Cultural Mutation
We've all heard of the concept of "natural selection", and it's a pretty simple idea. Let's see how it works in... let's say, a group of cats living in a medieval village.
The people in this village have got it into their heads that these cats are tangled up with witches and therefore evil. They start kicking the cats, rounding them up and destroying them, or even (I kid you not; this actually happened) subjecting them to trial and execution. What effect does this have on the traits of the cats? It places selection pressure on that population of cats: Only those cats who can find a place in the world despite the dangers will be able to survive and reproduce, passing on their genes. So this population of cats becomes wily, shy, and wild, hanging around the fringes of human civilization--and passing on their wild traits to their kittens.
But eventually, things change--the popular opinion of cats softens, and people start to focus on their abilities as mousers, their cleanliness, and the image of the nurturing mother cat and her kittens. Now the selection pressure on the cats eases up, and the environment ceases to be so harsh. As cats are invited back into barns and homes, all kinds of cats survive and thrive. The population of cats increases in diversity. The friendly cats who would have been quickly caught and killed during rougher times are now welcomed as purring fireside companions. The small and short-furred cats who would have died in the first cold winter are invited in and given table scraps. There are all kinds of cats--not just the shy ones who hide in barns and take down their share of mice, but the lap cats and the demanding talkers and the quick-pawed entertainers and the charming ones who know exactly how cute they are.
And because of that diversity, when the next hard time comes, the cats will have a large pool of possible traits to apply to their new problem, and that little group of cats will survive. Genetic diversity makes a species strong.
Those of you who skipped the primer on natural selection can start paying attention again here, because I'm going to shift away from genetics. Forget the DNA; forget the inherited traits; forget survival of the fittest. We're going to apply this idea to human culture.
Humans are unique. Unlike any other species, we have the ability to pass down ideas for thousands of years. Ask a modern child who King Tutankhamen was, quiz a high-schooler about Hammurabi, or ask a college student whether they've heard of Plato, and you'll probably find that they are at least vaguely familiar with those names. Go to a library, and you can find books about them, their times, and their worlds. Information from a long time ago is preserved among humans as it is among no other species. We're not limited by distance, either, especially during the modern era. The other day I was in a chat room talking with someone from Austria about a TV show produced in Japan and popular in America, and it seemed perfectly normal to me.
Back to those cats--but let's look at it from a different perspective, that of the humans in the village. At one point, many of them thought that cats are witches' familiars. At some later point, they came to believe that cats are useful companions. What changed?
Culture is the body of information common to a society. It's the pool of knowledge that most people just pick up when they're children, by watching, listening, and participating in their worlds. For us in America, it includes eating corn flakes, tying our shoelaces, going to high school, playing basketball. It includes pop music, interstate highways, coffee shops, summer vacations, and nursing homes. It also includes things made of pure thought--the ideas that are common to our culture. They range from the trivial to the complex: Free speech, BFFs, the Pythagorean Theorem, Middle-earth, and human rights. And, yes, that includes Internet memes, too--culture created with the awareness that one is creating culture.
So, when the people in that village started treating their cats differently, they did so because their culture had, however slightly, changed. In the heads of human beings is a sea of competing ideas which, just like the traits of a population of cats, are changed, popularized, or discarded as necessary.
Just like a population of individuals, ideas also undergo selection pressure. There are many forces driving this selection pressure and they're very nearly as diverse as the ideas themselves. An idea may be shown to be false by the scientific method. It may outlive its appeal when the people in the culture have had time to digest it and extract all the utility from it, like what happens with fads of music, clothing, or entertainment. It may fall out of favor in response to a cultural trait which used to support it but now no longer exists. Or it may be driven out by a more popular idea.
Ideas compete in human culture. They compete for our attention, our resources, and our ability to pass them on. Ideas are like symbiotic (or perhaps parasitic) passengers in our brains, using our ability to communicate abstract ideas to survive and reproduce. And just like living creatures, ideas will breed with each other, connect to create new ideas, and pass on their offspring.
Cultures, of course, compete against each other too. The culture which creates the most prosperity for its people will spread. Ideas compete against ideas to create a culture ideal for an environment; cultures compete against cultures, with some spreading and some dying out: Cultural natural selection.
I'm nowhere near the first to think of this, of course. Concepts like memes and cultural evolution are already themselves spreading through our collective minds, bumping up against other ideas, sometimes connecting and breeding, sometimes fighting and winning or losing, sometimes simply dying out from neglect. But let's look at another idea: Mutations.
In physical natural selection, mutations which affect the phenotype are almost always a bad thing. They create impairments that make a creature unfit for its environment, placing it at a disadvantage. But sometimes, mutations are a good thing. Think, for example, of the Devon Rex breed of cats, the first of which was discovered as what was likely a novel mutation in a litter of stray kittens. The cat's short, curly coat drew our attention, and this appeal led to our breeding the cats deliberately. In the end, this particular mutation was a good thing for the Devon Rex, which is now well-loved for its intelligence and unique appearance, and very well suited for the environment it has found--that of a pampered pet cat.
Is there an analogue to mutation in the world of ideas? Yes. Just like odd genetic quirks can produce a curly-coated cat, odd mental quirks can produce entirely new ideas.
Most new ideas come from old ideas combining in new ways. We say someone is intelligent when he is able to produce useful idea combinations; we say a joke is funny when a sudden juxtaposition of ideas gives us the feeling of surprise and pleasure at making a new connection. But sometimes--sometimes, there's an idea that doesn't really come from anywhere else--the memetic version of a mutation.
The majority of mutations have no effect on the organism; and of those which do, most are detrimental. But, like curly-coated cats, some mutant ideas survive and thrive. And the best breeding ground for mutant ideas? Eccentric minds.
We are living now in a world where ideas travel with unprecedented freedom from person to person. For the ideas living and reproducing in the human consciousness, this is a time of plenty--a time when diversity can flourish and the silly ideas that would normally be dumped immediately can survive long enough to make their mark on other ideas, which may easily be not-so-silly.
Of course, for every scientist or artist coming up with a truly new idea, there are probably a hundred crackpots and crazies--people we call eccentric and often diagnose with mental disorders of one sort or another. While a few of them may be unjustly labeled, most of the time, when we label them with disorders, the labels are correct. Those whose brains are strange enough to produce these mutant ideas also generally have brains that don't provide all the skills that our society expects of a person--a state which defines disability.
But--and this is the fascinating thing--this mental disability, far from preventing a person from thinking of things that nobody else has ever thought of before, actually makes it more likely. I have a weird brain, and the world calls it "autism". Autism, like all mental disorders, changes the way you look at the world. It's anywhere from a subtle change to a pervasively different perspective. That different perspective, that fundamentally different way of thinking, can be the environment in which a totally new idea germinates. It isn't all as grand as Einstein, of course. Actually, very little of it is. Most new ideas are very simple--a new joke, a new tune, a game, a story, a dance, a unique turn of phrase. But there are so many people, and so many ideas building on each other, that even the simplest new ideas can create ripples that reach across the world.
The particular setup we have right now, in this world, is ripe for new ideas to flourish. Not only do we have a lot more freedom to communicate, but we also have a social network which can, at least to some degree, support people who have the weird brains that, every once in a while, produce something wildly different from what anybody ever thought of before. As never before, our world allows the existence of the eccentrics, the loners, the obsessive or crazily imaginative, and the people for whom we change our society ever-so-slightly to compensate for the skill differences we call a disability.
Those ideas wouldn't get anywhere without the bulk of the world analyzing them and combining them with other ideas, putting them into practice or spreading them around. But they wouldn't get started at all if it weren't for the eccentrics of the world--some disabled, some not, but all just different enough, just far enough removed from popular culture, to think of something outside the boundaries of the culture they grew up in but--thanks to their unique circumstances--didn't fully absorb. Anything which distances a person from the culture he lives in can create a strange mind; these strange minds are the cultural mutagens of the world. And, because most people are strange in some way, distanced in some aspect from their own culture, the strangeness may not even represent the minority.
Just like genetic diversity, this diversity of ideas makes us stronger because it makes us more flexible. The more ideas we have to draw from, the more likely we will have an idea that can address any given problem we as a society may face. But to use these new ideas and new combinations of old ideas, we have to be willing to step outside the boundaries of our own cultural upbringing, meet them where they are, and recognize them as a vital part of our world.
The people in this village have got it into their heads that these cats are tangled up with witches and therefore evil. They start kicking the cats, rounding them up and destroying them, or even (I kid you not; this actually happened) subjecting them to trial and execution. What effect does this have on the traits of the cats? It places selection pressure on that population of cats: Only those cats who can find a place in the world despite the dangers will be able to survive and reproduce, passing on their genes. So this population of cats becomes wily, shy, and wild, hanging around the fringes of human civilization--and passing on their wild traits to their kittens.
But eventually, things change--the popular opinion of cats softens, and people start to focus on their abilities as mousers, their cleanliness, and the image of the nurturing mother cat and her kittens. Now the selection pressure on the cats eases up, and the environment ceases to be so harsh. As cats are invited back into barns and homes, all kinds of cats survive and thrive. The population of cats increases in diversity. The friendly cats who would have been quickly caught and killed during rougher times are now welcomed as purring fireside companions. The small and short-furred cats who would have died in the first cold winter are invited in and given table scraps. There are all kinds of cats--not just the shy ones who hide in barns and take down their share of mice, but the lap cats and the demanding talkers and the quick-pawed entertainers and the charming ones who know exactly how cute they are.
And because of that diversity, when the next hard time comes, the cats will have a large pool of possible traits to apply to their new problem, and that little group of cats will survive. Genetic diversity makes a species strong.
Those of you who skipped the primer on natural selection can start paying attention again here, because I'm going to shift away from genetics. Forget the DNA; forget the inherited traits; forget survival of the fittest. We're going to apply this idea to human culture.
Humans are unique. Unlike any other species, we have the ability to pass down ideas for thousands of years. Ask a modern child who King Tutankhamen was, quiz a high-schooler about Hammurabi, or ask a college student whether they've heard of Plato, and you'll probably find that they are at least vaguely familiar with those names. Go to a library, and you can find books about them, their times, and their worlds. Information from a long time ago is preserved among humans as it is among no other species. We're not limited by distance, either, especially during the modern era. The other day I was in a chat room talking with someone from Austria about a TV show produced in Japan and popular in America, and it seemed perfectly normal to me.
Back to those cats--but let's look at it from a different perspective, that of the humans in the village. At one point, many of them thought that cats are witches' familiars. At some later point, they came to believe that cats are useful companions. What changed?
Culture is the body of information common to a society. It's the pool of knowledge that most people just pick up when they're children, by watching, listening, and participating in their worlds. For us in America, it includes eating corn flakes, tying our shoelaces, going to high school, playing basketball. It includes pop music, interstate highways, coffee shops, summer vacations, and nursing homes. It also includes things made of pure thought--the ideas that are common to our culture. They range from the trivial to the complex: Free speech, BFFs, the Pythagorean Theorem, Middle-earth, and human rights. And, yes, that includes Internet memes, too--culture created with the awareness that one is creating culture.
So, when the people in that village started treating their cats differently, they did so because their culture had, however slightly, changed. In the heads of human beings is a sea of competing ideas which, just like the traits of a population of cats, are changed, popularized, or discarded as necessary.
Just like a population of individuals, ideas also undergo selection pressure. There are many forces driving this selection pressure and they're very nearly as diverse as the ideas themselves. An idea may be shown to be false by the scientific method. It may outlive its appeal when the people in the culture have had time to digest it and extract all the utility from it, like what happens with fads of music, clothing, or entertainment. It may fall out of favor in response to a cultural trait which used to support it but now no longer exists. Or it may be driven out by a more popular idea.
Ideas compete in human culture. They compete for our attention, our resources, and our ability to pass them on. Ideas are like symbiotic (or perhaps parasitic) passengers in our brains, using our ability to communicate abstract ideas to survive and reproduce. And just like living creatures, ideas will breed with each other, connect to create new ideas, and pass on their offspring.
Cultures, of course, compete against each other too. The culture which creates the most prosperity for its people will spread. Ideas compete against ideas to create a culture ideal for an environment; cultures compete against cultures, with some spreading and some dying out: Cultural natural selection.
I'm nowhere near the first to think of this, of course. Concepts like memes and cultural evolution are already themselves spreading through our collective minds, bumping up against other ideas, sometimes connecting and breeding, sometimes fighting and winning or losing, sometimes simply dying out from neglect. But let's look at another idea: Mutations.
In physical natural selection, mutations which affect the phenotype are almost always a bad thing. They create impairments that make a creature unfit for its environment, placing it at a disadvantage. But sometimes, mutations are a good thing. Think, for example, of the Devon Rex breed of cats, the first of which was discovered as what was likely a novel mutation in a litter of stray kittens. The cat's short, curly coat drew our attention, and this appeal led to our breeding the cats deliberately. In the end, this particular mutation was a good thing for the Devon Rex, which is now well-loved for its intelligence and unique appearance, and very well suited for the environment it has found--that of a pampered pet cat.
Is there an analogue to mutation in the world of ideas? Yes. Just like odd genetic quirks can produce a curly-coated cat, odd mental quirks can produce entirely new ideas.
Most new ideas come from old ideas combining in new ways. We say someone is intelligent when he is able to produce useful idea combinations; we say a joke is funny when a sudden juxtaposition of ideas gives us the feeling of surprise and pleasure at making a new connection. But sometimes--sometimes, there's an idea that doesn't really come from anywhere else--the memetic version of a mutation.
The majority of mutations have no effect on the organism; and of those which do, most are detrimental. But, like curly-coated cats, some mutant ideas survive and thrive. And the best breeding ground for mutant ideas? Eccentric minds.
We are living now in a world where ideas travel with unprecedented freedom from person to person. For the ideas living and reproducing in the human consciousness, this is a time of plenty--a time when diversity can flourish and the silly ideas that would normally be dumped immediately can survive long enough to make their mark on other ideas, which may easily be not-so-silly.
Of course, for every scientist or artist coming up with a truly new idea, there are probably a hundred crackpots and crazies--people we call eccentric and often diagnose with mental disorders of one sort or another. While a few of them may be unjustly labeled, most of the time, when we label them with disorders, the labels are correct. Those whose brains are strange enough to produce these mutant ideas also generally have brains that don't provide all the skills that our society expects of a person--a state which defines disability.
But--and this is the fascinating thing--this mental disability, far from preventing a person from thinking of things that nobody else has ever thought of before, actually makes it more likely. I have a weird brain, and the world calls it "autism". Autism, like all mental disorders, changes the way you look at the world. It's anywhere from a subtle change to a pervasively different perspective. That different perspective, that fundamentally different way of thinking, can be the environment in which a totally new idea germinates. It isn't all as grand as Einstein, of course. Actually, very little of it is. Most new ideas are very simple--a new joke, a new tune, a game, a story, a dance, a unique turn of phrase. But there are so many people, and so many ideas building on each other, that even the simplest new ideas can create ripples that reach across the world.
The particular setup we have right now, in this world, is ripe for new ideas to flourish. Not only do we have a lot more freedom to communicate, but we also have a social network which can, at least to some degree, support people who have the weird brains that, every once in a while, produce something wildly different from what anybody ever thought of before. As never before, our world allows the existence of the eccentrics, the loners, the obsessive or crazily imaginative, and the people for whom we change our society ever-so-slightly to compensate for the skill differences we call a disability.
Those ideas wouldn't get anywhere without the bulk of the world analyzing them and combining them with other ideas, putting them into practice or spreading them around. But they wouldn't get started at all if it weren't for the eccentrics of the world--some disabled, some not, but all just different enough, just far enough removed from popular culture, to think of something outside the boundaries of the culture they grew up in but--thanks to their unique circumstances--didn't fully absorb. Anything which distances a person from the culture he lives in can create a strange mind; these strange minds are the cultural mutagens of the world. And, because most people are strange in some way, distanced in some aspect from their own culture, the strangeness may not even represent the minority.
Just like genetic diversity, this diversity of ideas makes us stronger because it makes us more flexible. The more ideas we have to draw from, the more likely we will have an idea that can address any given problem we as a society may face. But to use these new ideas and new combinations of old ideas, we have to be willing to step outside the boundaries of our own cultural upbringing, meet them where they are, and recognize them as a vital part of our world.