Download NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURE

Theory of Knowledge Conference 2002
Eyüboğlu High School, Istanbul
NEW
PERSPECTIVES ON
CULTURE
Is there a biological theory of culture?
Presented by Gautam Sen
WHAT DOES CULTURE
MEAN?

Some definitions from Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror
for Man:
a
way of thinking, feeling and believing
 the total way of life of a people
 a storehouse of pooled learning
 learned behaviour
 a precipitate of history
Presented by Gautam Sen
Clifford Geertz’s definition
From The Interpretations of Cultures:
The concept of culture I espouse....is essentially a semiotic one.
Believing that...man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs,
and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science
in search of law but an an interpretive one in search of meaning.
Presented by Gautam Sen
WHAT DOES
CULTURE MEAN?
Are there other ways we can we define
culture?
Presented by Gautam Sen
TWO VIEWS OF
HUMAN NATURE

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The Enlightenment view: humans are a part of nature,
behaving according to immutable natural laws
discoverable by the methods of the natural sciences.
There is a core human essence which science can
discover.
The Standard Social Science view: humans are
distinguished from other creatures in being creators and
creatures of their social environments and cultures,
thus transcending their biological limitations.
Presented by Gautam Sen
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
VIEW


All humans are constrained by their biology and
by their evolutionary history.
Our biological inheritance defines our universal
and innate capacities hidden beneath our cultural
diversity.
Presented by Gautam Sen
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
VIEW



Could the unity underlying our diversity be a
ground for universal equality?
Does “an innate human nature imply innate
human differences”?
If so, could these innate differences imply that
we are irrevocably locked into our positions in
racial, gender and other kinds of hierarchies?
Presented by Gautam Sen
THE SOCIAL SCIENCE VIEW


“Biology is not destiny”.
The mind is not a product of biology, but a
“blank slate” onto which the light of experience,
filtered through some innate lens, inscribes
mental content.
Presented by Gautam Sen
THE SOCIAL SCIENCE VIEW
Since experience originates in the social
environment, adherents to the SSV often claim
that:
 Bad environments create bad people.
 A better society ensures better individuals.
 Culture, not biology, constrains individuals.
Presented by Gautam Sen
FROM THE BRAIN TO
THE MIND
THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY (EP)
PARADIGM
The EP paradigm attempts to reconcile the
two views of human nature by offering a
Darwinian explanation of how the
evolution of the brain has resulted in a
particular architecture of the human mind.
Presented by Gautam Sen
FROM THE MIND TO
CULTURE
THE CONCEPT OF MEMES
Building on an analogy with the gene suggested
by Dawkins (1976) The Selfish Gene, Blackmore
(1999) and others developed the idea of a
MEME - an idea, a song, an ideology, or a
mental product of any kind which spreads by
replication of a version selected from a
population of slightly dissimilar versions.
Presented by Gautam Sen
THE EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM
Psychology is an extension of
 biology - that studies how the neurophysiology
of the brain enables it to process information;
 cognitive science - that studies how the
processing of information enables the
functioning of specialized circuits within the
brain dealing with key adaptations.
Presented by Gautam Sen
THE EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM
Brain’s information processing generates
BEHAVIOUR
Process information
BRAINS
Presented by Gautam Sen
THE EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY PARADIGM
Psychology of SpecializedAdaptations
(e.g., vision, sexuality, reasoning, emotions)
Cognitive Science
Neurophysiology
Presented by Gautam Sen


BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
PARADIGM
The brain is a physical system that processes
information like a computer, using sensory
receptors to pick up information, which is then
sent through the brain’s neural networks.
Over the history of the human species, these
neural circuits evolved to solve problems that
existed in our evolutionary history. This enabled
the species to survive.
Presented by Gautam Sen
BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
PARADIGM


The brain has a modular structure, in which each
module has a specialized capacity for solving a
different problem which humans have faced in their
evolutionary past (e.g., language, reasoning, mate
selection, social exchange, etc.).
Each module represents an ADAPTATION that
evolved in response to a selection pressure in the
ENVIRONMENT OF EVOLUTIONARY
ADAPTEDNESS.
Presented by Gautam Sen



BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
PARADIGM
There are NO abstract, content-independent
and general-purpose cognitive abilities such as
memory, inference, categorization.
The cognitive abilities that do exist have evolved
to adapt to specific factors in the human’s
evolutionary environment.
These correspond to what we commonly call
INSTINCTS.
Presented by Gautam Sen
FROM MINDS TO MEMES


The modular mental architecture proposed by
the EP paradigm includes a specialised capacity
for IMITATION.
This capacity for imitation creates different
copies of an idea (more generally, any product
of the mind), some of which are passed on
(replicated) more successfully than others,
creating MEMES.
Presented by Gautam Sen
UNIVERSAL DARWINISM
Evolution by natural selection occurs whenever
the following conditions are satisfied:
1) replication: there are things that can be copied.
2) variation: there are dissimilar copies of the same
thing.
3) selection: there is an environment where not all
copies survive, but only some get copied again.
Presented by Gautam Sen
SOME EXAMPLES OF MEMES





Stories and jokes
Fashions in clothing
Languages (these are actually large combinations
of memes which Blackmore calls memeplexes)
Religions (also memeplexes)
Ideologies
Presented by Gautam Sen
SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE
DARWINIST APPROACH TO CULTURE


Both the EP paradigm as well as Universal
Darwinism regard the cognitive process (or the
process of meme replication) as ‘computational’
- i.e., a syntactic operation on a local database. Is
this an adequate approximation to human
thought?
The idea of a meme is itself a meme. Can
memetics then be a metaparadigm?
Presented by Gautam Sen
SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE
DARWINIST APPROACH TO CULTURE

How does Geertz’s description of culture as
“webs of significance that he himself has spun”
relate to memes? Perhaps the webs of
significance themselves are memeplexes?
Presented by Gautam Sen
WHAT HAVE WE GAINED WITH A
DARWINIAN PERSPECTIVE ON
CULTURE?
For me, the chief gain has been a fertile analogy
between the BIOSPHERE and the
IDEOSPHERE. There is a rich diversity in
both, and the Darwinian perspective suggests
that there may be a similar dynamic driving
both.
Presented by Gautam Sen
WHAT HAVE WE GAINED WITH A
DARWINIAN PERSPECTIVE ON
CULTURE?



Is cultural diversity intrinsically valuable and worth
preserving? Value judgement - can’t be answered within
this or any other scientific perspective!
Does the Darwinian dynamic suggest a tendency
towards cultural homogenization?
Can there be an ecology (or indeed a biology) of ideas,
just as much as of living species. How can this be
further explored?
Presented by Gautam Sen