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| 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.
The academic success of America’s youth is strongly linked with their health.
