Taboo on spiritual incest: justification of the anthropic principle

Abstract

This article makes an attempt to demonstrate that the evolution of culture is isomorphic to the evolution of life, and thus, such isomorphism can be considered a basic metaphor for studying the evolution of culture. Such research allows explicating the key cultural processes, which are imperceptible to other methods, and suggest algorithms for adjusting these processes. Leaning on fact that life due to the impact of isolating mechanisms of nature constantly forms different taxa, in which the evolution rapidly fades, it is proven that isolation of cultural memes leads to their degeneration. The emergence of certain taboos, such as the taboo on incest, cause fusion of taxa, which accelerates the evolution and results in structural revolutions. Such evolutionary pattern can be described with Freud’s metaphor from the eponymous book “Totem and Taboo». Totemism explicates teleologicity of evolution as the need for uniting all taxa into one. The work displays that culture has already formed the plurality of “semantic taxa”, which require unification, or at least, interaction with each other; such interaction should stimulate the taboo on “spiritual incest, which means limitation of evolution within a single semantic taxon.