The Path at the End of a Long Winding Goal
Image credits: @davehoefler
PSYC 358: Evolutionary Psychology with Dr. Azim Shariff
There is a general consensus that cooperation was a critical strategy for the survival and evolutionary success of humanity. But, adhering to the model of variation between observed behaviour and the cognitive mechanisms that enable it, there is indeed a gap between that which allows cooperation to occur and its tangible manifestation. As existing scientific literature suggests, moral emotions act as a key proponent in ensuring that individuals are motivated towards cooperating with one another to better their chances of survival, but perhaps they serve other functions as well. Much of cultural evolution has been centred around humans’ adeptness at selective social learning, allowing for the transmission of accumulated knowledge through time (Boyd, Richardson & Henrich, 2011). The success of this method of learning is largely attributed to the eliminating the costs of understanding causality as a prerequisite to manipulating existing knowledge to create modifications; while this is greatly advantageous for individuals’ capacity to learn and adapt, it facilitates the erasure of intention. This is not inherently bad or to be avoided, but it is important to consider its effects and implications, especially given that sociocultural environments and practices have grown to influence the selection pressures humans face.
Boyd and colleagues (2011) discuss the importance of maintaining a balance between imitation and learning to ensure a stable relative fitness within the population. Extending from this argument, it can be concluded that in occupying a cultural niche, humans mimic the process of natural evolution by gradually improvising on existing features, eventually moving towards a design that best solves a given problem. But what is the problem on hand? Each generation only has access to the tools that exist in their time, and a lack of knowledge of the causality/intention behind these tools opens up space for change in a particular direction, hence exponentially increasing the scope for complexity. Now each generation not only gets the opportunity to add to the existing repertoire of knowledge and improvise on existing tools, but they also get to improvise in directions they see fit, while not being constrained to a specific path that was laid down by people in the distant past.
The evolution and many functions of religion illustrates this perfectly. It has been suggested that cognitive tendencies such as mentalizing, anthropomorphizing, and relying on teleological intuition paved way for our ability to conceptualize and believe in supernatural entities. Although this effect in itself doesn’t necessarily mean much, it allowed for the formation of communities through cooperative endorsement in the same sets of beliefs and values. And as the communities grew in size and collective functions, they became an important tool through which moral emotions were monitored. The increase in complexity of religious beliefs and organizations could not have grown to be so widespread, if all the focus was limited to ensuring communal cooperation. Having each feature be its own entity was critical to the framework as a whole growing into its vast self, manifesting across numerous areas of human existence. This meant that the framework of religion as a whole wasn’t confined to monitoring social behaviour, and could instead grow to fulfill functions ranging from deriving meaning to accessing social support to finding comfort in the face of uncertainty.
It could be argued that frameworks like religion and language did more than just reflect humanity’s growing cooperative behaviours; they are also host to the divisive tendencies, making it easier to define and maintain distance with the outgroup. The forming of groups based on facets of identity reflects the shift from reactive aggression to proactive, organized aggression. But often, the expressed hostility or aggression towards members of the outgroup get masked under differences of beliefs and values, to a point where it’s these differences that explicitly motivate the hostility. The already complex level of planning and cooperative execution of instrumental violence takes on an extra layer of complexity in the form of reasoning and motivation grounded in cultural values. The moral emotions that primarily evolved to enhance cooperation compounded and grew multi-directionally to sustain animosity towards possible differences in beliefs. In short, a primarily adaptive cognitive module grew to become integral in the intentional, conscious construction and perpetuation of social structures. If cultural evolution had indeed been hinged on the cognitive niche hypothesis (rather than the cultural niche hypothesis), would this transformation have occurred? Most likely not. It seems apparent that forgoing the causal knowledge behind these tools/mechanisms was essential to their non-linear, web-like growth, hence furthering the progress of cultural evolution along multiple directions.
In drawing a philosophical parallel to this journey, it could lend support to the views against the idea of determinism (as does natural evolution), as each generation possesses the power to ascertain the next steps. While our beliefs are shaped by the environments and experiences of our ancestors across millennia, the decisions on where we go next lie with us, for the large part. This would not have been possible had we preserved the intentions behind the cycle of improvisation through the years, as the direction of evolution would have been pre-determined to fit the ideas of an arbitrary group of humans. What once evolved to help humanity move towards being more cooperative expanded and grew till it manufactured homophily, redefining the way identity is perceived and all that it spills over to influence. The universe may not have been made just to be seen by my eyes (1), but it peregrinated to a point where I can comfortably believe it did.
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J., & Henrich, J. (2011). The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(Supplement_2), 10918–10925. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1100290108
(1) O’Neal. R. (2014). Saturn [Recorded by Sleeping At Last]. On Atlas: Year One [MP3 file]. Santa Monica, California: Interscope Records
