Humanity's Sports Car Has Broken Steering

While other species have made do with the tricycle of DNA evolution, humans recently added the sports car of cultural evolution. But that sports car is new, crude, and breaks down far more often, compared to those robust and well-honed tricycles. For example, while DNA systems have special features to promote speciation, cultures don’t yet seem to have special features to promote new cults. 

Both kinds of vehicles, DNA tricycles and cultural sports cars, have the amazing ability to improve themselves while running. For example, culture seems to have evolved many cultural gadgets to help humans to think and work better. So while moving fast, humanity’s sports car has added bucket seats, airbags, power steering, antilock breaks, and much more. 

One of the reasons we can add so many features to our sports car is that feedback cycle times, between trying something and seeing how well it works, are much faster for those features than for cultural foundations. For example, we can try new ways to fish, or to make huts, and see how well they work, much faster than than we can make changes in, and judge the effects of, key cultural norms and values. Such as those related to family, work, death, mating, community, innovation, etc. 

This matters because, to effectively steer a vehicle along a road, a driver needs the rate at which the road changes direction, given vehicle speed, to be less than both the rate at which that driver learns about road direction changes ahead, and the rate at which he or she can reliably change the vehicle’s heading. If a vehicle goes slow enough, it is pretty sure to manage this. But if it goes too fast, it risks not seeing or making turns.

With cultural evolution, the main way that humanity “sees” the shape of the unfamiliar terrain ahead is via selection acting on current variations among cultures. But in the last few centuries, selection forces have become far weaker, while cultural variation has become far smaller. So it has become much darker outside our sports car, and we’ve lost power steering. Furthermore, many back seat passengers, who can’t see out front, successfully demand steering changes, and holding down the accelerator. So we see unprecedented rates of change in key norms and values. 

We are thus at serious risk of drifting off the smoother terrain, better suited for us, and onto rougher terrains, and perhaps even falling into a ravine. The strongest sign that we are actually drifting toward rougher terrain is falling fertility, whose main proximate causes are changing cultural norms re school, work, marriage, kids, housing, gender roles, and parent-kid relations. 

However, we are adding new car features like power windows, heated seats, and headlights faster than ever before. And we aren’t actually in very rough terrain yet, though we can see that coming with our new headlights. Alas, these facts are making it hard for most passengers to believe we are headed for problems. Most are watching movies on their pads, and others say their hearts tell them we are going the right way.

Yes, DNA and perhaps also cultural evolution has by now evolved some gadgets for adjusting to road variations that we have seen many times before. Such as changes in resource abundance, climate variation, density, pathogen prevalence, and lifespans. And no doubt some recent cultural changes can be attributed to such gadgets. But I find it hard to see most recent norm changes as pre-programmed adaptations; they seem to me nearly as well suited to old contexts as to new. 

Thus I really think our sports car and its passengers are at risk of being damaged soon from rough terrain, maybe even including ravines. Dear passengers, please look up from your pads! And dear sports car specialists (e.g., cultural evolution experts) help me get their attention!