Paradigm Shifts in Cultural Evolution

(Continued from the previous post, "Memes, Replication, and Application")

While the small incremental changes that occur through copying errors in the imitation process do lead to cultural “microevolution” (the development of a new style of pottery, for example, or a new shape for an arrowhead) major advances, which we might refer to as “paradigm shifts,” are not achieved through the accumulation of small errors. When a paradigm shift occurs, there is a sideways movement in the flow of evolution, rather than a branching off, as in biological evolution. This is where the analogy between biological evolution and cultural evolution breaks down. The classic model of biological evolution is the tree structure, often referred to as the Tree of Life, now sometimes modified to the Web of Life (in an attempt to make the model more “three-dimensional”). However, the tree metaphor does not quite suit what goes on in cultural evolution. There is no metaphor that can be drawn upon for a model of cultural evolution. The closest one can come to creating a visual model of the process is to invoke the image of a series of train tracks, with cultural trains running along them. Every now and then, a train jumps from one track to another (something that has to be imagined, since it does not occur in reality). Perhaps one might think of quantum particles making their quantum leaps from one energy level to another. Jumping the tracks works better than quantum leaping as a model for cultural evolution, however, since the train that has jumped to another track proceeds along that track and goes off in a completely different direction from the one it was originally travelling in. This is the essence of paradigm shifts in cultural evolution.

Perhaps the most dramatic paradigm shift in cultural history is the introduction of agriculture (here used broadly to include animal husbandry). It brought about a fundamental change in the way humans lived, and it took human evolution (both cultural and biological) in an entirely new direction. What is important to note is that there is no smooth transition or continuum between hunting-gathering and agriculture. There were no small incremental steps by which one “evolved” into the other. There was an enormous leap of the imagination, a leap in which a lateral move was made to an entirely new way of thinking about the acquisition of sustenance for the preservation of life. In making this leap, humans gave birth to the notion of “food” and to the conceptual distinction between sustenance and food. The instrument that made the leap possible was, not unsurprisingly, a meme—what we might call the “production” meme. This meme had been around for a while and had contributed greatly to the business of sustenance acquisition, for humans had been devising and producing tools for the purposes of hunting and gathering for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the introduction of agriculture. What was new was the idea that sustenance could be produced just as tools could be produced—a classic example of the transapplication of a meme. When the “production” meme was “transapplied” to the acquisition of sustenance, a new meme was created—the “food” meme. Food, then, is defined, in its simplest terms, as sustenance produced. No other species produces its own sustenance, and this is one of the first things that set the human species apart from its other animal relatives. We might speak of fish as “food” for polar bears or seeds and worms as “food” for birds, but this is surely a metaphorical usage—a metaphor applied backwards (in the context of meme generation) in that it is not the kind of metaphor that leads to cultural evolution as described above. Only humans can be said truly to have “food”—understood here as sustenance produced intentionally and in a planned and organized fashion.

The introduction of food production by means of agriculture was perhaps the first paradigm shift in cultural history, and it put the human species on a very different track—the fast track, so to speak, for cultural evolution then took off at lightning speed and began to advance exponentially. Prior to this great turning point in cultural history, cultural evolution proceeded at a glacial pace, precisely because transapplication had not yet been discovered and any changes that occurred did so only along the track of imitation and minor variation. Once the “transapplication” meme established itself in human consciousness, cultural evolution began to take off in leaps and bounds. People everywhere began transapplying memes and producing new ones as a result. The difference between imitation and transapplication is that imitation may give rise to new products (which may be thought of as “memes” of a lower sort), such as a more efficient spear or a sleeker arrowhead, but transapplication gives rise to fundamentally new memes (which are the “higher” memes). The “food” meme did not exist until the “production” meme was transapplied to the activity of acquiring sustenance. The products that resulted from the introduction of the “food” meme were of a fundamentally different sort from earlier products in the same category. Food products grown or raised in a field for the express purpose of sustaining human life belong to a different order from fruit growing on a tree in the wild or an animal hunted down and eaten on the fly. The latter belong to the “feast-or-famine” mode of life, whereas the latter do not. Interestingly enough, human biology did not keep up with human cultural evolution. The current spate of obesity around the world but particularly in North America owes at least something to the fact that human biology has not yet adjusted to the constant and plentiful supply of food that is available to humans today as a consequence of the introduction of the “food” meme not so very long ago in human history.

The lesson to be learned is that paradigm shifts may have a downside and that cultural evolution is not always an “upwards and onwards” endeavour. But the broader lesson is that paradigm shifts in cultural evolution owe their occurrence specifically to the presence of the "transapplication" meme and the activity of transapplying memes from one area of life to another.