The notion of culture is complex, and has been defined in a number of different ways.1 Specialists in evolution think of it as a collection of information that affects the behavior of individuals belonging to a particular culture. This information, which includes ideas, knowledge, beliefs, values, abilities, and attitudes, is acquired through teaching, imitation, and every other kind of social transmission.2
Cultural evolution is evident in the development of both moral values—certain values, more inspiring than others, will be more apt to be transmitted from one individual to another—and beliefs in general, insofar as certain beliefs give people greater chances of surviving or attaining a high social position.
Teaching—the voluntary, organized transmission of knowledge—is essentially an altruistic behavior that, in its non-professional iterations, consists of offering others useful information without expectation of reward. Animals teach certain kinds of expertise to their offspring—hunting, for instance—but the voluntary transmission of knowledge to non-related individuals is a specifically human phenomenon.3
It is important to point out that human transmission and cultural evolution are cumulative. Each generation has at its start knowledge and technological experience acquired by previous generations. Tools and behavior have a history. They become more and more complex as successive generations improve their quality and enrich their repertory.4
Another factor contributes considerably to the evolution of cultures: the instinct of imitation. Most human beings are inclined to conform to dominant attitudes, customs, and beliefs. Conformity to the norm will be encouraged by the community, whereas nonconformity will lead to reprobation and various forms of punishment, not very costly to the party inflicting them and sometimes disastrous to the party subjected to them. These penalties can affect an individual’s reputation and even lead to his exclusion from the community.
The evolution of cultures favors the establishment of social institutions that define and supervise respect for the behavioral norms, in order to ensure the harmony of communal life. Still, these norms are not fixed: like cultures, they evolve with the acquisition of new knowledge. Different cultural groups compete with each other on the Darwinian model. Consequently, certain cultures flourish while others decline. As Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson explain:
In the same way that evolutionary theory explains why genes persist and spread, a sensible theory of cultural evolution will have to explain why some beliefs and attitudes spread and persist while others disappear.5
The study of the evolution of cultures is a new discipline that has led to remarkable advances over the last thirty years, particularly under the impetus of two American researchers, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson. According to them, a twofold evolution occurs in parallel: the very slow evolution of genes, and the quicker one of cultures, which allows psychological faculties to appear which could never have evolved under the influence of genes alone. Hence the title of their book, Not by Genes Alone.6
The advent of complex societies and of civilization over the last five thousand years has actually occurred too quickly to be the result of genetic changes. But it has also occurred too slowly to be explained solely in terms of purely individual adaptation to new situations, such as war or peace, being single or married, rich or poor, which can happen in the space of a few years. Culture, on the other hand, has a rhythm of evolution that allows us to explain the growth of social complexity over the last five millennia.
Cultures and individuals shape each other mutually, just as two knife blades sharpen each other. Individuals who grow up in a new culture are different, because they acquire new habits and these habits transform their brains through neuroplasticity and the expression of their genes through epigenetics. These individuals will contribute to making their culture evolve more, and so on.
According to Boyd and Richerson, it is this cultural evolution that has allowed for the major transformations that have occurred in human societies since the appearance of our species. For example, over the last three centuries, our cultural perception of violence, wars in particular, has evolved considerably. We have gone from regarding torture as an entirely acceptable public spectacle and war as noble and glorious, to tolerating violence less and less, and increasingly regarding war as immoral and barbaric. We are progressing toward a culture of peace and respect for human rights.
Let’s look at a typical example of cultural transmission. We know that murders are more frequent in the southern United States than in the northern part of the country. Sociologists who have studied this phenomenon noted that people in the South were more polite, but also more quick to react to an insult or a provocation and more attached to the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which authorizes citizens to bear arms. Southerners assign more importance to a sense of honor, and are inclined to carry out justice themselves when codes of honor are transgressed. Culture is also inscribed in their physiology: reactions to an insult, measured by the level of cortisol (a stress indicator) and testosterone (an indicator of propensity to violence), are stronger among Southerners than among Northerners.
When studying the various origins of American populations, the researchers perceived that Southerners were mostly descended from Scottish and Irish shepherds who, in their native countries, lived in sparsely populated regions. Like any shepherd, they had to supervise their herds constantly and protect the pastures from intruders. This mode of life engendered a culture more inclined to violence, in which one’s word, tacit conventions (the vast, wild pasture land did not legally belong to the shepherds), swift response to provocations, and codes of honor had great importance. On the other hand, the northern part of the United States was colonized by farmers from England, Holland, and Germany, whose cultural codes are more peaceful. A farmer does not live in constant fear of someone stealing his field from him overnight.
All research indicates that the cultural differences present in the world are not genetic by nature. A study of a hundred Korean children adopted early on by white American families has shown that these children behave like American children, and exhibit no cultural traits reminiscent of their Korean origins. What’s more, these children generally show little curiosity about their culture of origin.7 Another study of children of European origin adopted by Native Americans after their parents were killed also showed that these children reliably adopted the behaviors and customs of the Native Americans, as well as the feeling of belonging to them.8
The difference in levels of violence between American Southerners and Northerners mentioned above must therefore obviously be imputed to the special systems of values and norms transmitted from generation to generation by education and example, and not to a genetic mutation.
Cultural values are often inspired by those who teach us and by prominent people in a population: charismatic leaders, scholars, celebrities. It turns out that it is the less learned and least powerful people who are the most easily swayed to conform to dominant values.
It’s also worth noting the fact that cultural ideas and values are not transmitted intact, but usually undergo alterations: the transmission can be partial, and can include errors or be distorted. In some cases, this transmission can also be reliable and faithful—as in a class on grammar, physics, or math, for instance. Everything depends on the degree of intrinsic and objective invariance of the subject taught.
We have seen that cultural transmission is cumulative. Knowledge is added to other knowledge with each generation. That is the only reason why the modern world enjoys such an advance in the realm of technology. If each generation had to reinvent the way to make fire, extract metals, and produce electricity, Apple and BlackBerry would refer to nothing but a couple of fruits.
Cultures evolve more rapidly when a large amount of new information becomes available. If there is little new knowledge or if the environment is very stable, cultures have few reasons to change. On the other hand, though, if the environment is too unstable, cultures don’t have the time to adapt to the constant, swift fluctuations.9 In changing, complex conditions, it will usually be more advantageous to conform to the dominant customs of the group. For cooperation or any other value, altruism for instance, to spread through a group of individuals, they must all grant importance to the objectives of the group and be disposed to cooperate, even at a personal cost. Researchers have also shown the importance of the strength of example and the spirit of emulation that is born from observing and acting together with others.
Finally, for a process of selection to be able to operate between different cultural values, individualism or a cooperative spirit for example, these differences must have effects on the prosperity or decline of those who hold those values.
Knowing that emulation, inspiration, and the power of living examples—the noble aspects of conformism—are both the framework that ensures the stability and continuity of cultures, and the motivating force behind their transformation and expansion, it falls upon us to embody, in our being and our behavior, the altruism we want to encourage: the messenger must be the message.
We have seen that altruism, cooperation, and mutual aid are much more present in daily life than prevailing media and prejudices suggest. Over the last fifty years, we have seen aversion to war develop, and have witnessed the spread of the view that the earth is nothing but a “big village.” The growing role of NGOs, the fact that many citizens are concerned with what is happening elsewhere in the world, especially when assistance is needed—all that indicates a change of mentalities, hence of our cultures, to be more concerned with a feeling of “global responsibility,” to use an expression dear to the Dalai Lama. This evolution is underway. Perhaps it is enough to take part in it, by adding our stone to the building, our drop to the ocean. But we can also decide to actively facilitate it and amplify it, like a catalyst accelerating a chemical reaction.