Culture Policy Is Neglected

Long ago in physics I learned of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Then in computer science I learned of Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility. Each struggled to gain respect. Later I saw how economists treat policy. In all these areas, I saw most “scientists” taking roughly this stance:

On policy where science seems relevant, the world should defer to listen to our most prestigious scientists. But, policy is not science, even if science sometimes has policy implications. So doing policy work doesn’t count toward scientific reputation, and often detracts. Also, there’s no need to study anything besides your usual science to do policy well. So for max policy influence, first gain max science prestige, then announce policy opinions. There’s no shame in ignoring policy; your science is what matters.

Yes, policy is more respected in some academic departments, like public policy and business, areas less eager to be seen as “science”. 

I’ve spent the last five months pondering culture, and upon finding what seem like big policy problems there, I’ve been puzzled to not find other cultural evolution academics much worried about them. I’ve read and watched many, and talked to a few. But watching a 2.5 hour interview by Joseph Walker of two top such, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, helped me understand: they avoid policy to seem “scientific”. 

Boyd and Richerson very much want to be seen as “scientists” (this interview mentions “scientist” 7 times and “science” 17 times), especially so given how many see social science, and especially cultural studies, as low status and “not science”. So while Boyd and Richerson do in fact notice some of the big problems I see, like modern status markers cutting fertility, causing a population fall, with our civ plausibly replaced by Amish-like, they just don’t seem worried, nor do they seek fixes. Why?

Boyd does mistakenly think population fall won’t hurt innovation much, probably from not knowing relevant economics literatures. But I suspect the deeper cause here is that cultural evolution specialists treat policy analysis as unscientific, and thus someone else’s job. Oh they’ll dabble a bit if it comes up in casual conversation, but they have little energy for digging deeper. Their job is to stand outside cultures modeling them, not to stand inside recommending cultural moves. 

This is a problem because others like myself has much less standing to be taken seriously in making claims about the policy implications of cultural evolution.

Here are selected quotes, which I claim support my interpretation:

---

RICHERSON: … in our ’85 book we have a little vignette about the demographic transition in which we attribute it to … If education becomes a major source of economic success and prestige, then people who spend a long time furthering their education and start their families late will have an advantage in getting into prestige positions, … So you're sacrificing your genetic fitness for your cultural fitness, so to speak. …

BOYD: I’d predict the same thing for urbanisation expansions in the past. So if we could go back to Tenochtitlan or Rome and get good measures of fertility, I'd predict the urban people would get sucked up into the same thing because they have these wider social networks. … 

RICHERSON: the Anabaptists, to take an example where the demographic transition is not happening, … they seal their prestige system off from the rest of us quite tightly. Things like movies and … They seal themselves culturally off. And they maintain small communities that are rich in kin. So they are working on both of those things simultaneously. …

WALKER: It'd be interesting to see whether the world's Amish in a few centuries.

RICHERSON: Yeah. Well, I mean, the other group that's a little like this is the ultra-orthodox Jews, and they're numerous enough now in Israel to be a political problem – or a political force, let's put it that way. So not to prejudge. Yeah, but who knows what … It's hard to predict what will happen to that whole phenomenon. …

WALKER: Does the fact that fertility-reducing behaviours don't seem to be being fixed very quickly imply that cultural group selection has weakened and that we have low variation? …

BOYD: We do have low variation.

WALKER: And we're in some kind of, like, global macro culture? … the archetype is like the Davos-style elite. Because we're all interconnected through telecommunications technologies.

BOYD: We do have a macro culture in the sense that urban life, bureaucratic government … Educational systems that take a lot of time, that's shared more or less, to varying degrees, across the world. I mean, development agencies are trying as hard as they can to make everybody else do it too.

WALKER: Am I making an analytical error? Could we infer from the fact that the demographic transition isn't being fixed in all these different countries that cultural evolution is happening too slowly and therefore there must be low variation?

RICHERSON: Well, the trouble is … you mentioned non-parental transmission. Cultural culture, in lots of cases, will result in adaptations that would fix problems with genetic fitness, but that's not guaranteed at all. So cultural evolution can favour fitness-diminishing behaviour. 

So selection on cultural variation will not necessarily be correlated with the selection on genetic fitness. Globally, overall, in human evolution, it had to have been true that there was some kind of correlation between cultural fitness and genetic fitness, or else culture wouldn't have evolved, right? It would have been extinguished by selection. But …

BOYD: That doesn't have to be true for even the last 10,000 years.

RICHERSON: No.

BOYD: Especially if you think brains are getting smaller.

I don't see any clear reason to predict that cultural evolution should favour higher genetic fitness, except that our brains have evolved to … We like sweet things and we don't want to die and lots of fitness-enhancing things. But if cultural evolution has finessed that by creating prestige systems, I don't see any reason it can't persist.

RICHERSON: It might persist to extinction of humans. … On the other hand, if you want to think about the Anabaptists, the correction is going right along, right? It will only take less than a millennium…

WALKER: As long as they can remain insular.

BOYD: Yeah. And get much more powerful. Technologically, much more powerful. I mean, this may happen in Israel, right? That secular Israelis will get tired of this and squash them.

RICHERSON: Yeah. That's one scenario.

BOYD: Who knows?

RICHERSON: Yeah, who knows? But, yes, I don't think there's any law-like process that will force a strong correlation between cultural fitness and genetic fitness. … And we got a lot of people in the world, so we’ve got a lot of scope for something happening before we go extinct.

WALKER: There is indeed some variation. There are also a lot of projections that show global population peaking around … 2080. How much does that worry you from the perspective of we need a large and increasing collective brain in order to sustain a technologically advanced civilisation? I know, Rob, you did some work on fishing technologies in Oceania, and the islands that were more populous and better connected had a greater number of fishing technology types and more complex fishing technologies.

BOYD: That's all true. …

WALKER: So to the extent that we need a really large collective brain to sustain technologically advanced civilisation, are fertility declines a worry? …

BOYD: We talked about science a bit earlier, but we now have institutions for innovating and cultural evolution that are evolving on their own. The engine of scientific and engineering progress I don't think depends so heavily on the population size as the diffuse, informal processes of innovation that happen in the village. … Both [models] show very striking diminishing returns. So you get a big effect for when populations go from 100 to 1000, a smaller effect 1000 to 10,000. … it shows diminishing return, just like you'd think, to population size. I think 10 billion is a lot of people. And if were down at 100,000, I would be more worried.  And then couple that with the fact that we've made the system much more efficient by routinising it and institutionalising it.