ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
to mind) might quibble with the assertion that genes are not responsible for content.
As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argues, it matters not whether one gambles
for bits or nations – what matters is how honestly (or not) one behaves (i.e., how
genetic self can be definitive).
Especially in the early sections of the book, Mesoudi understandably keeps steering
away from individual genes in terms of learning and favors culture. No one would
necessarily question this: cultural learning is easier, more adaptive, and works faster;
but individuals have innate dispositions that can affect learning and outcomes (see,
e.g., research by Jerome Kagan and even work by Elaine and Arthur Aron). Regarding
learning, the human species alone has an advanced, cumulative (Tomasello’s ratchet
effect), and highly influential culture, but how do we explain the many discrete
individuals (not groups) who resist such culture?
But this is not to take away from Mesoudi’s points or fascinating argument. Who
could really disagree? Mesoudi goes on to argue convincingly about Darwin’s model
of variation, competition, and inheritance in terms of cultural transmission. And of
course in this model there is acknowledgment of individuality (i.e., variation). There
is also variation within and between groups, which helps establish cultures: different
groups, extending back to our prehistory, are different cultures (languages, religious
practices, and social customs). More specifically, as per Darwin, the competition will
occur between like species, since both are trying to secure a certain (in this case)
cultural foothold. And just as there are distinct individuals and groups, there will be
competition between such, and in cultural competition there will be ideas against other
ideas, skills against other skills. In fact, in a Darwinian manner, says Mesoudi, some
aspects of culture can become extinct. And finally, as Darwin speaks about
inheritance, we can see from observation and documented history that values, beliefs,
ideas, knowledge, and customs are passed on within families and within groups (some
modified, some not). While there is in terms of cultural transmission, on the one hand
(among human beings), very close imitation, there is also, on the other hand, what
Darwin calls descent with modification – we have progressed and flourished precisely
because whatever we learn (whether in manufacturing a product or in generating an
idea) is improved over successive generations.
In addition to his careful writing on a Darwinian application of cultural evolution,
Mesoudi manages to weave into his explanation a brief history of early cultural
evolutionary theories (including Herbert Spencer and his insistence on progress to
Lewis Henry Morgan and his Euro/American centrism in terms of classifying races).
These early theories, whether products of their time or simply illustrations of
individual ignorance, stress that some cultures are more evolved than others. To say
that these ideas are “racist” (38) is true from our cultural perspective, but would they
not be racist because they are products of Victorian, nineteenth-century British
culture? Victorians were notoriously fearful of the other – that was their culture. (See,
for instance, Collins’ The Moonstone, and earlier still, Austen’s Mansfield Park –
works of art drawing attention to the status quo mentality of colonialism.) So how
does one define and qualify one culture against another or aspects of itself? An earlier
and smaller group, the Eighteenth century British Quakers, spoke out against the slave
trade long before it was abolished, so were they counter-culture even if theirs is the
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