Culture and Evolution; some new thinking.



Not by genes alone: The PowerPoint is available on request

This will be my last post of 2010.  I'm going to look at something absolutely basic to what we do.  We are all in the culture business. 

But what is culture?

A wide definition is preferable. Culture is simply the way we behave in a certain place at a certain time. Breakfast in Japan is different from breakfast in Britain.

Something as deeply embedded as culture must be instinctive. We acquire a large part of it without thinking about it. But then, like all instincts, it must have a use, be, as they say, adaptive.

Do other animals have cultures?  In some chimpanzee bands one member may find a new way of doing something useful, like extracting termites with a stick, and others copy him or her.  But it doesn’t seem to go much further than that. 

Yet that, according to the latest thinking on culture, we have an instinct to watch others in order to learn things, determine how best to behave.  The two academics who have articulated this viewpoint most clearly, Boyd and Richardson, use the term "fast and frugal heuristics" which simply means that a quick way to decide what to do in a given situation is to copy others. This appears in a book called Not by Genes Alone.

Culture needs large brains and large brains are not common in nature. As the two authors put it, most animals are as stupid as they can get away with. (The explanation as to why humans went a different route can be found in their book or in the PowerPoint (see above) which summarises their work and which I will send on request.) 

Pleasure is one of nature’s ways of getting us to do adaptive things. We get pleasure from watching other people behave and imagining ourselves in various situations.  Moreover, we don’t seem to need to distinguish too much between fact and fiction.  So a film can give us as much pleasure, perhaps more, as gossiping about our friends and neighbours. 

The UK Film Council has been trying to understand what is the impact or cultural contribution of a film.  The first phase of this work has been published in a report called the Stories we tell ourselves.  

The next phase looks even more interesting.  It will survey filmgoers to try to understand what sort of difference a film can make to you or me, i.e. what is its cultural contribution?

That contribution will be a residue of the pleasure experienced in watching it. 

What about a website or forum where anyone can say what film, song, book or TV programme actually changed his or her attitude or behaviour? My guess is that the big impacts happen quite early in life, in peoples' early twenties, for instance.

It might throw light on another big question. How much impact does what we read or watch have on our behaviour?