Mark Pagel: culture is central to human success

Mark Pagel

Mark Pagel is head of the Evolution Laboratory at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading. He has travelled the world studying evolution and the spread of cultures. He is also the author of Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation, in which he argues that human culture has surpassed genes in determining who we are and how we live.
You argue that culture exercises a sort of mind control over us?
Some people think culture is a virus that infects our minds and controls us in ways that don't serve us but serve it; I actually think we've tamed it so that it serves us quite exquisitely. We've actually evolved to embrace our cultures and allow them a degree of mind control over us in return for the prosperity and protection they give in return.
How did culture become this important?
Around 200,000 years ago, the defining event in modern human evolution occurred when humans acquired the capacity for culture. This was an ability to learn from others and to transmit knowledge, wisdom and skills. It was a new kind of evolution – we could call it idea evolution. Ideas were able to jump from mind to mind and it meant our cultures could adapt far more quickly than our genes could adapt.
When humans walked out of Africa and into the deserts of Saudi Arabia, they didn't need to wait for genes to arise that would confer some kind of adaptive advantage to living in the desert; humans could figure out how to make shelters, dig for water, domesticate camels and so on. Our ability to adapt at the cultural level shouldn't be seen as any different from our ability to adapt at the genetic level.
Both are streams of information that get passed down the generations; it is just that one has allowed us to adapt in hundreds or thousands of years, rather than hundreds of thousands of years.
You would say culture is the most successful way of making more people?
No other species has ever had such a long run of population increase. Most animals rise up to the carrying capacity of their environment and then they are stuck; if you're a wildebeest, you can't climb trees for fruit. They are limited by the environments their genes are adapted to. But we've been able to move around the world because we have been able to adapt at a cultural level to the many different environments on earth. Now, most species are having to adapt to us, rather than adapt to the environment. We've changed the environment of the whole world.
If the most successful cultural ideas are those that do us most good, why are we not fending off the bad ones that effect the environment, biodiversity etc?
You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages. But we are now seeing that this isn't a sustainable strategy. So our species is confronted with its biggest conundrum and so far it isn't responding well. So far, you could categorise all the efforts, such as Kyoto, as abject failure. We shouldn't be surprised by that, but we should see that our co-operative nature gives us some glimmer of hope. What we're going to have to do is create a world where we are all in the same boat. Until we all start behaving in a way that acknowledges that all our fates are linked, there isn't much hope.
You claim that we have a cultural immune system to ward off bad ideas?
Ideas such as celibacy, reckless drug taking and suicide bombing – they act directly against our reproductive interests. What we should realise is that those things are at incredibly low levels, so it cannot be that easy for an idea to come into our mind and rule us.
I argue that we have developed an immune system to deal with the nasty ones, just as we have an immune system to deal with genetically based viruses. Those genetically based viruses can occasionally outpace us, but they haven't won, because we have this immune system inside us that is evolving in real time. I think it's reasonable to expect we've acquired a kind of cognitive immune system for testing out ideas and asking: are they any good? I have not a single shred of evidence that it exists; I can't find any cognitive immune cells floating round your brain, but our behaviour suggests that very few of us are taken in by suicide cults or drug abuse and so on.
You're not arguing that cultural identity is passed down the generations like genes?
Well, I am. We can speak of the fidelity of the transmission of genetic information and that fidelity is far greater than the fidelity of cultural information, but nevertheless the fidelity of transmission of culture should make us stand back in awe.
For example, with some difficulty, you and I can read Chaucer, despite there being hundreds of years of cultural transmission containing probably billions and billions of events – it should really astonish us that cultural transmission has this fidelity.
The remarkable fidelity of cultural transmission tells us something more – that our shared cultural knowledge has played a vital role in promoting our survival and prosperity. If it hadn't, there would not have been such a pressure for it to evolve into forms that are easy for us to remember and transmit to others. This means that you can be plucked from your cot and plonked in Tasmania and brought up a Tasmanian, and you'd be a Tasmanian.
So if I'd been dropped in KwaZulu-Natal at one day old, I could have become a Zulu?
You ask a delicate question because there are obvious difference in appearance. You would have been recognised as a strange omen. If we could avoid that obvious problem I'm sure you'd be a pretty good Zulu.

But if I took you out of your cot and dropped you high up in the Tibetan plateau you would struggle, because they have a gene that gives them a really extraordinary ability to process oxygen; that's a genetic difference. Yet it's also a facultative one – if you go there, on holiday you will probably vomit for the first few days, but you will respond and start making more haemoglobin, although you would probably would never be as good a high-altitude Tibetan as them. These are the exceptions that prove the rule.