Quotes from a new book about gene-culture coevolution

I was invited to write a review for Reason of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, which I will post for patrons only when I finish it. In the process, I typed up a bunch of key quotes, which I am sharing verbatim here (The sectionslabels in ALL CAPS are for my benefit -- not from the book):

PRE-WIRED

(citing research by psychologist Paul Bloom on 3 month old babies) In short, at a very young age, humans appear pre-wired (in the sense of having a strong, innate proclivity) to interact in positive ways; we’re equipped with insight into the intentions of others and have a tendency to care about being fair.

Evolution provides the underlying foundation for human culture by equipping us with the ability to cooperate, make friends, and learn socially. 

I am not saying that differences across societies are based on our genes. Rather, I am saying that the similarities across societies – the social suite – are based on our genes.

PAIR-BONDING TO LOVE AND KINDNESS

Over the course of evolution in many species, parents initially come to feel a special bond for their offspring. In our species, that included a feeling of love. This feeling toward offspring may have then been hijacked and repurposed (in a process sometimes described in evolutionary biology as exaptation, for pair bonding, which is the special feeling, beyond just lust, humans feel for their mates. An exaptation is an evolutionary preadaptation in which a trait evolves initially for one purpose but then comes to serve another. A classic example is bird feathers, which probably evolved initially as a kind of thermal insulation and later were used to support flight.

Humans evolved to love their offspring first, then their mates, then their biological kin, then their affinal kin (their in-laws), then their friends and groups.

The evolutionary psychology of both mean and women is to exchange love for support.

Together with the gender-based division of labor, the sharing of food, and the lengthy period of caring for the young, paternity certainty was a crucial factor in the transition from our hominid ancestors to our own species.

The capacity for social learning and cultural transmission, which is itself part of the social suite, is a crucial aspect of our adaptation as a species and of our ability to manifest many marital patterns overlaid on an impulse to pair-bond.

Our many marriage systems reflect the human capacity for social learning, a key part of the social suite. We can flexibly apply a cultural overlay to the deep truth of our loving attachment to our partners..

Moving outward from a circle of attachment and affection to partners offspring, and kin, we proceed to our attachment and affection for our friends and our groups.

RECIPROCITY AND IN-GROUP

We feel good about people in proportion to how nice they are to us, and we keep balance sheets of those sentiments and remember past interactions.

You treat in-group members more favorably because you expect to be treated that way in kind. This is known as mutual-fate control, meaning that all the members in the group affect one another’s fate even if they cannot force others to behave in a certain way or even communicate about it.

FREE-RIDERS, DEFECTORS, PUNISHMENT

A second way to overcome the problem is to allow punishment of any free-riders…The responsibility to punish free-riders was, and is more equally distributed in human groups and our desire for retribution is quite standard…The willingness to pay a personal cost to punish someone else who is hurting a third person is known as altruistic punishment...Punishment works as an institution – changing behavior by its very existence

Each of the types – defectors, cooperators, and loners can survive, but they do so only because they are coevolving with another type that beats its nemesis. The types need each other to exist. It’s just like rock-paper-scissors.

COOPERATION

Cooperation is formally defined as as a contribution to an outcome that benefits all members of a group (even a pair of people), regardless of whether the other people themselves contributed to the outcome. Those who contribute (cooperators) pay a cost for doing so, and those who do not contribute (the defectors or free-riders) pay nothing.

Teaching is actually a kind of cooperative behavior, and it is uncommon in the animal kingdom because it is costly

CULTURE

In the case of exophenotypes, genes code for something specific, like an artifact or asocial behavior, that then affects the evolution of the organism. But when it comes to culture, our genes equip our species with the capacity to flexibly produce things…our species survival across the wolrld hinges on its capacity for culture…Ecologist Peter Richerson and anthropologist Robert Boyd define culture as “information capable of affecting individuals’ behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.”

And this is another way of describing culture – knowledge that is transmitted between individuals and across time, that can be taught and learned, and that is distinctive to groups…culture is a set of beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts that are shared by members of a group and are typical of it, and that are socially transmitted.

When your friends become better connected, it increases your own connection to the whole network…Your centrality can be quantified by counting not just the number of your friends, but also the number of your friends’ friends and the number of their friends, and so on…the transitivity finding that your genes could affect the social lives of other people…When we think of niche construction, we usually think of animals engaged in acts to modify their physical environment, such as beavers building dams of sticks to enhance foraging opportunities…people might analogously engage in niche construction by manipulating the social world around them…domestication may have fosted neurological changes that made humans not only more docile, but also more attentive to others, thus making our species more responsive to training and more prepared for social learning.

This is cumulative culture. People endlessly contribute to the accumulated wealth of knowledge that belongs to humanity, and each generation is generally born into greater such wealth.

But the ability to fashion diverse cultures – our pre-wired inclination to produce culture – is itself a crucial attribute of our species. This capacity for culture, rather than its products, reflects our evolved proclivities for social interaction, cooperation, and learning…Culture can actually affect the genes we carry as a species…This interaction between genes and culture is known as the theory of gene-culture coevolution…First, as noted above, our capacity to create culture is itself an adaptation shaped by natural selection…Because we are a long-lived, group-living organism that has generational overlap (that is, multiple generations living together at the same time and place) and extended parental care (with a relatively long period of development, we can benefit from, and therefore likely evolved, the ability to manifest culture...The second element is that culture itself can evolve over time in a process that follows a logic similar to natural selection. Just like genetic mutations can lead to improved disease resistance, chance discoveries can lead to better tools. And then superior ideas can outperform weaker ones – and be selected for…cultural evolution has the special feature of allowing lateral transmission (of ideas or practices) between individuals within the same generation, not just to individuals in subsequent generations, as in the case of genetic evolution…The third element of gene-cultural coevolution theory is that this cultural system of inheritance itself becomes a feature of our species’ evolutionary landscape, exerting a force of natural selection on us. We have evolved genetically in response to the culture that we are genetically prepared to create.

Humans have a constellation of psychological traits built for culture, including the tendency to conform to what others are doing, to develop and obey local norms, to privilege high-status or older people who could be potential teachers, and to pay attention to the people who others are paying attention to… The existence of cumulative culture in our species makes prestige an especially appealing way to acquire status… 

The sex appeal of prestige in both men and women is important because evidence that prestige is associated with reproductive success supports the claim that humans evolved to value those who can teach things.

Bigger populations are better suited to social learning and to maximizing opportunities for valuable innovation.

GENE-CULTURE COEVOLUTION

Cultural transmission can hinge on how cooperative and friendly a population is. Consequently, elements of the social suite lie at the foundation for our capacity to develop culture…Our species’ capacity for culture, based on teaching and learning, is a key part of the social suite even if the specific components of culture..so variable – are not. Sustaining complex cultural knowledge requires a large and interconnected set of thinkers and innovators.

Cooking freed up energy to power the demanding human brain, which got larger…Though we cannot outrun even our household pets in a short sprint, we have all sorts of adaptations that equip us to run for a long time…Another very good example of gene-culture coevolution is lactose intolerance in adults.

As humans evolved the capacity to live socially and then developed the cultural innovation of forming larger urban collectives, certain kinds of religions became more useful…religions are a cultural feature that secondarily allow unrelated individuals to expand the circle of cooperation, exchange goods, and maintain a division of labor.

But cultural norms of reciprocity are another way of coping with the challenges of sustaining cooperation in groups. Cultural norms regarding punishment, altruism, and reciprocation can clearly support cooperation in circumstances where it would otherwise fail. In short, culture further supports several crucial elements of the social suite – accentuating practices related to identity, friendship, in-group bias, cooperation, and learning – even as culture depends on the other elements of the social suite.

Once cultural transmission became possible, our species faced circumstances favoring brains that were capable of learning and teaching, including brains that could respect norms, copy models, or transmit information. In turn, as humans came increasingly to rely on the knowledge of others, they became even friendlier and kinder so that they could interact reasonably peacefully within groups and so that they could take full advantage of culture in order to survive. Culture builds on, and reinforces, our evolved capacity for making a good society. Culture is an emergent property of human groups, a new property of the whole not manifested in the parts themselves. And it arises from humans having the brains and social systems that allow for retaining and exchanging ideas…Human culture also cumulates.

“The project of evolutionary sociology in which we have been engaged reveals that humans everywhere are pre-wired to make a particular kind of society – one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning.”