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NATURE & CULTURE:
How Culture is Essential
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E.g.: Fact/data. USA. The South is more violent
than the North.
In the South men are more likely to kill an
acquaintance than in the North. Yet the chance to
be killed in a robbery doesn’t differ.
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Why?
Because Southerners have acquired beliefs about
personal honor that are different from Northerners,
i.e. personal reputation is important and worth
defending even at great danger.
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Biological differences.
Variations of levels of cortisol and testosterone
hormones. Cortisol level increases in response to
stress while testosterone level increases in
preparation of violence.
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When insulted Southerners show much more
increase in cortisol and testosterone than
Northerners.
Difference in beliefs between southern and
northern people can be understood in terms of a
difference in their culture and economic histories.
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The difference cannot be explained in terms of
contemporary socio-economic differences.
It rests on an acquired difference in the set of
beliefs transmitted from one generation to the
other.
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Culture is part of biology
We have an evolved psychology that shapes what
we learn and how we think. This in turn influences
the kind of beliefs and attitudes that spread and
persist.
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Fact: Why people don’t have sex in public?
A penchant for sexual privacy seems to be part of
human nature, not culture. Why?
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Mindreading
Enable people to “see” themselves as others would
see them. Perspective taking capacity.
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Self-awareness
Exploited by culture. It’s detrimental to sex.
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Human sex has become culturalized
Culture shaped nature.
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Similarities between humans and animals
Similarities reflect the input of nature while
differences reflect the input of culture.
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Culture shaped our innate psychology
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Culture (df.)
Is information capable of affecting individual’s
behavior that they acquire from other members of
their species trough teaching, imitation, and other
forms of social transmission.
It is information-based: importance of knowledge
and meaning in culture.
Importance of the use of language.
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Culture is in part a category or aspect of social life.
Learned and transmission of behavior.
In its essence culture is a world of sharable and
transmissible meanings. It encompasses ideas and
activities.
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Division of labor.
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It doesn’t make sense to ask whether behavior is
determined by genes or environment.
Every organism is the result of interaction between
genetic information and the properties of the
environment. Genes are like a recipe, but the
ingredients (temperature, cocking time, ….) are set
by the environment.
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Culture is neither nature nor nurture, but some of
both.
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Not all processes shaping culture do arise from our
innate psychology
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Culture itself is subject to natural selection.
Culturally acquired ideas, values etc. affect what
happens to people during their lives and in turn
affect what gets transmitted from one generation to
the other.
Culture of honor arises (at least partly) because in
lawless societies men who are not aggressive in
protecting their herd and family tends to fall victim
to ruthless predators.
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Three different worlds in which we live
1. Physical environment: all organism need it in
order to survive and reproduce.
2. Social world: superimposed on the physical
world. It offers a better way to deal with the
physical environment (joint action / cooperation:
e.g. wolfs hunting). Hence the need of some inner
psychological mechanism.
3. Cultural world: Culture is a better way of being
social and a better way for survival and
reproduction.
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Evolution and Culture
Since culture became such an evolutionary
advantage it must be present in other species.
Evolution doesn’t produce something out of
nothing.
Hence culture must have existed in our ancestors.
Learned patterns of behavior passed down form
one generation to the other (e.g. potato washing
pattern among Japanese monkeys).
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The beginning of culture can be found
in other species
It is thus plausible that it appeared before
humankind did.
The brain evolved to take advantage of society and
culture.
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There is a mixture of nature and
culture
The brain and culture developed together
The brain must be powerful enough to manipulate
language and it wouldn’t have evolved the way it
did if it didn’t had to manipulate language. This
offers a huge evolutionary advantage.
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Culture vs. Cultural Differences
It explains why culture can influence nature. It is a
fallacy to equate the two (as many social scientists
do).
Cultural differences are not rooted in biological
differences.
The main difference is between culture and noculture, not between cultural differences, i.e.
between e.g. the Canadian and the French
populations (cf. language).
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When nature recognized the value of
speaking, humans appeared
There are some form of “language” in other species
and it must have been there among our ancestors.
Human have been designed to capitalize on it.
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Four classical views about the
relationship between the individual
and society
1. Conflicts and struggles
Culture is inimical to human nature (e.g. wars).
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Why war?
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Freud’s answer
People continue to develop culture because they
are looking for ways of life which are bad for them
(people have an innate death drive).
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Freud’s view doesn’t match the facts of history.
People are better of when they live in a cultural
environment than when they live isolated or alone
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The cultural animal theory contrasts Freud’s
theory inasmuch as it suggests that culture is
what we are precisely suited for.
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2. Culture as a Defense Mechanism
Human are beasts like other species but with a
superior intelligence.
Intelligence produced the knowledge that we are
mortal which is profoundly upsetting and the source
of existential terror.
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Culture is the antidote:
We can live beyond our individual bodies and
achieve a sense of immortality.
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But people know they’re mortal in virtue of
cultural learning.
Thus there must be some amount of culture in
place before the knowledge of death.
Furthermore, existential terror doesn’t suffice to
explain the whole of culture since people produce
culture even when they don’t think about death.
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Hence the fear of death is not the only
mechanism generating culture.
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3. Culture and the Tabula Rasa
Culture shape the individual: people qua product of
culture and socialization (vs. nativisme).
But cultural differences conceals profound
similarities (remember culture vs. cultural
differences).
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E.g.: gender differences.
The feminist movement of the 1960s suggested
that gender identity is culturally shaped. This runs
against the facts: a boy raised as a girl after a
circumcision went wrong (even with the help of
hormones) didn’t developed a desire toward men.
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E.g.: communism.
Even if it got all the tools (propaganda, media
control, education, …) it didn’t succeed to create
ideal communist individuals.
Culture only succeeds insofar as it can
accommodate the innate tendencies built into
human nature.
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4. Culture qua By-Product of
Intelligence
Brains evolved to deal with the physical
environment. As a side effect human became smart
enough to generate culture by copying each other’s
innovations.
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For what exactly are big brains designed?
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If brains evolved to solve problems, then larger
brains should deal better with those problems. This
runs against the facts. Species with larger brain do
not necessarily solve problems better.
Bigger brains go with more complex social worlds:
this show that the brain evolved mainly for enabling
animals to deal with their conspecifics.
The longer the animal spends in social learning the
larger the brain is. This suggests that the purpose
of the large brain is to maximize social learning.
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Evolution made us for culture
Are people better suited for any other form of life?
No
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Our psyches are innately programmed by nature
specifically to participate in culture and society, i.e.
the human psyche emerged because natural
selection redesigned the primate psyche to make it
more suitable for living in a cultural society.
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The Biological Advantage of Culture
The human brain accounts for only the 2% of the
body mass. Yet it consumes 20% of the calories
that an average person takes in.
Since the brain:
(i) is such an expensive organ to have and
maintain, and
(ii) it co-evolved with culture,
culture must offer substantial advantages over
other mechanisms.
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Culture must ultimately be measured
in biological terms, i.e. survival and
reproduction
(i) People have been extremely successful at
reproducing.
(ii) People success of survival dramatically improved
in industrialized nations.
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The Advantages of Culture
1. Progress: it can be accumulated across
generations.
Merely social animals don’t accumulate knowledge.
Big difference between human and other species
(e.g. highly social species like wolfs didn’t progress
in the last 10000 or 100000 years, while we did).
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The ratchet effect (Tomasello)
comparison with the tool permitting forward
movements while preventing backward ones.
For progress to succeed two things are needed:
(i) innovation (one must come out with some
novel and better solution to a common
problem), and
(ii) preservation (the solution has to be
transmitted and remembered).
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Progress: Apes vs. Humans
Apes are quite good in finding new solutions, but
they are incapable of preserving and transmitting
them.
Cultural knowledge is stored in the collective rather
than in the individual minds. Without progress the
new generation would have to reinvent everything
(e.g. how to make fire, how to build tools, …).
A natural disaster (e.g. the Black Death in Europe)
can kill most of the people. Yet the culture’s stock
of information survived merely because few people
did.
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Division of Labor
Nonsocial animals cannot profit from the division of
labor.
Social animals which are not cultural can divide up
labor in some ways.
Cultural animals can divide up labor extensively
(e.g. assembly line of the industrialized society) so
that every one becomes an expert in what s/he
does.
With specialization we have better performances.
Concerning the division of labor human uniqueness
is a matter of degree, not of kind.
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Culture is a System
Insofar as nature designed us for culture, it
prepared us to be part of a system.
Systems connect multiple individual points (nodes).
Thus the total is more than the sum of its parts. If
all the nodes were the same, doing the very same
thing, we would not have much of a system. We
would have a mere collectivity of identical nodes.
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Systems linking together nodes doing different
things can be extremely powerful and produce huge
gains in productivity.
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group vs. individual
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biological altruism vs. biological egoism
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psychological altruism vs. psychological
individualism (cf. Sober & Wilson’s Unto Others).
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Language/Meaning and Culture
Language is not a private activity (cf. Wittgenstein’s
private language argument).
For one to be capable of using language one must
be part of a culture.
Just as language is only possible via a culture, a
culture always involve language. For culture relies
on meaning and language is the principal tool for
meaning.
Language and culture are just two sides of the
same coin.
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The importance of language
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Language allows the storage and transmission of
information
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Disputes can be solved in talking rather than
fighting
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Language permits to live in time (to have a time
perspective, to distinguish the past from the future)
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Animals don’t import the past into the
present
E.g.: rats can only connect the past with the
present for few second; they are thus prevented of
learning and undertake great deal of tasks.
In contrast a human beings can make choices
based on past information and event which
occurred before one’s birth. This also allows to
evaluate short term benefits vis-à-vis long terms
ones (e.g. agriculture would be impossible without
that).
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Abstract reasoning (e.g. logics and mathematics)
would be impossible without language.
Without the cultural use of meaning via language,
rationality could not be imposed on systems (e.g.
division of labor in factories).
Planning would be impossible without language.
…
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Cultural Apes
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How did Nature designed cultural apes?
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Success and failure is judged in terms of the
survival of the species.
Because of survival, Why are we not immortal?
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Nature choose reproduction over immortality
because aging and death are inevitable.
Hence the choice of reproduction for the survival of
the species.
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Biology has its limits.
It is thus in the need of finding a good balance
(e.g. an unlimited intelligence would require an
unlimited brain which would consume an unlimited
quantity of energy to the detriment of other
biological organs).
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Cultural animals
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Must be capable of mindreading.
Without it the sharing of knowledge and the
transmission of culture would be impossible.
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Must have a cultural brain, i.e. a brain capable of
storing a good amount of information.
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Must have a lengthy socialization process enabling
them to learn the culture’s knowledge and the rules
for behavior in the society.
Must have an extended childhood permitting the
transference of culture by education.
Hence there must be a behavioral plasticity trough
life and in particular trough the juvenile period.
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Must have a sophisticated decision-making process.
Must have free will. Nature must create a gap
between causes and effects (controlled processes).
For noncultural animals and organisms automatic
processes may be sufficient to guide behavior. For
us the behavioral outcome must be chosen.
Must be capable of self-control.
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