I sent the following to Bill Powers. He suggested I post it here.
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Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 16:50:39 -0400
To:"William T. Powers" <POWERS_W@FORTLEWIS.EDU>
From:bbenzon@global2000.net (Bill Benzon)
Subject:Intrinsic variables and cultural evolutionBill,
1. I've now got a website (URL in signature block) and a page in that is
devoted to the work Dave Hays & I have done on cultural evolution
(Account Suspended).Most recently I decided to get serious about seeing how to make cultural
evolution Darwinian. My first effort on those lines is a paper on
"Culture as an Evolutionary Arena," which is at my site and which will be
published in a few months. I managed to get young biologist (Hans-Cees
Speel) to critique my paper and have written a critigue of his
critique--all available on the web (and all due out in hardcopy). Which
brings me to:2. Intrinsic variables & cultural evolution. I pretty much decided that
the evolutionary landscape for culture is given in those intrinsic
variables of the brain. That is, what culture adapts to directly are the
neural requirements for reorganization and only indirectly does culture
adapt to the physical world. My views on this matter are most clearly
stated in my critique of Speel & I have included those remarks here.I'd be interested in knowing how this strikes you. It isn't exactly the
theoretical job those intrinsic variables were invented for. . . but it
does ground cultural evolution in biology w/out giving way to the
reductionism of sociobiology. And it has the beginnings of a way to think
about what society is about; something Dave & I pondered a great deal to
little effect. That is, our felt sure that society isn't just the sum of
individuals, that there is something more. Well, "projecting" those
intrinsic reference levels from individual brains into the group, that's
something to do & it has to be done without ESP & such.Bill B
* * * * *
Culture's Evolutionary Landscape:
A Reply to Hans-Cees SpeelWilliam L. Benzon
1. Introduction
I welcome Hans-Cees Speel's "A short comment from a biologist" and wish I
had been in contact with him before I wrote "Culture as an Evolutionary
Arena" rather than after, for I would have written a better paper had I
been able do exchange views with him. Alas, both of us must cope with the
paper I wrote, not the one I now wish I had written. To that end, I will
discuss his first, second, third, and fifth points in this introduction
and devote the rest of my reply to his fourth point, which is the most
substantive difference between us.On Speel's first two criticisms, having to do with the relationship
between classification and phylogeny and with the status of species in
evolutionary theory, as a non-biologist I have no reason to dispute what
he says. Speel's' points weaken the contrast I have made between
biological and cultural evolution, but they do not affect the substance of
my views on cultural evolution. Beyond that, his points may even
strengthen my suspicion that comparative and historical linguistics has
been pursuing an inappropriate biological analogy in seeking to arrange
the world's languages into a genealogical tree, for it seems that most of
the biological world cannot be placed in such an arrangement either.Speel's third point, about replication, interaction and selective
retention, involves his rewriting a passage from my article. I wasn't
happy with my original formulation; I prefer his rewrite and thank him for
it. Of course, I reserve the right to adopt still a different formulation
in the future.On this fifth point, concerning the relative complexity of biological and
cultural evolution, I note that, in the absence of any agreed-upon
measurements, his belief that the biological world is as complex as the
cultural is as empirically empty as my assertion to the contrary. Neither
of us has anything serious to say on this matter.This leaves us with Speel's fourth issue, they way I constructed the
cultural parallels to the biological genotype and phenotype. These waters
are deep and murky. And they are at the heart of the project to provide a
Darwinian account of cultural evolution. I would guess that some of our
differences are mere semantics while others are substantive.
Unfortunately, there is no easy to distinguish between these two classes
of disagreement so that we can agree on definitions which resolve the
semantic differences and only then go on to explore the substantive
differences with our newly minted common language.2. Cultural Success and Failure
From my point of view the major contribution of memetics, the term Speel
uses for his discipline, is to recognize and insist that cultural
artifacts and processes be treated as agents in an evolutionary process
and not simply as the creatures of human will and action. The major
weakness of memetics, e.g. Dawkins (1982, 1993), Dennett (1990), or Speel
(in press), is that it has little to say about why cultural interactors
are retained in a society. Memeticists are thus in the position
evolutionary biologists would have been in if they had no ideas about the
nutritional requirements of organisms, about health and disease, physical
disturbances, predation, etc. In that situation one can describe patterns
of growth and change, but one is powerless to explain those patterns. To
explain those patterns you need to think about what causes success and
what causes failure. You need some rich notion of the adaptive
environment.In making the distinction between cultural replicator (meme) and cultural
interactor (trait) as I did, I was, and am, concerned about working out a
substantive approach to understanding cultural success and failure. I am
interested in exploring the hypothesis that cultural adaptation is not
primarily about adaption to the physical environment (as is the case with
biological adaptation), but about adaptation to a rather more abstract
environment, one physically located inside the brains of members in a
social group. Cultural adaptation obviously presupposes adaption of the
human group to the physical environment, but it is not primarily about
that adaption. If I were a religious man I would say that cultural
adaptation is about spiritual matters. As I am not religious, I must work
harder for my truths, and with far less certainty of success. As I will
argue below, I think cultural evolution is about affective and conceptual
coherence.3. No Memes in Mind
Following David Hays (1993, section 8.2.1), I place memes, that is,
cultural replicators, in the external physical environment, and only
there. Speel would have memes in the brain. This seems to me doubtful,
though it seems to be the standard assumption of memeticists; certainly,
it is the assumption Dawkins himself has made [1]. In his reply Speel
asserts:In my view it is clear that ideas, songs and norms reside in the brain
somehow, and are copied from human to human. They can also be copied from
a brain to a book, or to physical air-waves.I agree that the things he names, and others of similar kind, do somehow
"reside in the brain." But I deny that they can be said to "be copied from
a brain to a book" or that they are "copied from human to human" in any
sense of "copy" that is useful in a technical discussion of evolution. His
assertion presupposes that when two people sing the same song, read the
same book, dance the same steps, etc., that their mental processes are
identical or at least highly similar. That presupposition is, at best,
dubious.Let us use the term "schema" to designate mental representations and
processes, whether perceptual or motoric, cognitive or affective, atomic
or complex. My position is that what is copied (replicated) in cultural
adaptation and change is the external physical thing, whatever it may be,
text on a page, soup in a pot, dance steps, physical vibrations in ear,
colored markings on a wooden poles, etc. Whether or not one person uses
the same (or highly similar) schemas in making the copy is another issue
entirely. If the schemas are not the same, then we do not have replication
from one brain to another. But we do have replication from one physical
object or process to another. In my paper (section 3.1) I give the example
of a middle-class Japanese marriage ceremony where, in one segment, the
groom dresses in a tuxedo and the bride in a white dress wearing a veil in
the manner of the Christian ceremony. In these two situations, the
Christian marriage ceremony and the Japanese, the memes are quite similar,
but the accompanying schemas are different in crucial ways. I think that,
in general, memes move relatively freely from one culture to another, but
the corresponding schemas do not necessarily accompany them.In a different vein, the discipline of literary criticism has been wracked
with disputes over just "where" the "text" is: Is it on the page, in the
author's mind, or in the minds of each of its various readers? Many,
perhaps even most, contemporary critics take the view that, while the ink
splotches on the page have objective existence and are fundamentally the
same for all readers, those readers have rather different experiences of
the literary work according to differences in age, gender, social class,
national background, ethnicity, and personality. A few critics have even
attempted to gather empirical evidence on this matter (e.g. Holland,
1975). Similar considerations would apply to other artifacts of expressive
culture, paintings, statues, works of music, and dance, etc. Thus it
doesn't seem reasonable to think of writing a book, or singing a song, as
simply copying something from inside the brain onto some physical medium,
nor the acts of reading and listening as simply copying from a physical
medium into the brain. These are complex psychological acts and are not,
as yet, well-understood. A memetics which is constructed on such shaky
foundations seems unnecessarily risky.Beyond this, coherence across the schemas of members in a group surely
plays a role in group dynamics. If group members have widely varying
schemas for their cultural products and processes, then effective
communication and cooperation would be difficult and conflict would be
prevalent. In this context one particular line of thinking about
expressive culture commands attention. Such thinkers as Gregory Bateson
(1972, pp. 128-152), Eric Havelock (1982, pp. 89-149), and Robert Rogers
(1985) have argued that well-constructed effective expressive objects
(paintings, poems, rituals, etc.) encode their messages with a high level
of redundancy. Some of my work in literary analysis shows that subtle
aspects of semantic structure can be strongly cued through sound structure
(Benzon, 1977, 1985); these cues might well place constraints on the
schemas constructed in understanding literary texts so that people are
more likely to share a common understanding and experience of such texts.
Sharing such objects will thus facilitate constructing a common reality
and thereby contribute to group cohesion (at what Linnda Caporael calls
the deme and macrodeme levels, 1995, paragraphs 24 ff.).I am thus suggesting that certain kinds of cultural artifacts and
processes, including expressive works but by no means limited to them, are
more likely than others to elicit similar schemas among different people.
The resulting social cohesion means that such cultural products would be
more likely to be retained though successive generations than objects
lacking these properties. These and only these products would be memes.At this point I would seem that I have all but agreed with Speel on the
point I have been contesting. He wants to allow memes in the mind/brain
while I do not. The memes with which I ended the previous paragraph,
however, are defined in such a way that they elicit/support similar
schemas among different people. So why not call those schemas memes as
well? The issue is now whether one thinks of the external physical "thing"
as a tool for replicating the internal mental "thing" (which is, of
course, some physical process in the brain), or thinks of the internal
mental "thing" as a tool for replicating the external physical "thing." I
come down firmly in favor of the latter while Speel would seem to admit
both possibilities. While I intend to stick to my guns on this one, at
least for awhile, I want to move on to other matters. For this argument
now seems to be one about the relationship between the chicken and the
egg. Such arguments tend to be about global system dynamics, and that is a
matter which I am not prepared to address, and certainly not in the
limited context of this reply. I only note that I suspect my preference on
this matter is related my belief that the selective environment for
culture is to be found in the interior of the brain.4. Intrinsic Variables and Traits
However vague the concept of meme is, my concept of the inner (phenotypic)
trait is, if anything, even more vague. Speel has forced me to think more
deeply about just what these mysterious traits are and I'd like to sketch
out my current thinking.Let me begin by asserting that I have decided that (at least some of) the
schemas I have been talking about in the previous section are the
interactors in cultural evolution. The traits I discussed in my paper are
properties of these interactors. To understand these traits we need to
understand what William Powers (1973, pp. 177-204) has to say about
reorganization, that is to say, learning.Reorganization is triggered by neural structures monitoring what Powers
calls intrinsic variables. Consider some physical variable like the level
of glucose in the blood. If that level goes below a certain "comfort
zone," the animal will seek nutrients which will bring the glucose level
back into that comfort zone. What happens, however, if the animal runs
though its complete repertoire of food-finding and -eating schemas and
fails to raise its glucose level? Of course, if this goes on for a long
enough time the animal will die. But, before that happens, the animal will
start doing things it never did before, perhaps on a haphazard basis. It
will learn new schemas. If the environment is cooperative and the animal
sufficiently lucky, one of the new schemas will have the desired result,
the animal will get some appropriate food and the glucose level will rise
back into the comfort zone. The point at which the animal ceases to deploy
its present repertoire of glucose acquisition schemas and begins to learn
new schemas, that is its intrinsic reference level for glucose.In Powers' view the intrinsic reference levels are genetically set. There
will be a number of them, many related to some physical variable important
for the animal's survival--temperature, oxygen, nutrients of various
sorts, physical security, sexual satisfaction (which is important for the
survival of the species as a whole, not for that of the individual
animal), etc. Whenever any of these intrinsic variables strays outside its
comfort zone, reorganization begins.Reorganization, that is to say learning, is the basis for the retention
system of cultural evolution. What I have been calling the "phenotypic"
traits of cultural evolution are the capacities which schemas have for
keeping one or more intrinsic variables within the comfort zone. Imagine a
person trying out any number of new patterns in order to find one that
will bring the intrinsic variable back to its reference level; it will
retain only the schema(s) which have the needed result. The others will
simply be lost. Schemas are interactors competing in a cultural
environment which is somehow implemented deep in the interiors of the
brains of people in a social group.In discussing intrinsic variables and their reference levels, Powers also
admitted the logical possibility, and practical desirability, of intrinsic
variables governing the quality of control in the system (Powers, 1973,
pp. 195-196). David Hays and I have followed Powers on this and have
suggested that each (more or less) distinct functional area of the
neocortex is regulating an intrinsic variable governing some kind of
informatic coherence (Benzon & Hays, 1988, pp. 298-304, 313). The goal of
each cortical area is to account for its input. Following Karl Pribram
(1971; see also Abu-Mostafa & Psaltis, 1987; Psaltis & Mok, 1995) we have
speculated that a cortical region operates holographically to match its
input to the patterns it has stored, where "pattern" is a term for an
atomic schema confined to a single cortical region. There may never be an
exact match. The intrinsic reference level for a cortical region would be
the level of correspondence between input and stored pattern which is
necessary to score a match. If there is a match, the input is said to be
accounted for by the stored pattern. If there is no match, then a new
pattern must be created to account for the input. That requires
reorganization. The new pattern thus created will, of course, become part
of the permanent repertoire of the cortical region. It will be, in a word,
retained.We now have two classes of intrinsic variables:
1.) variables for physical quantities which are, presumably, monitored
subcortically; and2.) informatic variables, which are cortically monitored.
These variables are wired into the structure and processes of the brain
and thus genetically determined. When "projected" into the social sphere
(which I will discuss below) these variables constitute the evolutionary
landscape in which culture grows and changes.I would guess that we have on the order of a thousand or so of these
intrinsic variables, with there being more cortical informatic variables
(one for each functional area) than subcortical [2]. Many schemas will be
distributed across several or even many cortical areas. Many, perhaps
ultimately all, will be relevant to regulation of one or more subcortical
variables. The (phenotypic) traits of a schema consist then of its various
capacities to bring intrinsic variables within range of their respective
intrinsic reference levels. In talking thus of a schema's traits I am
distinguishing what the schema represents, whether something perceived,
thought, planned, or enacted, from its "position" in the multi-dimensional
mental space determined by those thousand or so intrinsic variables.
Schemas compete with one another according to their capacity to satisfy
these intrinsic needs.I thus believe that we have memes, cultural replicators, in the external
physical world. The perception and use of those memes is subserved by
psychological schemas, interactors, which are patterns of neural
activation in the brain. Those interactors have traits which determine
their relationships to the 1000 or so reference variables regulated by the
brain's reorganizing system. If an interactor's traits are such that it is
retained by the brains of many individuals in a group, then the memes
employed/subserved by that interactor are likely successfully to
replicate.5. Feeling in Society: Culture's Evolutionary Arena
Culture inheres in social groups and, up until now, we have been talking
about the interior of individual's brains. I am of the view that, while
society is "implemented" in the actions and perceptions of its individual
members, it cannot be reduced to those actions and perceptions. Society is
more than the sum of its individual human parts; just what that something
more is remains something of a puzzle, at least to me (cf. Caporael's
concept of "obligate interdependence," 1995; Hays, 1973, pp. 204-208).
However, I am now so far out on a speculative limb that I could not make
things any more hazardous by continuing to speculate.David Hays (1992, p. 197) has argued that human sociality is strongly
enhanced by interactional synchrony, the precise coordination of movements
between members of social groups. More recently William McNeill (1995, p.
27) has argued that "muscular bonding," by which he means such activities
as communal dance and military drill, is essential to human society:Moving together rhythmically for hours on end can be counted upon to
strengthen emotional bonds among those who take part...Far larger bands
than any existing today among chimpanzees or other great apes could
therefore come into being...What we may think of as the human scale of
primary community, comprising anything from several score to many hundreds
of persons, thus emerged, thanks to the emotional solidarities aroused by
keeping together in time.My speculation is that synchronized interaction facilitates the creation
of a social space in which the intrinsic variables operating in the brains
of individuals become the evolutionary landscape for cultural adaptation
and evolution. In saying this I do not mean to raise the specter of
mysteries like the Jungian collective unconscious or other non-material
phenomena. I am talking about electro-physical interactions taking place
in the brains of humans interacting in a group. The symbolic interactions
which are central to human social and mental life require coordination of
a kind which is unlike interactions in animal groups. Interactional
synchrony is the most basic means of achieving that interaction.This emergent evolutionary landscape is structured by those thousand or so
intrinsic variables genetically wired into human brains. And, in the view
Hays and I have been elaborating, this landscape would seem to be
fundamentally about feelings, which brings us back to Speel's critique,
where he distinguishes between norms and our emotional attachment to those
norms. What I am saying is that the norms (which would be a schemas in my
current view, schemas that could be expressed/realized in a variety of
memes) and many other cultural "things," survive or die according to how
they mesh with our feelings (see also Geertz, 1973, 80-82). In our paper
on the brain (Benzon & Hays, 1988) Hays and I associate feelings with a
principle of modal operation which we reworked from its original
formulation by Warren McCulloch (Kilmer, McCulloch, & Blum, 1969). A mode
is a global structure of brain activation which subserves some particular
need, whether physical or informatic. For any given mode some functional
areas will be inactive, others fully active, still others in intermediate
states. Feelings are the subjective experience of modal processes, the
transition from one mode to another, satisfaction of a modal goal, or the
failure to satisfy a modal goal. Mode and feeling are thus intimately
related to those thousand or so intrinsic variables at the heart of the
mind/brain. How we feel is a function of the current satisfaction levels
of those variables.Thus we arrive at the heart of the matter: What relationships obtain
between these intrinsic variables? Are there constraints on our capacity
to satisfice, to use Herbert Simon's (1981) term, over these variables?
The simplest case would be one where all of the variables are correlated
in the same way; any schema which contributes to the satisfaction of one
variable will contribute to the satisfaction of all variables. A more
complex situation would arise if the variables were all independent of one
another so that one could act to satisfy any one variable without having
any affect on the satisfaction of the other variables. Unfortunately,
human life seems more difficult than this. These variables are not
independent of one another, nor are they correlated in the same way. As
Hays has argued in his discussion of expressive culture (1992) some of
these variables seem to be linked in contradictory ways; the satisfaction
of one variable will force another variable or variables into error. As
biologically given, the evolutionary landscape of human culture is riddled
with conflict and contradiction. That makes for difficult living.And it provides a driving force behind cultural evolution, namely, to
create patterns of perception and action which minimize, or perhaps elude,
conflict between intrinsic variables. My analysis of the interaction
African-American and European-American music (Benzon, 1993, in press),
provides an example. What we observe is that over this century (and back
well into the nineteenth century) there has been a massive flow of music
memes from African America to European America; if you will, there is a
"slope" in the evolutionary landscape of American musical culture from
African America to European America. I argue that this is because those
memes provide for emotional satisfactions of a kind which European-derived
memes do not support. That is, those memes give rise to schemas which
contribute to the satisfaction of intrinsic variables which have been
"starved" in the European cultural regime.More generally we have the various cultural ranks which Hays and I have
elaborated in a series of essays on cultural evolution. In this theory we
have followed others in giving a privileged place to writing, calculation,
and computation. Our reason for doing this has to do with the modal
system, in particular, with the various modal patterns implemented in the
cortex. Thus in our first essay (Benzon & Hays, 1990, pp. 302-303) we
said:The activities of reading and writing require patterns of brain activity
which don't exist in illiterate peoples. These new patterns of brain
activity support modes of analysis and synthesis not possible in other
modes; hence concepts of a new kind become possible. Other cultural
inventions-we are particularly concerned about algorithmic calculation and
computer programming-have similar effects. The creation of a new brain
thus doesn't require genetically driven changes in brain structure; it
requires only culturally driven changes in cognitive technology.In the current context I would suggest that the cultural potency of
writing, calculation, and computation is that they sustain modes which
allow for more effective satisfaction of the 1000 intrinsic variables
driving the brain's reorganization. Writing, calculation, and computation
change the evolutionary landscape in a way that reduces conflict, thus
engendering greater coherence in the mental processing of individuals and
societies.* * * * *
Of course, this is all very speculative. But if we want to advance our
understanding of culture in new ways, then speculation is unavoidable. I
think we are ready to undertake evolutionary investigations of human
culture which are richer and more rigorous than has been possible in the
past. As the work moves forward, the evolutionary view of human culture
will become the mainstream view. This can only happen if biologists, such
as Hans-Cees Speel, instruct humanists and social scientists in the ways
of evolution, even as we instruct them in the ways of culture. Together we
can construct a new account of human life on earth.Notes
1. I want to emphasize that the memeticists' assertion of memes in the
mind/brain is an assumption. They have not, to my knowledge, considered
the possibility I am arguing and so have constructed no explicit arguments
for this belief. They take it as a self-evident truth.2. I don't know of any explicit count of distinct functional areas in the
human neocortex but, with much anatomical work yet to be done, I'm not
sure how valid such a count would be. My sense of things is that the
number or cortical areas is likely to be between 100 and 1000. I have even
less a sense of just how many intrinsic physical variables are being
regulated by subcortical systems. But, whatever that number is, if we add
it to the number of functional areas in the cortex, we'll come up with a
number on the order of 1000. Nothing in my argument depends on the exact
magnitude of this number.References
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American, 256, 3, pp. 88-95.Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.
Benzon, W. L. (1977) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Semiotics of
Ontology. Semiotica, 21, pp. 267-293Benzon, W. L. (1985) Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla
Khan." Language and Style, 18, pp. 3- 29Benzon, W. L. (1993) The United States of the Blues: On the Crossing of
African and European Cultures in the Twentieth Century. Journal of Social
and Evolutionary Systems, 16, pp. 401-438.Benzon, W. L. (in press) Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the
United States of the Blues. To appear in Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed., Leading
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His Critics: Demystifying Mind. Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell.Dennett, D. (1990) Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination. Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48, 127-35.Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Havelock, E. (1982) The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural
Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Hays, D. (1973) Language and Interpersonal Relationships. Dædalus 102, 3,
pp. 203-216.Hays, D. G. (1992) "The Evolution of Expressive Culture." Journal of
Social and Evolutionary Systems, 15, pp. 187-216.Hays, D. G. (1993) The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive
Ranks. White Plains, NY: Connected Education.Kilmer, W. L., McCulloch, W. S. & Blum L. (1969). A Model of the
Vertebrate Central Command System. Int. J. Man-Mach. Stud. 1, 279-309.McNeill, W. (1995) Keeping Together in Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.Holland, N. (1975) 5 Readers Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Powers, W. (1973) Behavior: The Control of Perception. Chicago: Aldine.
Pribram, K. (1971) Languages of the Brain. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, Inc.Psaltis, D. & Mok, F. (1995) Holographic Memories. Scientific American
273, 5, pp. 70-76.Rogers, R. (1985) Three Times True: Redundancy in Ambiguous Texts. Poetics
Today, 6, pp. 591-605.Simon, H. (1981) The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Complexity. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
http://www.sepa.tudelft.nl/~afd_ba/hcmem.htmlAcknowledgement: I would like to thank Hans-Cees Speel for the delightful
email correspondence which stimulated these remarks.
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William L. Benzon 518.272.4733
161 2nd Street bbenzon@global2000.net
Troy, NY 12180 http://www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
USA
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What color would you be if you didn't know what you was?
That's what color I am.
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