SHAPING CULTURE

Once in a great while someone will publish a scientific paper that affects several areas of research but relatively few references the work in the popular press—in contrast to reporters who popularize science who don’t mention it, scientists reference it, but not in the numbers the findings merit. They seem to sense the reported findings make a significant contribution but do not know how to integrate the results into their “pet story” of humankind. Such was the case of a paper published by Dr. Donald E. Brown in 2003. Stephen Pinker called attention to it in his popular book, The Blank Slate.

Brown reviewed anthropology literature and found that 200 human cultural similarities; he dubbed them as “cultural universals”.  In the context of this blog post, I bow to the accepted definition of culture as something found only in humans and closely related primates.

Culture, which can be defined as the presence of geographically distinct behavioral variants that are maintained and transmitted through social learning, was long considered to be a [sic] uniquely human trait.

Hillary Mayell,

National Geographic, Oct. 28, 2010

There is a bit of circularity here because we require a primate species to have culture before we consider it closely related to us; Dr. Mayell and associates consider orangutans to have culture, the most primitive of all the ape species. That is an aside; the point here is she (and other) restricted the definition of culture in two different ways, which was the contribution I considered thought provoking.  One, culture is transmitted though social learning; and, two, human culture can be divided into what are universal traits and geographically limited traits. According to Brown’s findings, at least 200 identifiable aspect of culture are universal. Geographically distinct behavioral variants would presumable approach an infinite number.

Now here is the challenge as I see it. If we gain geographically limited traits by social learning, how did we gain “universal traits”, which are as common to humans as chicken behavior is to chickens or dog behavior is to dogs? Are these traits genetic that is some how written in our DNA/RNA? Who among us would deny that dog and chicken behavior is genetic? If cultural traits are learned, how did they become part of the human genome?

Without going into the history of genetics, classical geneticists have condemned colleagues for suggesting that there is some way to write; hence, accumulate information, into our DNA. The existence of “universal cultural examples” clearly shows this can and does happen. In addition, it also suggests it is happening now. They claim that the only way DNA/RNA can be molded is by trial and error selection of naturally random occurring mutations: Darwinian “natural selection” and Herbert Spencer pithy little summary of that theory as “survival of the fittest. To support their claim, they often cite examples such as a one armed man does not father one-armed children; 3,000 year of Jewish circumcision should prove that is not the case. They are wrong. We know it can happen; it is just that we do not understand how it happens. I am writing a book about how scientists have learned to evaluate the impact on “our” genome of “our” selection of existing cultural traits that society has deemed desirable. Darwin and many others, before and after his “Origin of Species”, have written about it mainly with their focus on physical attributes and not culture. Now it is time to focus on shaping culture: racism, feminism, politics, business religion, to name just a few.

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