http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/stories/culture-the-newest-evolutionary-force
E. O. Wilson’s Consilience offers sweeping, large-scale reflections on the stuff of human nature and the importance of both scientific and metaphorical thinking. It aims to reconcile the sciences and the humanities, and this broader goal deserves thoughtful reflection, but I am presently transfixed by one particular passage in his chapter on gene-culture coevolution.
In it, Wilson argues that our genes predispose us to certain cultural behaviors, but that cultural behavior also creates social norms which then select for specific genes. In this way, nature and nurture participate in an ongoing discourse.
But this ongoing discourse gets tricky when culture begins to accelerate, when technology (starting with agricultural tools, farming, etc...) enables swift growth of civilizations. The speed of genetics is notoriously slow; except in moments of mass convulsions (plague, planetary catastrophe, etc.), it requires centuries to select for certain genes. The result, therefore, when culture accelerates is a growing gap between our cultural behavior and our genetic disposition. We may believe that we have genetically advanced beyond our “less civilized” ancestors, but Wilson would say that this is a mistake. He describes this in this way:
The swiftness of cultural evolution in historic times may by itself seem to imply that humanity has slipped its genetic instructions, or somehow suppressed them. But that is an illusion... For most of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens and its antecedent species... cultural evolution was slow enough to remain tightly coupled to genetic evolution. Both culture and the genes underlying human nature were probably genetically fit throughout that time... There was time enough, as one millennium passed into another, for the genes and epigenetic rules to evolve in concert with culture. By Upper Paleolithic times, however, from about 40,000 to 10,000 years before the present, the tempo of cultural evolution quickened. During the ensuing Neolithic agricultural advance, the pace accelerated dramatically. According to the theory of population genetics, most of the change was far too fast to be tracked closely by genetic evolution. But there is no evidence that the Paleolithic genes simply disappeared during this “creative revolution.” They stayed in place and continued to prescribe the foundational rules of human nature. If they could not keep up with culture, neither could culture expunge them. For better of worse, they carried human nature into the chaos of modern history. (182)
This affirms some thoughts I’d had a number of years ago, but it also has some dramatic implications for the role and importance of education.
If our genetic evolution is not aligned with our present culture, then our present culture must nurture and select behaviors that enable our present culture to accelerate and grow stably and responsibly. There are two places where our present culture is well-suited to nurture and select sustainable behaviors: school and family. And this signals the importance of education.
How can we reconcile our genetic dispositions with the seduction of contemporary culture? The question addresses the intersection between biological impulses, social norms and pressures, and individual values. If, as Wilson proposes, our biological impulses (our genetic evolution) are not in sync with our social norms and pressures, then our individual values and behaviors must sustainably moderate between them.
Whether this means we need a moral component to our educational system, or whether an educational program that includes critical awareness, self-control and foresight provides the essential skills to discern and develop a healthy, social-morally balanced culture, I don’t have a definitive answer, but I tend towards the latter.
This is all heady stuff, and a thorough entry would include exploration of a number of other related points: healthy and happy families as another source for learning sustainable values, further exploration into what makes up a moral education, and, of course, some examples to make all of this a little more concrete. Until then: Wow--take a look at E. O. Wilson’s Consilience.
