Abstract
This article outlines how the historical human sciences see ‘culture’ and its dynamic developments over time and over generations. The operations of human culture are systemically self-reflexive and, as a result, exhibit a complexity that sets them apart, as a semiotic system, from mere communicative information transfer. Peculiar to this complexity is the two-way interaction between the ‘etic’ substance of the cultural exchanges and their ‘emic’ function. Cultural signals require parallel etic/emic processing at stacked levels of complexity. As a result of this complexity, the homeostasis and autopoiesis of human culture, including its dynamics and development over time, cannot be explained fully in terms of responses to the physical environment. How, this article ponders by way of conclusion, can an evolutionary approach be reconciled with these characteristics of human culture, or the notion of culture be applied to evolutionary modelling?This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.
Highlights
The application of ‘culture’ to ‘evolution’ covers widely divergent scientific debates and practices [2,3]. Underlying these is a fundamental crux: what does either word mean in the light of the other? The present paper aims to bring to this question some insights from the long reflection on culture within the humanities—those sciences that have been analysing cultural artefacts and cultural production ever since Aristotle’s Poetics
Its tenets and insights have developed in interdisciplinary contacts with anthropologists1; anthropological theory, for its part, has been drawn upon by primatologists, palaeontologists and biologists; but I find little evidence of a direct dialogue between the historical humanities and the bio-sciences or empirical sciences about the mutual applicability of ‘culture’ and ‘evolution’
Eliot felt it necessary to publish his Notes towards the Definition of Culture [9] because the term had been operationalized in the mission of the recently established UNESCO, furnishing the C in that acronym
Summary
The application of ‘culture’ to ‘evolution’ (or vice versa) covers widely divergent scientific debates and practices [2,3]. Reflections on culture have, for centuries, been the core business, the very definition, of the humanities; so central and fundamental, perhaps, that meta-reflections on the meaning of that concept were left to philosophers, together with the meaning of beauty, of humanity or of life itself It took encounters with the rising empirical sciences to force the humanities to look into that mirror. This article raises the problem how assumptions on culture, fundamental as they are in the long-established field of the humanities, and commonsensically informing our non-technical language usage and self-understanding as humans, can be validly applied to the scientific praxis (or practices) of analysis in the thriving field self-defining as ‘Cultural Evolution’. This, I hope, will clear a space in which we can establish, in an interdisciplinary discussion of pitfalls and possibilities, what is involved in studying culture in evolutionary terms, or operationalizing the cultural aspects of evolution
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