Landscape Learning in Relation to Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

Change in location or environment in and of itself does not entail cultural change at the macroevolutionary scale. However, consideration of the processes by which human populations develop, remember, and transmit to others environmental information from the time of colonization of a given region onward is an important component in understanding how social groups construct and respond to their natural world. Changes in the interactions between groups and their natural environment are a key feature of the transitions that macroevolutionary theory seeks to explain. Therefore, landscape learning is an important tool in the macroevolutionary kit. Landscape learning proceeds through the development of locational, limitational, and social knowledge. Locational knowledge is constrained by Bauplan; limitational knowledge responds dynamically to appropriate scales of environmental change. Social knowledge, the composite of shared locational and limitational knowledge, develops through social learning and is thereby subject to the multiple biases of the transmission process. Behavioral holons describe feedback between environmental information and social response, which may create punctuations in group-level environmental learning. Compilation of responses to environmental interaction may be one means of determining that a shift in adaptive peak is necessary or appropriate. This combination of environmental knowledge structures and the processes of holon feedback described by the landscape learning model has great relevance to our efforts to understand the patterns of long-term human–environment interaction and inform studies of macroevolution.