The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 13

The evolutionary variation of meanings depends on their correct repetition by successive human generations. The inability of people to authentically repeat a meaning leads to its demise. Therefore, as Henrich shows, people tend to “over-imitate,” mimicking meanings with excessive accuracy (Henrich 2016, pp. 108-9). The ability to improve meanings (or at least not allow them to degrade) depends, all other things being equal, on the size and sociality of the human population. Thus, the size and quality of a society influence the path of its cultural evolution and the adaptive landscape of its meanings.

The difference between indirect cultural transmission and direct transmission of genes means that meanings can negatively affect human survival. If the survival of genes depends entirely on the survival of organisms that possess those genes, then meanings are not strictly tied to their carriers, allowing harmful meanings to spread throughout the human population. “…Oblique transmission opens up the possibility that some traits may spread through a population in spite of the fact that they reduce the fitness of the individuals who bear them” (Lewens 2018). Well-known examples include alcoholism and drug addiction.

The evolution of social learning went through two phases: (1) earlysocial learning, which transmitted simple meanings that each individual could rediscover through individual learning (that is, independent discovery or invention), and (2) cultural learning, which transmitted meanings, that an individual, regardless of his abilities, could not rediscover independently in his entire life.

Social learning is characteristic of the early stages of cultural selection, when meanings were conveyed between hominids on the basis of their herding behavior, that is, their animal sociality. The early meanings themselves were still part of the animal behavior and appeared as animal signals and tools. If meanings got lost in the course of transmission, they could be rediscovered or reinvented through self-learning. In the later stages of cultural selection, meanings had left the realm of nature and formed an independent realm in which active abstractions in their shape of a word and a tool gradually decoupled from immediate animal behavior. Now meanings were transmitted through cultural learning; the complexity of meanings no longer allowed them to be simply reinvented if the community had lost them for some reason. At the same time, cultural learning enabled the transition from the collection of individual experiences to the growing accumulation of meanings from generation to generation.

Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb noted that “the transition to human societies with linguistic communication required changes in anatomy and sensorimotor systems and an increase in cognitive ability, but the part of the transition that is most difficult to explain is how humans acquired the capacity to quickly master the complex rules of grammar when young” (Jablonka and Lamb 2006, p. 243). They suggested that this ability may have arisen in the course of the co-evolution of genes and culture. Originally, linguistic information was transmitted through social learning. However, as linguistic communication became more crucial for proto-human groups, cultural selection of individuals took place based on their ability to learn the basics of language, leading to partial genetic assimilation of those basics. Given this assumption, the question arises: how can it be that every child today can learn any of the five or six thousand human languages. The answer could be either that by the time the genetic capacity for language evolved, all proto-humans had the same language and that no change in the genetic capacity was required for further language evolution, or that the genetic capacity evolved relative to a base common to all languages.