My analysis of cultural drift has (at least) three distinctive elements:
We have a big problem: we broke our process for the evolution of (not in) cultures.
Instead of reviving blind evolution, it might be better to evolve deliberately
I have three concrete ideas for institutional mechanisms of deliberate evolution.
I asked an LLM for book authors who have also made my #2 point, on deliberate cultural evolution. It gave 3: Skinner (’71), Stewart (’00), Wilson (’19). All seem to understand the nature of cultural evolution, all argue for working harder to understand and think in terms of evolution, all say we might plausibly win in evolutionary terms if we were to more consciously manage cultural evolution, and all say to do this at least in part via governance.
But none of them offer concrete mechanism solutions re how to induce governance leaders to effectively manage cultural evolution, instead of pretending to do so while actually serving themselves and their allies. I’m thinking that this might be my most unusual stance in this space, and so maybe what I should focus my writing there on.
The best book was the earliest: BF Skinner (’71) Beyond Freedom and Dignity
Many were offended and tried to rejected Skinner’s book via rejecting his behavioralism framework. But the arguments in this book are mostly independent of behavioralism. Skinner correctly notes that commitments to freedom and dignity might limit the wins of deliberate evolution. He gets that we’d need to design good institutions to keep controllers in line, but offers no ideas re how to do that.
The least famous of the 3 authors is: John Stewart (’00) Evolution’s Arrow
Stewart insists that markets are not good enough, but also admits that existing forms of governance are not good enough. We must both change out individual psychologies to value adaption, and also adopt much better governance forms. He gives the name “vertical markets” to a better form, but mainly just associates that name with many desirable features, without a concept of how they could be achieved.
The most recent is the most political: David Sloan Wilson (’19) This View of Life
Wilson says economics and economists are terrible, everything needs regulation, and we must make a world government designed to max world welfare. He doesn’t clarify how that might square with max adaption. He admits the problem of world governance is hard, says not to use markets or central planning, and points to many particular small orgs he admires, including communes.
Here are many quotes from those books:
BF Skinner (’71) Beyond Freedom and Dignity:
The intentional design of a culture, with the implication that behaviour is to be controlled, is sometimes called ethically or morally wrong. …
CuIture[’s] … main effect … is to bring the individual under the control of the remoter consequences of his behaviour. The effect has had survival value in the process of cultural evolution, since practices evolve because those who practise them are as a result better off. …
[But] we say that there is something ‘morally wrong’ about a totalitarian state, a gambling enterprise, uncontrolled piecework wages, the sale of harmful drugs, or undue personal influence, not because of any absolute set of values, but because all these things have aversive consequences. …
The intentional design of a culture and the control of human behaviour it implies are essential if the human species is to continue to develop. …
Those who have been induced by their culture to act to further its survival through design must accept the fact that they are altering the conditions under which men live and, hence, engaging in the control of human behaviour. Good government is as much a matter of the control of human behaviour as bad. …
Our culture has produced the science and technology it needs to save itself. It has the wealth needed for effective action. It has, to a considerable extent, a concern for its own future. But if it continues to take freedom or dignity, rather than its own survival, as its principal value, then it is possible that some other culture will make a greater contribution to the future. …
Abstract thinking is the product of a particular kind of environment, not of a cognitive faculty. … The physical and biological technologies which have increased man’s sensitivity to the world around him and his power to change that world have taken no more than four or five generations. …
C. S. Lewis protested : ... ‘the power of man to make himself what he pleases means ... the power of some men to make other men what they please’. This is inevitable in the nature of cultural evolution. …
For a long time men have introduced new practices which serve as cultural mutations, and they have changed the conditions under which practices are selected. They may now begin to do both with a clearer eye to the consequences. …
The individualist … has refused to be concerned for the survival of his culture and is not reinforced by the fact that the culture will long survive him. In the defence of his own freedom and dignity he has denied the contributions of the past and must therefore relinquish all claim upon the future. Science has probably never demanded a more sweeping change in a traditional way of thinking about a subject, nor has there ever been a more important subject. …
Physical and biological technologies have alleviated pestilence and famine and many painful, dangerous, and exhausting features of daily life, and behavioural technology can begin to alleviate other kinds of ills. … There are wonderful possibilities - and all the more wonderful because traditional approaches have been so ineffective. It is hard to imagine a world in which people live together without quarrelling, maintain themselves by producing the food, shelter, and clothing they need, enjoy themselves and contribute to the enjoyment of others … Yet all this is possible. …
The designer of a culture comes under fire because explicit design implies control (if only the control exerted by the designer). The issue is often formulated by asking : Who is to control? And the question is usually raised as if the answer were necessarily threatening. To prevent the misuse of controlling power, however, we must look not at the controller himself but at the contingencies under which he engages in control. … The great problem is to arrange effective counter-control and hence to bring some important consequences to bear on the behaviour of the controller.
John Stewart (’00) Evolution’s Arrow:
if humanity turns its back on evolutionary objectives and continues to serve the pre-existing goals, we will be evolutionary failures. …
individuals with a comprehensive capacity for evolutionary modelling are likely to decide to pursue the development of the psychological skills needed for evolutionary self-management. …
To date, traditional science has produced very little knowledge about how humans can achieve this psychological transformation. … They will know that if they fail to take this step, they will be part of a failed evolutionary experiment. …
But it was not the externality of the new management that enabled it to organise human societies that were far better at exploiting the potential benefits of cooperation. It was the ability of the new management to adapt its controls during the life of the society. … The most significant organisational innovation developed to date by humans to align the interests of government with the interests of society is democracy. …
Market systems do not make governments redundant. Management by governments is essential to establish and adapt the market framework and to correct the deficiencies in the market system. …
But the forms of government that are currently in existence are seriously limited in their ability to carry out these functions effectively. …
How must human society evolve if we are to participate successfully in the future evolution of life in the universe? … as individuals … we must develop the psychological ability to find motivation and emotional satisfaction in whatever we need to do to achieve future evolutionary success. … But we must also organise ourselves socially in whatever ways will enable us to best exploit the benefits of cooperation. …
When life evolves successfully on a planet, it will eventually produce a cooperative organisation on the scale of the planet. … The planetary organisation will be able to adapt as a coherent whole, pursuing evolutionary objectives by acting on its external environment. …
But our current forms of government are seriously limited in their ability to discover and adapt the management that is needed. If humanity is to fulfil its evolutionary potential, it must discover new and better processes for establishing the various levels of governance. … The next great evolutionary challenge for humanity will be to invent a new form of governance that will overcome the serious flaws in our existing processes. … Could governance be established by supra-individual change-and-test processes that continually search for and implement better governance?
In a vertical market, it would not be the goods and services traded in economic markets that would be produced and sold. Instead, the vertical market would trade in regulations, market frameworks, systems of education, laws, taxes, law enforcement systems, and programs that build better communities. Any component of governance could be developed and sold in a vertical market.
acts of management would not be purchased by individuals. They would be purchased collectively by the group of citizens who benefit from the management. …
A vertical market can operate only if entrepreneurs are able to obtain appropriate payment from all those who benefit from the acts of governance that the entrepreneurs develop. …
A vertical market would enable any member of society to capture the benefits of anything he could do to improve an aspect of the governance of society. … the vertical market uses a supra-individual change-and-test process to discover the best forms of governance.
David Sloan Wilson (’19) This View of Life
Compared to where we started ten thousand years ago, well-functioning governance at the scale of the whole earth seems just within reach. …
the modern economics profession rests upon a pre-Darwinian foundation. … If human groups are to function like organisms, then they need to be regulated … Labor unions became strong, the state played an active role in social welfare and industrial development, … But [then] … selfish interests and ideologies that justified individual and corporate greed as good for the whole group began to spread, leading to our decline in well-being and increase in political discord …
The whole cannot be optimized by separately optimizing the parts. That’s why the concept of the invisible hand in orthodox economic theory, which pretends that the pursuit of lower-level self-interest robustly benefits the common good, is so deeply flawed. …
The most important conclusion for our purposes is that cultural group selection must become more intentional and deliberative than ever before. … To solve problems at the planetary scale, we must formulate policies with the welfare of the whole planet in mind.
There is something between centralized planning and laissez-faire that can work: a managed process of variation and selection. First there must be a target that we are aiming to hit. For a business, this might be profitability, social responsibility, or the development of a new product line. At the planetary scale, it might be a robust global economy or the reduction of greenhouse gases. These targets become the criteria for selection, …
We can deliberately formulate alternative strategies for reaching the target goals, comparing them to each other and to current practices using rigorous statistical methods. …
I have provided three examples of adaptable societies. All of them are drawn from the business world,
economy. But decades are required and each cultural lineage comes against barriers that limit its distribution,
Clearly, more is needed for human groups of all sorts to adapt to change at the speed and scale that is required to solve the myriad problems of our age. … The first step is to adopt the right theory. … The right theory is based on the cultural evolution of complex systems. … Making our societies more adaptable won’t be easy, especially at larger scales, but it will be possible with the right blueprint provided here by evolutionary theory, multilevel selection, and a solid four-question approach.
Cultural transmission represents another mechanism of heredity in many species, one that has become vastly more powerful in humans with the advent of symbolic thought. … The bottom line for our purposes is that there is nothing wrong with the concept of conscious evolution. …
Once we become comfortable with the concept of conscious evolution, then the need to design our personal and cultural evolutionary processes becomes clear, similar to designing an evolutionary algorithm on a computer. This is what biologists call “the evolution of evolvability.” If we don’t become wise managers of evolutionary processes, then evolution will still take place but will lead to outcomes that are not aligned with our normative goals. …
If we want the whole earth to become a superorganism, then multilevel selection theory tells us exactly what to do: make planetary welfare the target of selection. This is easier said than done. …
An evolutionary worldview makes two contributions toward actually achieving a whole earth ethic, as opposed to just wanting it when in the right frame of mind. First, it provides strong scientific support for the need to make the welfare of the whole earth the target of selection in the formulation of policies, which in turn can orchestrate the formulation of policies for all lower-level units. At the same time, it removes scientific support for the main alternative narrative, which is that the unregulated pursuit of lower-level self-interest robustly benefits the common good. …
Policy formulation must be a conscious evolutionary process that first chooses the right target of selection, then monitors planned and unplanned variation, and then replicates best practices, realizing that implementation might be highly contextual. …
All of us are in a position to make things happen at some scale, if only in our own lives and our immediate surroundings. … A remarkable example, with lessons for all of us, is an ecovillage called Dancing Rabbit … I have conducted a survey of over a hundred intentional communities … They scored near the top on measures of satisfaction and meaning of life …
What if you are a politician, policy expert, CEO of a business, or board member … Avoid the temptation of centralized planning. You and your expert consultants are not smart enough to know how to improve the complex system that is under your care. You should implement the core design principles, which are fundamentally inclusive. You should also implement evolutionary processes that identify the right targets of selection, monitor planned and unplanned variation, and replicate best practices, knowing that their implementation will be highly sensitive to context. Everyone within the complex system under your care will need to take part, as in the examples of Toyota, the rapid results method, and innovation ecosystems that I recounted in chapter 9. You will have far more success, recognition, and personal fulfillment than you would pretending to be a Master of the Universe. Here is something else that everyone can do: learn more about the evolutionary worldview. …
“this view of life” is the wave of the future. The main question is how soon it will arrive and whether it will be in time to avert the potential disasters that confront us.
Wilson: "Avoid the temptation of centralized planning. You and your expert consultants are not smart enough to know how to improve the complex system that is under your care. You should implement the core design principles, which are fundamentally inclusive. You should also implement evolutionary processes that identify the right targets of selection, monitor planned and unplanned variation, and replicate best practices, knowing that their implementation will be highly sensitive to context."
It's very interesting that Wilson separates authoritarian goal-selection from authoritarian planning. I was about to say that he may be the first person to do this, but there is a previous example: Hitler, who set goals, but refused to tell his underlings how to achieve them. He wanted them to fight it out between themselves, to make the organization stronger.
That comes across as a cheap shot at Wilson; but, as I said in another comment, there are no obvious non-evil approaches here. I'm sure he's nicer than Hitler. I just don't think niceness will help here.
> [David Sloan] Wilson says economics and economists are terrible, everything needs regulation, and we must make a world government designed to max world welfare.
Ah.
When E.O. Wilson died in 2021, Scientific American published, not an obituary, but an attack, calling Wilson just another white racist whom we should forget rather than commemorate. I remember one of its points was that Wilson had used something called the "normal distribution", which proved he was trying to establish a norm of "normality".
(The chief editor who approved that article, proving herself completely scientifically illiterate, was, last I checked, still in charge.)
I wrote to David Sloan Wilson, who often collaborated with EO Wilson, asking if he would participate in or organize some group response to this publication. He never responded. Perhaps his politics would not let him.
But this question of how to manage cultural adaption is, really, the stickiest moral dilemma in the Universe. It is in a way the Ultimate Question: Is it better to steer evolution (in which case we will never evolve any new qualia, since you cannot value a qualia you don't have); or to stay hands-off? It appears at first to force us to choose between Maoism and Nazism.
If amphibians had learned to steer evolution, they would never have let the ability to love evolve, since it seems strictly bad to someone who hasn't experienced it.