As societies become wealthier, they also tend to become more connected, with more people living in close proximity and more able to travel and collect information from distant places. This increases the competition for status, as more people vie for the top of the traditional status hierarchies. This status competition is likely a driver of cultural shift. If I'm at the top of the hierarchy, I want to move the status competition in a direction that favors my existing advantages. If I don't see a path for myself to win the existing status competitions, I want to change the discourse to favor alternate measures of status by creating a "tribe" that will share my new values. As new tribes are created this way, they vie against one another, and those that rise up start to have increasing influence on the larger status discourse.
One way that our current world is very different from all times in the past is ubiquitous, global visibility of the winners of our status competitions. This increases the pace of the creation of new tribes as people try to differentiate enough that they can stand out, creating an increase in factionalism and pushing the cultural values of those tribes further and further out into the space of possible values in order to find something that hasn't already been claimed.
I think that the missing, implicit part of Dennis Horte's thesis is that status competition is socially constructed. It is just made up. So it is not grounded in reality.
Thus the sequence goes: culture gets tested against reality and this testing against reality helps it to evolve to produce wealth, health, and peace. Then culture transitions to status competition and cultural evolution loses its anchor in reality. Untethered to reality, culture drifts and starts producing bad outcomes. In a word, it has degenerated.
I believe that Dennis Horte is responding to your concern that "sometimes unusual wealth makes cultural evolution go bad" by suggesting detail around "weak selection". Weak selection is down stream from the transition to status competition. Earlier cultural evolution involved people noticing what worked in practice. Later cultural evolution involves people noticing what earns them status, and status is just a social game; you can win with moves that don't work in practice.
I'm not sure that appeal to DNA is even warranted here, much less to Evolution, when it seems sufficient to assume that the possibility space of culture is 1) not uniformly distributed but rather a more normal distribution
AND/OR
2) the possibilities at either extreme both incentivise change (via a push dynamic as those at the bottom distribution of cultures that suffer such severe resource deprivation that abstract thought is an unaffordable luxury are strongly pushed toward trying anything else and a pull distribution as those at the top of wealthy and abstract cultures are still seeking novelty and further improvement but are temporarily insulated from the real world negative feedback that should have indicated to them that the closer you get to perfection the greater the proportional chance that any further arbitrary changes will prove net negative (and when you are insulated from feedback, pretty much all changes are arbitrary, effectively random).
In either case, reversion to the mean is not only probable, but nearly guaranteed if given enough time.
"possibilities at either extreme" imply a 1D. I think you are just saying that we should expect to see a regression to the mean after unusual events. Which is true. But I think there is more going on here than just that.
I'm not putting it well, but I'm trying to say that cultural regression to the mean is inevitable in the long term, not specifically due to wealth or abstract thinking or any particular axis you care to name (not 1D, but for n in nD axis), but that those are examples of the broader principle in action. "That which cannot go on forever, won't." kind of thing. The lowest either rise or cease to exist, whereas the highest eventually fall prey to The Gambler's Ruin and decay. Whether the extreme is positive or negative, the result is that people become desensitized to negative feedback and therefore more willing to attempt arbitrary changes, which will statistically trend back towards the mean because that is where the majority of the possible options to choose from are. Culture is most stable nearest the mean. It doesn't require any exceptional circumstances or outside factors to trigger reversion, only enough opportunities for change.
That's not to say that other things aren't also happening, but they aren't necessary to explain this particular phenomena
My thought on this is not a justifying of biological DNA behavioural decline but more of an evolution of it.
We live in the historical period in which we can obtain the most things with the least effort possible.
Not thinking about surviving left in our minds much space to think. The more time passes the more our thoughts get complex, however thoughts can't come to exist without an object to think about, so existing things become object of discussions, institution comprised.
Moreover I believe your DNA theory is effective only if considered on a communal level.
You're right on saying that the basic behaviour of an individual can be contained in his DNA, however growing up this behaviour can be easily plasmated or eroded.
Living in a community where that behaviour is rooted as in him is what will allow for him to develop it as part of the community.
So DNA is just in part a purely biological factor. It's mutually dependent on culture, which in turn is the decisive factor that can determine the developing or erosion of that type of behaviour in the DNA of the people that, still depending on their community's culture, will reproduce or not.
For me, I can't visualize useful concrete, real examples that map to this framework.
For example, did "wealthy" Rome decay do to cultural drift or more about governing institutions corrupting over time because they can't error correct? Or something else?
Re: "The prediction, then, is that as we’ve gotten rich and more into abstract reasoning over the last few centuries, our behavior has become less set by culture, and more by our basic animal and forager natures."
That's not correct, though. Rapid cultural evolution means memes are now running rings around our nuclear genes. That means that culture affects our behavior more - not less. These days, we drive around in cars, type on keybords and scroll on our phones. That's all to do with culture. It would all be unrecognizable to our most-recent cave-dwelling ancestors.
Peaceful? We are the most aggressive and murderous society on the Planet. War is an industry here and we try to hide all the machinations from full view. We overthrow legit governments of other countries so that the few 'privileged' people can make Money! America has been at war for 227 out of 260 years of it's existence!
"culturally transmitted behaviors are often justified in terms of ... claims and arguments that are often confused, weak, and incoherent."
I think that we can be a lot more specific than that. Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoF28tqSea4 titled "Marriage is a price-fixing cartel designed to benefit women."
It offers an economic analysis of the battle of the sexes. Which reminded me of Thomas Hobbes. After the English Civil War he tried to support the Divine Right of Kings by offering a mechanistic, materialist account of why every-one should obey the king. But he got in trouble with religious people, who found his reasoning atheistic.
It seems obvious to me that the man from the man from the Scottish Family Party who made the video will be attacked from both sides. Lusty folk will object to sexual restraint. Pious folk will find fault with his atheistic style of reasoning.
I see this as an instance of a more general problem. Culturally transmitted behaviors are justified in terms of being sacred. And alternative practical justifications are rejected as atheistic. So when faith wains, the alternative practical justifications were never part of the cultural transmission. Worse, for reasons that I don't understand, as sacredness wains, culture does not permit a switch to alternative practical justifications.
When abstract reason rises, we are less satisfied with sacred justification, and we find the practical ones wanting. Alternate more consistent variations are less compelling, and less adaptive.
We can't keep forgetting China -- the longest-lasting literate culture and one with a great, continuous tradition of learned discussion -- in this sort of debates.
Is there something specific about China related to this topic you think deserves mention? Or is it just that all blog posts should mention China at some point?
I was just struck by this part in particular: "DNA changes much slower than culture, DNA likely contributes more to the relatively stable context-independent stuff, while culture contributes more to the faster-changing more context-dependent stuff." Mote, in his History of China, notes that when the Mongol Dynasty was crumbling the Chinese themselves -- by this time thoroughly tamed by centuries of urbanization and examinations -- wondered whether they could take the role of military elite, thinking they might be too civilized to do brute force work like killing other people. And the answer was that they could: their DNA hadn't yet caught up with their civilized ways. In the race towards gracilization and neoteny, the Chinese are well ahead of us Westerners, and yet they still can do brute stuff, that says something.
The Chinese have very low levels of inbred aggressiveness already. One can tell when riding any packed subway, with people crushing each other in complete silence. I often wonder at what point that becomes untenable -- that is, at what point a human group with a generally similar DNA evolution just becomes too un-aggressive to defend itself, and thus too weak to keep transmitting its genes, just too sophisticated, at least on the paternal side. Is there a limit? This is, again, a pretty significant strain in Chinese thought, with authors often pondering how much barbarian blood the Chinese nation needed to survive. Like I said, they are far ahead in this kind of discussion, and it's a pity we don't refer to Chinese history more often. That's my overarching point.
'as DNA changes much slower than culture, DNA likely contributes more to the relatively stable context independent parts, while culture contributes more to the faster changing more context dependent parts.' I see you said 'more' but I think 'obvious' good parts of culture may be preserved (e.g. ban against sports gambling might get put right back how it was).
do agree w/ the thesis 'when a culture allows and even encourages an unusually large amount of abstract reasoning over an unusually long time, that reasoning is likely to undermine that culture’s ... justifications' [also per usual 'about half' DNA is a bit generous to env. for IQ, not important here tho].
main thing missing from your sketch is that complex thought/communication pattern changes don't have an easy mechanistic path to 'bake in' to DNA (though they do - see incredible animal instinctual behaviors)
I agree that some parts of culture are "baked in" deeper into behavior, and that it isn' clear how culture based habits get baked into DNA, though they do.
Interesting argument that wealth plus reasoning tilts behavior back toward DNA defaults. The part about cultural claims needing only to be "plausible enough" rather than coherent is sharp, basically culture runs on good-enough heuristics until someone applies too much logic and the whole thing unravels. What makes this tricky is the feedback loop: as culture weakens we get more DNA-driven laziness, which means even less capacity to maintain complex cultural norms. Maybe that's why every wealthy society eventually hits the same wall.
The enfeebling of communities is the negativef feedback loop which is now weakening our culture. Even basic norms - against gluttony, promiscuity, waste, fraud, aggressive violence - are now fading. We don't even have an active concept of virtue any more! We only have incentives (career, wealth, status) and a system of vague and poorly (and unevenly) enforced dictates from the state. We're like people sleepwalking off of a cliff. We still have the mental inheritance of decades ago (it's wrong to cheat on your partner, it's wrong to steal, it's wrong to punch strangers in the face) but if those actions don't interfere with gaining incentives and if they don't risk the punishment of the state, they are essentially available for modern people to explore, without social penalty or loss of status.
This is a very dangerous situation, and I can't see a corrective, other than to insert yourself within a vibrant community and to work for its protection. But for those who live in global cities or faceless suburbs or the fallout-zones of modern urban decay? You're standing on a net that is disintegrating before your eyes. Your money and status won't save you in the end.
Reason weakens *previous* cultures, by replacing them with new, more rational cultures. These new, more rational cultures have just as much or more influence on behavior as the previous cultures. They're different, not less influential.
Your argument is like saying that engineering weakens technology because it replaced the traditional horse-drawn buggy with the automobile. It weakened the market for horse-drawn buggies, yes...
The previous poorly justified cultural features were at least somewhat adaptive, while the versions that reason replaces them with are less so. Even less effective at getting people to embrace them.
Your argument today has nothing to do with how "adaptive" the cultures produced by reason are, only with how influential.
The cultures produced by reason are extremely influential, as much or more than the traditional cultures they replaced. Certainly a modern person thinks and acts in hugely different ways from a medieval peasant or a hunter-gatherer. This difference is due to culture.
Also, I think you are frequently equivocating on the word "adaptive" in your drift narrative. Sometimes you mean that an "adaptive" culture is one that propagates itself. Sometimes you mean that an "adaptive" culture is one that causes its members to reproduce more. These must be clearly distinguished. Ancient cultures caused their members to reproduce (well, sort of, if we ignore that world population was roughly constant and much lower than today for thousands of years), but failed to propagate themselves to modern times.
It's more accurate to say that there's a brief period of a few centuries in which traditional cultures lead to rapid reproduction, *when combined with* modern increased access to food. Before that period (pre-modern-access-to-food), the traditional cultures led to stagnant population, and after that period the traditional cultures mostly fail to propagate themselves and give way to modern culture.
A culture with time for and openness to “reason” is rare, and usually means a relatively peaceful and successful society with functional institutions. Openness to “reason”usually means that doubt has been cast upon the existing institutions, with lots of agreement that the current system is sub-optimal, but lots of disagreement about what would be better or how to get there. In practice, this tends to be a corrosive force degrading successful institutions.
I’ll add that the founding of the US is a very rare exception, in which there was openness to reason about political systems (largely centered on Lockean ideas), a society came to together mostly in agreement about how to move forward, then successfully implemented a radical new societal structure based on reason, and it was unambiguously successful. We may have this example engrained in us as a success of reason in culture, but we should also note how rare this was.
As societies become wealthier, they also tend to become more connected, with more people living in close proximity and more able to travel and collect information from distant places. This increases the competition for status, as more people vie for the top of the traditional status hierarchies. This status competition is likely a driver of cultural shift. If I'm at the top of the hierarchy, I want to move the status competition in a direction that favors my existing advantages. If I don't see a path for myself to win the existing status competitions, I want to change the discourse to favor alternate measures of status by creating a "tribe" that will share my new values. As new tribes are created this way, they vie against one another, and those that rise up start to have increasing influence on the larger status discourse.
One way that our current world is very different from all times in the past is ubiquitous, global visibility of the winners of our status competitions. This increases the pace of the creation of new tribes as people try to differentiate enough that they can stand out, creating an increase in factionalism and pushing the cultural values of those tribes further and further out into the space of possible values in order to find something that hasn't already been claimed.
I don't see what your comment has to do with my post.
I think that the missing, implicit part of Dennis Horte's thesis is that status competition is socially constructed. It is just made up. So it is not grounded in reality.
Thus the sequence goes: culture gets tested against reality and this testing against reality helps it to evolve to produce wealth, health, and peace. Then culture transitions to status competition and cultural evolution loses its anchor in reality. Untethered to reality, culture drifts and starts producing bad outcomes. In a word, it has degenerated.
I believe that Dennis Horte is responding to your concern that "sometimes unusual wealth makes cultural evolution go bad" by suggesting detail around "weak selection". Weak selection is down stream from the transition to status competition. Earlier cultural evolution involved people noticing what worked in practice. Later cultural evolution involves people noticing what earns them status, and status is just a social game; you can win with moves that don't work in practice.
Yes, changing status markers is a way culture can change, and in a poor evolution context those changes may well go bad.
I'm not sure that appeal to DNA is even warranted here, much less to Evolution, when it seems sufficient to assume that the possibility space of culture is 1) not uniformly distributed but rather a more normal distribution
AND/OR
2) the possibilities at either extreme both incentivise change (via a push dynamic as those at the bottom distribution of cultures that suffer such severe resource deprivation that abstract thought is an unaffordable luxury are strongly pushed toward trying anything else and a pull distribution as those at the top of wealthy and abstract cultures are still seeking novelty and further improvement but are temporarily insulated from the real world negative feedback that should have indicated to them that the closer you get to perfection the greater the proportional chance that any further arbitrary changes will prove net negative (and when you are insulated from feedback, pretty much all changes are arbitrary, effectively random).
In either case, reversion to the mean is not only probable, but nearly guaranteed if given enough time.
Culture is in a very high dimensional space; its not 1D.
I didn't say that it was. Did you intend that reply for someone else?
"possibilities at either extreme" imply a 1D. I think you are just saying that we should expect to see a regression to the mean after unusual events. Which is true. But I think there is more going on here than just that.
I'm not putting it well, but I'm trying to say that cultural regression to the mean is inevitable in the long term, not specifically due to wealth or abstract thinking or any particular axis you care to name (not 1D, but for n in nD axis), but that those are examples of the broader principle in action. "That which cannot go on forever, won't." kind of thing. The lowest either rise or cease to exist, whereas the highest eventually fall prey to The Gambler's Ruin and decay. Whether the extreme is positive or negative, the result is that people become desensitized to negative feedback and therefore more willing to attempt arbitrary changes, which will statistically trend back towards the mean because that is where the majority of the possible options to choose from are. Culture is most stable nearest the mean. It doesn't require any exceptional circumstances or outside factors to trigger reversion, only enough opportunities for change.
That's not to say that other things aren't also happening, but they aren't necessary to explain this particular phenomena
My thought on this is not a justifying of biological DNA behavioural decline but more of an evolution of it.
We live in the historical period in which we can obtain the most things with the least effort possible.
Not thinking about surviving left in our minds much space to think. The more time passes the more our thoughts get complex, however thoughts can't come to exist without an object to think about, so existing things become object of discussions, institution comprised.
Moreover I believe your DNA theory is effective only if considered on a communal level.
You're right on saying that the basic behaviour of an individual can be contained in his DNA, however growing up this behaviour can be easily plasmated or eroded.
Living in a community where that behaviour is rooted as in him is what will allow for him to develop it as part of the community.
So DNA is just in part a purely biological factor. It's mutually dependent on culture, which in turn is the decisive factor that can determine the developing or erosion of that type of behaviour in the DNA of the people that, still depending on their community's culture, will reproduce or not.
Who is researching ways of suppressing DNA programming to enhance humans to become more rational?
GLP-1RAs show a glimmer of that kind hope yet their development was halting and haphazard.
For me, I can't visualize useful concrete, real examples that map to this framework.
For example, did "wealthy" Rome decay do to cultural drift or more about governing institutions corrupting over time because they can't error correct? Or something else?
Does it follow that a culture will be more stable if it's in alignment with DNA motivated behavior?
Re: "The prediction, then, is that as we’ve gotten rich and more into abstract reasoning over the last few centuries, our behavior has become less set by culture, and more by our basic animal and forager natures."
That's not correct, though. Rapid cultural evolution means memes are now running rings around our nuclear genes. That means that culture affects our behavior more - not less. These days, we drive around in cars, type on keybords and scroll on our phones. That's all to do with culture. It would all be unrecognizable to our most-recent cave-dwelling ancestors.
This seems to assume a "culture" is a stable thing that can then "change." But cultures are constantly changing and have no stable points.
Peaceful? We are the most aggressive and murderous society on the Planet. War is an industry here and we try to hide all the machinations from full view. We overthrow legit governments of other countries so that the few 'privileged' people can make Money! America has been at war for 227 out of 260 years of it's existence!
"culturally transmitted behaviors are often justified in terms of ... claims and arguments that are often confused, weak, and incoherent."
I think that we can be a lot more specific than that. Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoF28tqSea4 titled "Marriage is a price-fixing cartel designed to benefit women."
It offers an economic analysis of the battle of the sexes. Which reminded me of Thomas Hobbes. After the English Civil War he tried to support the Divine Right of Kings by offering a mechanistic, materialist account of why every-one should obey the king. But he got in trouble with religious people, who found his reasoning atheistic.
It seems obvious to me that the man from the man from the Scottish Family Party who made the video will be attacked from both sides. Lusty folk will object to sexual restraint. Pious folk will find fault with his atheistic style of reasoning.
I see this as an instance of a more general problem. Culturally transmitted behaviors are justified in terms of being sacred. And alternative practical justifications are rejected as atheistic. So when faith wains, the alternative practical justifications were never part of the cultural transmission. Worse, for reasons that I don't understand, as sacredness wains, culture does not permit a switch to alternative practical justifications.
When abstract reason rises, we are less satisfied with sacred justification, and we find the practical ones wanting. Alternate more consistent variations are less compelling, and less adaptive.
We can't keep forgetting China -- the longest-lasting literate culture and one with a great, continuous tradition of learned discussion -- in this sort of debates.
Is there something specific about China related to this topic you think deserves mention? Or is it just that all blog posts should mention China at some point?
I was just struck by this part in particular: "DNA changes much slower than culture, DNA likely contributes more to the relatively stable context-independent stuff, while culture contributes more to the faster-changing more context-dependent stuff." Mote, in his History of China, notes that when the Mongol Dynasty was crumbling the Chinese themselves -- by this time thoroughly tamed by centuries of urbanization and examinations -- wondered whether they could take the role of military elite, thinking they might be too civilized to do brute force work like killing other people. And the answer was that they could: their DNA hadn't yet caught up with their civilized ways. In the race towards gracilization and neoteny, the Chinese are well ahead of us Westerners, and yet they still can do brute stuff, that says something.
The general human ability to return to war after long periods of civilized peace does indeed suggest some war habits are in DNA.
The Chinese have very low levels of inbred aggressiveness already. One can tell when riding any packed subway, with people crushing each other in complete silence. I often wonder at what point that becomes untenable -- that is, at what point a human group with a generally similar DNA evolution just becomes too un-aggressive to defend itself, and thus too weak to keep transmitting its genes, just too sophisticated, at least on the paternal side. Is there a limit? This is, again, a pretty significant strain in Chinese thought, with authors often pondering how much barbarian blood the Chinese nation needed to survive. Like I said, they are far ahead in this kind of discussion, and it's a pity we don't refer to Chinese history more often. That's my overarching point.
Maybe cultures survive abstract reasoning when they have a sense of sacredness that encourages debate. Thinking of Jewish tradition especially.
But that sense of sacredness needs to protect key beliefs from logical scrutiny.
'as DNA changes much slower than culture, DNA likely contributes more to the relatively stable context independent parts, while culture contributes more to the faster changing more context dependent parts.' I see you said 'more' but I think 'obvious' good parts of culture may be preserved (e.g. ban against sports gambling might get put right back how it was).
do agree w/ the thesis 'when a culture allows and even encourages an unusually large amount of abstract reasoning over an unusually long time, that reasoning is likely to undermine that culture’s ... justifications' [also per usual 'about half' DNA is a bit generous to env. for IQ, not important here tho].
main thing missing from your sketch is that complex thought/communication pattern changes don't have an easy mechanistic path to 'bake in' to DNA (though they do - see incredible animal instinctual behaviors)
I agree that some parts of culture are "baked in" deeper into behavior, and that it isn' clear how culture based habits get baked into DNA, though they do.
Interesting argument that wealth plus reasoning tilts behavior back toward DNA defaults. The part about cultural claims needing only to be "plausible enough" rather than coherent is sharp, basically culture runs on good-enough heuristics until someone applies too much logic and the whole thing unravels. What makes this tricky is the feedback loop: as culture weakens we get more DNA-driven laziness, which means even less capacity to maintain complex cultural norms. Maybe that's why every wealthy society eventually hits the same wall.
The enfeebling of communities is the negativef feedback loop which is now weakening our culture. Even basic norms - against gluttony, promiscuity, waste, fraud, aggressive violence - are now fading. We don't even have an active concept of virtue any more! We only have incentives (career, wealth, status) and a system of vague and poorly (and unevenly) enforced dictates from the state. We're like people sleepwalking off of a cliff. We still have the mental inheritance of decades ago (it's wrong to cheat on your partner, it's wrong to steal, it's wrong to punch strangers in the face) but if those actions don't interfere with gaining incentives and if they don't risk the punishment of the state, they are essentially available for modern people to explore, without social penalty or loss of status.
This is a very dangerous situation, and I can't see a corrective, other than to insert yourself within a vibrant community and to work for its protection. But for those who live in global cities or faceless suburbs or the fallout-zones of modern urban decay? You're standing on a net that is disintegrating before your eyes. Your money and status won't save you in the end.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/entitlement-culture
This doesn't follow at all.
Reason weakens *previous* cultures, by replacing them with new, more rational cultures. These new, more rational cultures have just as much or more influence on behavior as the previous cultures. They're different, not less influential.
Your argument is like saying that engineering weakens technology because it replaced the traditional horse-drawn buggy with the automobile. It weakened the market for horse-drawn buggies, yes...
The previous poorly justified cultural features were at least somewhat adaptive, while the versions that reason replaces them with are less so. Even less effective at getting people to embrace them.
Your argument today has nothing to do with how "adaptive" the cultures produced by reason are, only with how influential.
The cultures produced by reason are extremely influential, as much or more than the traditional cultures they replaced. Certainly a modern person thinks and acts in hugely different ways from a medieval peasant or a hunter-gatherer. This difference is due to culture.
Also, I think you are frequently equivocating on the word "adaptive" in your drift narrative. Sometimes you mean that an "adaptive" culture is one that propagates itself. Sometimes you mean that an "adaptive" culture is one that causes its members to reproduce more. These must be clearly distinguished. Ancient cultures caused their members to reproduce (well, sort of, if we ignore that world population was roughly constant and much lower than today for thousands of years), but failed to propagate themselves to modern times.
It's more accurate to say that there's a brief period of a few centuries in which traditional cultures lead to rapid reproduction, *when combined with* modern increased access to food. Before that period (pre-modern-access-to-food), the traditional cultures led to stagnant population, and after that period the traditional cultures mostly fail to propagate themselves and give way to modern culture.
A culture with time for and openness to “reason” is rare, and usually means a relatively peaceful and successful society with functional institutions. Openness to “reason”usually means that doubt has been cast upon the existing institutions, with lots of agreement that the current system is sub-optimal, but lots of disagreement about what would be better or how to get there. In practice, this tends to be a corrosive force degrading successful institutions.
I’ll add that the founding of the US is a very rare exception, in which there was openness to reason about political systems (largely centered on Lockean ideas), a society came to together mostly in agreement about how to move forward, then successfully implemented a radical new societal structure based on reason, and it was unambiguously successful. We may have this example engrained in us as a success of reason in culture, but we should also note how rare this was.