Sociotype and cultural evolution: The acceleration of cultural change alongside industrial revolutions

Abstract

The present work explores, from the vantage point of the sociotype, the dramatic acceleration of cultural change alongside the successive industrial revolutions, particularly in the ongoing information era. Developed within the genotype-phenotype-sociotype conceptual triad, the sociotype means the average social environment that is adaptively demanded by the “social brain” of each individual. For there is a regularity of social interaction, centered on social bonding and talking time, which has been developed as an adaptive trait, evolutionarily rooted, related to the substantial size increase of human groups. A quantitative approach to the sociotype basic traits shows fundamental competitive interrelationships taking place within an overall “attention economy.” Approaching these figures via the Planckian Distribution Equation, they can be connected with many other competitive processes taking place in the biological, economic, and cultural realms. Concerning culture, the cognitive limits of the individual, which we consider commensurate with the sociotype general limitations, impose by themselves a strict boundary on the cultural items effectively handled by each individual, fostering the overall competition and decay. Further, the emergence of differentiated generations with ample discrepancy in styles of life, social aspirations, and dominant technologies would represent a systematic bias in the competition and replacement of cultural items. Intriguingly, the cultural acceleration detected in modern societies alongside the successive industrial revolutions, with an ostensible climax in the ongoing fourth industrial revolution –the information era– might be itself a paradoxical consequence of the sociotype's dynamic constancy.