I’ve spent a couple of days searching for people who are
interested in actual cultural evolution; like discussing human culture in the
(hypothetical but strongly arguable) light of being an evolving process, analogous to
biological life. I am looking for a
cooperative forum where such necessities as taxonomy, scale, calibration can be
discussed, as a pre-conditon for developing a natural history of
culture. Think of an ornithological field
guide, with pictures and diagrams to enable bird recognition. What equivalent do we have for cultural evolution? Nothing yet.
The meme thing is not just dysfunctional, it’s counterfunctional. Nobody has the slightest idea what a meme is
(well, “mirror neurones”, but in the context of the cerebral cortex and all
that goes on there that we traditionally characterise as thought and memory, identifying
mirror neurones explains nothing). An end to
memes!
We need some hard work. Cultural
evolutionists spend their time in all sorts of ventures, arguing with
creationists (redundant), formulating theories like the place of
warfare in the evolution of ultrasociability (interesting, but totally
unscientific until we have some sort of finer calibrated system for looking at
culture). Where’s anybody doing any work
on the basic stuff (apart from at the Royal Society, Stringer, Whiten &c)?
We need a bird book. But before you have a bird book you have to
know what a bird looks like. Fill it up
with cows, bacteria, dinosaurs, angels, and it’s kind of rather lost the point.
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