularity and Reciprocality

Allen and Martínez have embodiment, artifacts (including symbolic), and cultural evolution themata. Their grain is different from Gerson’s approach to cultural evolution as institutional changes, but any theory of individuals or institutions are reciprocally related repeated assemblies with the scaffolding depending on perspective. Typically, however, researchers focus on one perspective with the other tacitly assumed and “held constant.”

Allen focuses on natural perceptual biases and their role in the recognition and articulation of symbols. The focus is like that of Heintz or Sperber, but the content is quite different. He considers a number of experiments in which artificial spacing or other aspects (such as the relative location or height of symbols) can lead to parsing errors in the evaluation of arithmetic expressions.

There is an assigned order of precedence in the execution of arithmetic operations in complex arithmetic strings, but the arrangement of spaces (or of parentheses) is both used naturally by novices to reinforce proper groupings and can conflict with this assigned precedence, and cause errors, even among sophisticated arithmeticians. He thus argues that natural perceptual tendencies to group nearby objects together operate in the evaluation of symbolic expressions. He follows this with other examples, suggesting that cadences (such as a “walking pace” used in reciting the children’s “alphabet song”) and different-sized saccades and their timing of the eye movements in different kinds of visual tasks suggest the coadaptation of symbols to cognitive tasks. In this he suggests that our cognitive abilities constrain and are entrenched in the coevolution of tasks and our symbols, in order better to scaffold the performance of complex tasks.

Martínez faults existing attempts to base accounts of cultural evolution on the transmission of ideas. He argues that if we consider artifacts, but seen as exemplifications of cognitive processes and procedures, that this provides the kind of hybrid objects necessary to link the more complex structures we find in the evolution of cultures. But rather than looking for general laws (as we have been advised to do in the physical sciences), he suggests that mechanisms are the appropriate units to capture the complex combinations of regularity and contingency we find in culture and the structures promoting its stability and elaboration. Martínez argues that practices such as the “shaping of deductions” in geometry require the articulated use of two different kinds of resources—mathematical language and diagrams—to together produce a convincing demonstration of the generality of a mathematical conclusion. Here cognition is distributed in our practices. He extends the reach of this view by arguing that the widely touted social brain hypothesis also requires the capacity to exploit the enduring properties of material objects by turning them into material culture that is transmitted through generations and allows the complexification of social networks. This creates a “technology of cognition” that scaffolds culture and its transmission and elaboration.

Gerson too is critical of extant accounts of cultural evolution, but his critiques run deeper. He argues that none of the attempts to extend Darwinian paradigms begin to capture the complexity of culture for several reasons. First, nothing quite fits: it is hard to individuate separable species when most creative fusions combine elements from multiple lineages; epidemiologically based accounts capture diffusion processes but fail to capture or to be capable of analyzing institutional changes; developmentalist accounts seem to suggest a constrained natural life cycle for cultural entities, where their change seems to be characterized more by extreme plasticity, and for all of this culture seems more like a complex ecosystem than an evolving array of species. He reviews and critiques several different views of culture (including culture as systems of meaning, and culture as intergenerational transmission of learning) before arguing for his preferred characterization of culture “as a system of conventions and institutions.”

In elaborating his view, he articulates a two-way relationship between institutions as forming and formed by organizations. He urges that the crucial problem is to articulate an account of institutional structural change, and he proposes that a useful way to do this is to track a single innovation and its consequences, looking in this for “mechanisms that enable and block influences among institutions.” Gerson’s perspective is particularly useful for its sustained elaboration of institutions as the preferred units of analysis, although in a full account of the dynamics of cultural change, they must be articulated with individuals, transmissible elements, organizations, and practice–artifact structures.