CELC: Theory of Humor #30: Cultural Evolution and Humor

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

For years in this blog, I have explored the nature and origins of mirthful humor (especially from 2017 to 2020). In February of 2018, I articulated what I consider to be my own theory of humor as I merged two of the major schools within this discipline. (Note: I may call this my own theory of humor, but it is very similar to many other theories of humor. I haven't created something new so much as put my own spin on ideas that have been around for centuries, if not millennia. For a discussion of how similar many of those theories are, read this blog entry from October of 2018.)

In April of 2020, I showed how this theory could fit into a branch of evolutionary psychology. (Others may challenge my claim that I am using evolutionary psychology, as I use ideas that fall outside the strict definition of evolutionary psychology originating with Tooby and Cosmides.)

Since the summer of 2025, I have been trying to migrate the foundation of my approach to literary criticism to cultural evolution as articulated by Joseph Henrich. This effort raises the question: how does a foundation of cultural evolution change my theory of humor? Toward the end of this blog post, I will give an example.

At the beginning of my inquiry into humor, in a blog entry from July of 2015, I discussed the personality traits of the hero of a physical comedy. I had taken that list of traits from a documentary starring Rowan Atkinson. (Unfortunately, that video has been taken down from YouTube, probably because it has many clips of classic physical comedy from film.) In July of 2016, I issued a bit of a correction. Not all physical comedy conforms to the list of traits from that documentary, though Atkinson's list is still quite good in many instances. For the example I give below, I will review that Atkinson list of personality traits and discuss how they might fit into a theory of cultural evolution.

My Definition of Humor: Mirthful humor has two components: first, an incongruity that is triggered when two scripts or "mental spaces" in the brain clash with one another, and second, a social / emotional component. The social component often features disparagement or a lowering of social status, and the emotions are often inconguous emotions. Those two components usually occur within a playful context. Some humor focuses on the first component—incongruity—while other humor focuses on the second component—social adjustment.

I have adapted this theory of humor to be compatible with evolutionary psychology, but a version of evolutionary psychology that includes David Sloan Wilson's multilevel selection theory. I argue that humor often functions to adjust social status within a group of people, an adjustment which can be either gentle or aggressive. Non-violently adjusting social status helps a social group function smoothly. Having a well-functioning social group is important for group selection within multilevel selection theory. Within the framework of evolutionary literary criticism, humor can reinforce pro-group behavior and discourage anti-group behavior.

Cultural Evolution: How does this theory change under Henrich's cultural evolution? In The Secret of our Success, Henrich discusses four essential features that distinguish human social life from that of other species (186-7). One: "We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules." Two: "Many of those rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary ..." Three: "Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations;" and four: "We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules" (186).

As Henrich continues, "From the gene's-eye view, survival and reproduction would have increasingly depended on the abilities of one's bearer (the individual) to acquire and navigate a social landscape governed by culturally transmitted local rules ..." (186).

How do social groups police violations of those norms according to Henrich? Typically in small-scale societies, "the sanctioning of norm violators begins with gossip and public criticism, often through joking ... and then intensifies to damage marital prospects and reduce access to trading ..." (188). As I have argued, when humor is used to sanction someone, it is typically a non-violent mechanism. What happens if the norm-violator does not get back into line? "If violators are still not brought into line, matters may escalate to ostracism or physical violence ... and occasionally ... group executions" (188). The background for this theory is found in the works of Boyd, Richerson, Bowles, and Boehm. Please consult Henrich's Secret for references.

The Example: Atkinson's theory of the slapstick protagonist

Below are the elements of Atkinson's theory of the personality traits of the hero in a physical comedy. I list the element and then explain how it fits into the framework of cultural evolutionary literary criticism (CELC).

1. Atkinson: The slapstick hero is alienated from his society. CELC: He finds himself in a low position on the social status hierarchy or outside it and has already been, to a degree, ostracized.
2. Atkinson: He is childish. (Childish here means that he is naively selfish.) CELC: This indicates that he refuses to adopt social norms which might include cooperative behavior toward others or is incapable of understanding them. One could say that he takes actions that might, if allowed, advance individual reproductive advantage, even when the social norms forbid those actions.
3. Atkinson: He has to fight with ordinary objects. CELC: He has not adopted the cultural practices that allow him to participate in the group's collective knowledge about their local environment, such as using tools properly.
4. Atkinson: His body can be humorous itself. CELC: His physical body may prevent him from conforming to social expectations. This relates to a form of prestige that is based on appearance or physical ability. He cannot achieve high-status within the dominance and prestige hierarchies of the group because of his diverging appearance or abilities.
5. Atkinson: He is uncivilized and cannot or will not conform to social rules. CELC: This point directly addresses his inability or unwillingness to embrace cultural learning. This point arguably includes several of the other traits, such as childishness.
6. Atkinson: He is a threat to respectable people. CELC: Respectability relates to conforming to social norms and staying within a prestige hierarchy. Again, because he refuses to conform to social norms, the slapstick hero is a threat to those for whom social norms are the basis for the group's status hierarchy.
7. Atkinson: He mocks authority and politeness. CELC: This is a sub-point of being a threat to respectable people and not conforming to social rules, but here his refusal to conform is intentional and active. He may already feel ostracized from the status hierarchy and actively reject it because he has himself been rejected.
8. Atkinson: He spreads confusion. CELC: Violating social norms causes the social order based on prestige and cultural learning to be thrown into disarray.
9. Atkinson: The final trait. He always survives his travails. CELC: Many violators of social norms who violate those norms to gain dominance or for genetic advantage threaten the basis for the social order. Those violators can be killed in retaliation. However, the slapstick hero is often like a child who is too immature to understand why social norms should be followed. He is not a fundamental threat to the social order, but the social order may have to restrain him. He might be expelled as a scapegoat, but he does not need to be killed to punish his refusal to follow social norms.

CELC: Role of Language in Human Nature

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

A variety of thinkers have held that human language is the medium of all thought within the human brain and is an essential precondition to us becoming reasoning beings. For example, this claim can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In a very different school of thought, the literary theorist Kenneth Burke also held that we think in language.

In the present day, some contemporary branches of Critical Theory hold that language is the crucial trait that allows humans to escape from biology and construct their world socially. One formulation of this idea is, "The world must be made to mean." For example, the book Ten Lessons in Theory is an introductory textbook to Critical Theory. In that book's introduction, Calvin Thomas writes, "The phrase 'textual anthropogenesis,' then, involves what's called linguistic determinism, or what I'll call semiotic materialism, the argument, also to my mind permanently revolutionary, that any human reality, and any individual or collective 'subject' thereof, any and all persons, must be made out of language as a specifically 'anti-natural'--unreal or 'anti-real'--form of productive labor." (xxiv).

Steven Pinker, as a neuroscientist and advocate for evolutionary psychology, holds that language is not the stuff of thought. Pinker argues that the mind thinks in its own internal thought-language called mentalese. Pinker started out in the field of neurolinguistics, so he is in an excellent position to make that case. To him, verbal language is a mechanism by which we can package information, originally formulated in mentalese, and share it with other individuals within our language community. It is a communications protocol, not the machine language of the brain's central processor. (To give my own example of non-linguistic thinking, a good chess player can sit down to a game and think hard for hours without using any language at all. A sculptor can do the same while wielding the chisel.)

The cultural evolution of Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich says that cultural learning is the essential precondition for what makes us human, not language per se. Language evolved in a cultural context in which we were already learning from one another.

Henrich argues that the skill for crafting physical tools may have come before verbal language. Sophisticated tool-making requires recursive mental procedures which parallel the recursive mental procedures of language. Therefore, tool-making could have been the cognitive path evolution took to build the genetically programmed neural structures that became the preadaptation for human language (Secret, pp. 250-255).

Language presents a tricky problem for evolution. If a single individual in a proto-human species were to begin to develop language, with whom could she speak? What selective advantage would accrue to this lone proto-speaker? It is difficult to see how language as a stand-alone instinct with specialized brain wetware can evolve. It would be like the sound of one hand clapping.

On the contrary, a social group that has a gifted tool-maker can benefit even if that individual's mental abilities are unique. Everyone else can still use those superior tools, even if they don't have the brains to make them. Brain structures that facilitate a complex Chomskyan grammar might have evolved because of the selective advantage that was conferred on early human communities with singular individuals who could produce superior tools. Only then did the selective advantage for cultural learning take those brain structures and adapt them to create this powerful communication system we call verbal language. Language, once evolved, then turbo-charged cultural learning.

For those theorists who have argued that language is a necessary precondition for humans evolving the capacity to cooperate with one another, Henrich argues that it is the other way around. "For complex communicative repertoires to evolve in the first place, this cooperative dilemma has to have already been at least partially solved. Therefore, language can't be the big solution to human cooperation" (257).

Whether the theory of language-through-toolmaking is confirmed by later research, this scenario at least offers at path by which it could have occurred. In Chomsky's original formulation of his universal grammar, the language instinct popped into existence as a fully formed spandrel, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Pinker's neurolinguistic work shows that the Chomskyan grammar which is universal among humans has some of the "Panda's thumb" imperfections that indicate that it has evolved, but Pinker did not explain how the human brain was able to boot-strap our sophisticated language-related traits from brains that lacked human language. Tool-making-first theories solve the paradox.

Post-script: As for recent research into the evolution of language-enabling structures in the brain and throat, scientists have compared the DNA of Homo sapiens (us) with the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans. They have found that the most rapid evolution within the human genome since the split with those other species has targeted the vocal tract and other language-related structures (as well as genes that have flattened the face and eliminated the chimp-like muzzle). See for example: Gokhman, David, et al. "Differential DNA methylation of vocal and facial anatomy genes in modern humans." Nature Communications 11.1 (2020): 1189.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. William Morrow, 1994.

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Biological Evolution

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

One might reasonably ask: how does this theory of cultural evolution differ from the sorts of culture-first theories of human nature that might be found in the philosophical tradition of Critical Theory? It turns out that there is a big difference.

Using as a guide to critical theory the book Ten Lessons in Theory by Calvin Thomas (2/e), one can see that a foundation of that school is that humans are fundamentally different than other animals.¹ We humans have achieved a plane of existence in which we can define ourselves. Thomas uses the term antiphysis to signal this discontinuity. Language has allowed humans to cease to be bound by biology.

Thomas's version of Critical Theory--or just "Theory" as he calls it--seems to have some relationship to Henrich's cultural evolution. After all, Thomas calls the human condition, in contrast to mere animal nature, a "'sociogenic' and/or 'biocultural' existence" (22-23 of the preface). Thomas sees his antiphysis arising from Marx's historical materialism, and Marx was a reader of Darwin.

Nevertheless, antiphysis is a stance that culture is nearly completely divorced from biology. Thomas looks to Lacan as an authority, for example. Thomas's Freudian theory of child development is a century out of date. He argues that our use of language means that we have the ability to define ourselves ("the world must be made to mean") in a way that escapes scientific attempts to describe us. For Critical Theory, the philosophical "reification" which is a necessary precondition for describing the world in a scientific way is itself an evil to be exorcised. In particular, for Critical Theory, we have transcended the influence of natural selection.

By contrast, Henrich argues in Secret of our Success that cultural evolution has taken over from genetic evolution among humans, but that biological evolution still operates. In particular, he writes, "Cultural evolution is a type of biological evolution; it's just not a type of genetic evolution" (263). Again, "cultural differences are biological differences but not genetic differences" (263). He makes these statements after explaining that the skill of reading and comprehending a written language "actually rewires our brains to create a cognitive specialization" (262). Finally, culture may have taken over from genetics, but natural selection is still shaping the process.

A more hard-line, genes-only evolutionary psychology diminishes the role of culture in building the human being. However, Henrich's cultural evolution does not abandon completely the behavioral constraints that flow from the genes. "We evolved genetically to have (somewhat) programmable preferences, and modifying our preferences via cultural learning is part of how we adapt to different environments" (266). The word "somewhat" indicates that genes do still have an influence on preferences.

Footnote 1: It is my sincere hope that Thomas' Ten Lessons in Theory is fairly representative of Critical Theory in general, because I have studied it (the second edition), and I don't want to have to slog through another book about Critical Theory related to literary criticism.

Post-Script

In looking back over my history with evolutionary literary criticism and Henrich's cultural evolution, I see that the transition has been more gradual than I realized. I had listened to an audiobook of Secret of our Success in the summer of 2023. I have found evidence that it influenced my thinking about ELC before January 1, 2025. That might help explain why I subsequently declared that a transition from ELC to CELC was not that dramatic of a shift. What happened in the meantime was that I actually studied Henrich in detail and realized that I had to rewrite my entire theory.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted July 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/07/

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete, Idea #33, and More Toole Resources Moving to OpenRiver

On December 31, 2025, (yesterday) the university where I work, Winona State University, shut down the server that I have been using to publish many of my John Kennedy Toole resources and other resources. I will be exploring means to migrate my content to other servers.

Therefore, I have converted the rest of my JKT resources to PDF documents and am making all of them available in one of two places. The first place is OpenRiver, the institutional repository for Winona State University. A list of my resources on OpenRiver can be found at: https://openriver.winona.edu/do/search/?q=author%3A%22H.%20Vernon%20Leighton%22. The second place is my ResearchGate account, located at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vernon-Leighton or click here: Vernon Leighton, ResearchGate.

My university has allowed me to create some webpages on a WordPress site, so my directory for various John Kennedy Toole resources is now at: John Kennedy Toole Research at educate dot winona dot edu. It has links to: 1) a PDF version of my Ideas for Papers or Term Papers on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the Occasional Series; 2) a PDF version of my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces; 3) a PDF version of my lecture, The Dialectic of American Humanism: the Lecture Script; and 4) a PDF version of my John Kennedy Toole's Papers: A cautionary tale of scholarly research, lecture script. I have decided that I will no longer be adding entries to either "Ideas for Papers" or the "Obscure Scholarship," so they will be fixed PDFs.

Versions of Evidence of Influences and ResearchGate

My "Evidence of Influences" paper was my first big study of Toole's novel. I had had several versions of that study. The version which I produced to accompany my big peer-review article, "Dialectic of American Humanism" (2012) was version 2.0. I did produce three years later a version 2.1, but no one has cited it, and I have not updated it since. I will let 2.1 vanish (unless you can find it on a way-back machine). Version 2.0 is the canonical text, and it was already on ResearchGate. A "Green" open access version of the peer-review article "Dialectic of American Humanism" is also already available on ResearchGate. You can find links to those resources on my John Kennedy Toole Research page on educate.winona.edu

As a perk to you for going to the OpenRiver site, I am adding one new entry to the "Ideas for Papers," which I have also included as part of this blog entry.

Idea for Paper about JKT and Confederacy, #33: Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete

Most of my ideas for papers on John Kennedy Toole, such as comparing Ignatius to Kosmo Kramer, are rather modest. This is not one of those modest ideas. This is a Big Idea. I had been saving it for myself. I believe that it genuinely warrants a peer-reviewed paper. Were I to devote further effort to writing one more scholarly paper on Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, this would probably be it.

Within the Toole Papers at Tulane, one will find that Ken Toole studied the 19th century English Romantics extensively. For example, in the Fall of 1956, Toole's Tulane transcript indicates that he took "English 651: English Romantic Poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats."

When Kenneth McIntyre wrote a book chapter for Theology and Geometry (2020), edited by Leslie Marsh, about the possible influence on Toole of the Kierkegaardian concept of the aesthete, I wrote to him. I let him know that there was no mention of Kierkegaard in Toole's surviving papers, but his studies of Romanticism are extensive, especially Keats. If Toole was thinking about an aesthete, it was probably not a Kierkegaardian aesthete but an aesthete in the mold of Keats or one from the Walter Pater school. Such an aesthete might be related to the sensitive types in Proust and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, discussed in Idea #14 above.

This theory that Ignatius is a Romantic aesthete meshes nicely with theme of Neoplatonism. The Romantics were big on Platonism and Neoplatonism. I would recommend to a scholar starting on this topic the book The Platonism of Shelley by Notopoulos (1952), which was contemporary to Toole's intellectual education. This Neoplatonism also nicely connects to Evelyn Waugh.

This theory also fits well with Ignatius's self-image as a genius. The Cult of the Genius was strong among the Romantics. Because Ignatius is a parody of a genius, A Confederacy of Dunces may be seen as mocking the pretensions of the Romantic aesthete.

Thesis: Explore the parallel themes within the tradition of English Romanticism and within A Confederacy of Dunces. Discuss aestheticism, Neoplatonism, and the role of the Genius.

Artificial Intelligence: What is Truth, What is Education?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include topics such as AI. This entry discusses a facet of that discipline.

First, I would like to acknowledge that a number of people offered advice on this topic, and they generally know more than I do about philosophy and education. I would name them, but then I would want to have their approval, and I take ultimate responsibility for this text.

On October 22, 2025, I was a co-presenter of a talk at Winona State University to the informal AI Discussion Group along with Professor Malgarzata Plecka. I billed the talk as "The Reverse Turing Test." The basic thesis of the talk was not groundbreaking in the least: if you are trying to discern whether an academic text was generated by AI rather than written by a person, then one strategy is to check the footnotes and references. AI systems will sometimes fabricate references to articles that don't really exist. If a submitted paper has fabricated references, a reviewer can reject it not because it was generated by AI, but because it is a flawed paper. It was probably generated by AI, but that is almost beside the point.

As part of that talk, I digressed onto the philosophical issues pertaining to the situation. Namely, I touched on philosophical theories of Truth. In last month's entry for this blog, I compared "truth as factual accuracy" with "truth as loyalty." A friend of mine who is more familiar with these issues pointed me toward a philosophical position called "The Correspondence Theory of Truth." Does a given statement correspond to a state of affairs in the world?

I sent this paragraph to a philosophy professor:

Some schools of thought deprecate the belief that there is an external, objective, observable world at all, much less one that can be measured. I am reminded of the joke about the drunk at the bar during the philosophy conference who said, "Solipsism works for me, but that’s just one man’s opinion."

That professor pointed out that there are a variety of philosophical schools that don't fall into this dichotomy of "correspondence theory of truth" or solipsism. There are deflationist theories and pragmatist theories which still believe in the external world. Further, one can deny the existence of the external world without being a solipsist, such as in Bishop Berkeley's philosophy of idealism.

Circling back to factual accuracy, though, even if you don't buy a theory similar to the correspondence theory in general, it is neverthesless the case that a research library is part of a scholarly correspondence theory of truth. Even for scholars who cast a jaundiced eye toward the value of telling the truth, they do largely adhere to a different commitment to factual accuracy: within their own scholarly texts, they try to accurately quote and reference other writings.

For example, I have read a book by Melvin Pollner called Mundane Reason. Pollner develops a theory of ethnomethodology, which he then uses to question the existence of the objective, determinate world. Truth is socially constructed, and a community will develop a unitary world of social truth.

Even if I am a scholar who is a follower of Pollner or Bishop Berkeley, I will still adhere to a correspondence theory of truth in my production of my own scholarly texts. If I claim a quotation from one of their texts or a text that discusses them, I will make a citation that will correspond to the location of that statement in the objective, observable universe of texts managed by libraries.

These musings are relevant to a discussion of AI LLMs, because LLMs generally string statements together without worrying whether they are factually accurate statements about the universe of scholarly texts. ChatGPT will often just make crap up. Some commentators politely refer to made up quotes and references as hallucinations. Others rely on Harry Frankfurt’s definition and refer to the act of making up stuff, including references, as bullshitting. Some library researchers have created a metric for testing LLM systems called the Reference Hallucination Score. See citations below.

The scenario that we presented on October 22nd was this: a researcher has claimed to have authored a paper that was submitted to an academic journal. The editors of the journal have a policy of not allowing texts that are generated by AI. The basic justification for detecting AI-generated texts is that they should be identified and rejected. Why should they be rejected, though?

Obviously, if a student is assigned to write a paper without the assistance of AI, and the professor can show that the paper was generated by AI, that is a violation of the assignment. But if the paper is a genuinely brilliant and well-executed paper, perhaps an academic journal should consider publishing it, even if it is generated by an AI LLM. Of course, if the references in the paper are fabricated, then the paper is by definition flawed, regardless of who or what generated it.

During the discussion after the presentation, a professor argued that he uses AI LLMs so extensively that a text under his name is almost always a fusion of his own words and those of the AI LLM, and that he himself might not know which of the two crafted any one passage. The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred. The basic point of the other professor's claim of blending is that the AI-generated text is superior to the human-generated text and should be utilized. Those two positions are not necessarily opposed to one another.

The core of the problem is whether the human claiming authorship is actually the author of the work. Here I offer a modified definition of author, namely: the human is the author if that human is an authority on the content in the work, and the human takes responsibility for what it says. An AI LLM might have assisted with the wording, or even some of the ideas, but the human should have both a command of the content and editorial control of the final text. After all, human ghost writers have been around for millennia; this is not a new concept.

If a paper has fabricated references, then it is likely that the purported human author left the generation of the text entirely up to the AI system. The human might not understand what the paper says or what it contains. For a paper that is entirely composed by an AI system, the human is not the author of the paper under this definition.

If, on the other hand, the human is fully in control of the subject matter and is using the AI system as a tool to improve the final product, then that case probably falls on the acceptable end of the spectrum. That assertion of authorship, though, would involve actual work by the human.

For instance, if the AI system offers up references, the human would be responsible for actually tracking down those texts (and in the process verifying their existence), reading them, and establishing that they are relevant to the argument. This problem of AI-fabricated references is related to the long-standing problem that arises when human authors borrow citations from earlier human-written texts without verifying them. If the earlier paper has a mistake in the reference, that mistake will be perpetuated by later authors who fail to verify the reference and read the cited work.

You can even couch this discussion within a larger context of education: To me, the point of the university is 1) to educate students, 2) to expand the realm of knowledge through research and scholarship and creative works, and 3) to preserve that realm of knowledge and share it with the broader community.

Educating students can be thought of as the process of building neural networks. However, they are the biological networks made of actual neurons and located between the ears of the students, not neural networks located in massive data centers (which in the industry are sometimes called "multi-layer perceptrons"). If the students (or faculty members) rely solely on an artificial neural network, they are often not building the biologically-based neural network in their own brains, and we are failing to educate them.

A complicating aspect of today’s world is that AI is ubiquitous. One of the things our students—and our faculty—will have to learn is how to delve into AI systems to leverage their own knowledge while still retaining intellectual control and responsibility. ( "Delve" and "leverage" are two words commonly used by AI LLMs when writing prose—as are m-dashes.) That authorship requires work, and AI systems make it easy to skip the work and masquerade as the author. Worse, employers may require workers to give up their authorship to increase productivity (that is, increase the quantity of product, not its quality).

NOTE: None of the above text was generated by an AI LLM. It is all the product of the wetware inside my skull, plus the broader collective knowledge held by the community of people with whom I consulted and written texts which are part of my culture (and the product of cultural evolution).

Afterword, December 12, 2025

I shared the above blog entry with my friend Will Dowling, who is retired now from, first, teaching computer science, and then, working in the computer industry. He now teaches an occasional AI course as an adjunct at Temple University. He was the person who suggested that I look into the correspondence theory of truth.

One question he asked when he read my phrase "fabricated references" was: "how would you know whether incorrect references are fabricated, or due to innocent error?" My answer: "You cannot know for certain that a citation was fabricated, but there is a difference between a typo and a citation where none of the details relate to an actual citation. In the paper that Professor Plecka brought to me and my colleagues, NONE of the citations existed in the observable universe of scholarly texts. One citation had for its title a phrase from a quote that the supposed author had made in another, existing article. The AI system probably found that quote and used it when cobbling together its references. Humans can fabricate references, too, but it would be time consuming to do so, and it would be faster to go into a library database and download a number of real citations on the relevant topic."

To my claim that "if there are fabricated references, then the supposed author probably left the writing of the paper entirely to an AI system," Will writes: "I don't buy this. Say I write an article, by myself, no help from AI. It has 10 cited references. I need to fluff up the references section before submission. I go to Claude, and now I have 40 references." My response: Good point.

Will also took issue with my statement: "The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred." He noted that studies have shown that the average person prefers a text written by an LLM to a text written by a human. That may be true--he cited an article that really exists to back up the point (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13939v3)--but what I meant was that editors of journals and readers who want to learn from other humans might prefer a text that was generated by a human.

Will took issue with my "jaundiced eye" statement. Just because someone does not subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth does not mean that the person does not value telling the truth. My reply: Fair enough. Melvin Pollner might not dislike truth-telling, he just defines truth in a particular way that includes "the politics of experience."

Will didn't agree with my definition of an author. He writes, "Who gets to judge whether you are an authority of the content in the work? This moves what should be unambiguous, author or not?, to the realm of judgment call. I prefer the common (JAMA; The Lancet; Nature; PLOS ONE; etc.) requirement that contributing co-authors must enumerate their contributions including categories such as conceptualization, writing (original draft) and writing (review and editing)."

My response: I agree with Will's basic point. But in libraries, there are instances where a corporation is an author, such as a congressional committee being the author of the text of a hearing. My definition would allow one to argue that an editor at a publishing house is equally the author of a book that the house edited. But in literary studies, there are already debates about the degree to which authorship is shared among a group of people in the text production process, so this is not a new problem. I guess I would retreat back to the point that the author is the entity which takes full responsibility for the text. Whether that person or legal entity knows what is in the text or is an authority on the content, that is a judgment call.

Thanks Will. Your critique is very much welcome and has helped me improve my thinking on this topic.

Bibliography

Aljamaan, Fadi, et al. (2024). "Reference Hallucination Score for Medical Artificial Intelligence Chatbots: Development and Usability Study." JMIR Medical Informatics 12 (1): e54345. doi: 10.2196/54345

Hicks, Michael Townsen, James Humphries, and Joe Slater. (2024). "ChatGPT is Bullshit." Ethics and Information Technology 26: 30. doi: 10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Pollner, Melvin. (1987). Mundane Reason. Cambridge UP.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Stephen Jay Gould

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). This entry discusses that discipline.

When I was in college in the 1980s, I enjoyed the essay collections of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In the Summer of 2025, I was reediting my old book reviews that had originally been posted on WorldCat. I discovered that Gould's collections of essays are available as audiobooks on the platform Hoopla, a platform to which my public library subscribes.

I began listening again to the first collection of essays, Ever Since Darwin. Lo and Behold! Gould was arguing in favor of the concept of cultural evolution back in the 1970s, before even Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman published their seminal book Cultural Transmission and Evolution, which was published in 1981. At that time, Gould was arguing against the position of the school of Sociobiology. Its champion was E. O. Wilson, who published an influential book of that title.

For example, in Ever Since Darwin, Gould describes a scenario where grandparents in the Arctic will sometimes sacrifice themselves to help the young survive. In the sociobiology literature, it was hypothesized that there was a gene or combination of genes which were responsible for that behavior. Gould offers an alternative to the genetic theory for elder sacrifice: "The sacrifice of grandparents is an adaptive, but nongenetic, cultural trait" (256).

"Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a nonbiological 'environmentalism;' it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality—a / brain capable of the full range of human behaviors and rigidly predisposed toward none—against the idea of biological determinism—specific genes for specific behavioral traits." (256-257)

Where I think Gould differs from proponents of evolutionary psychology is in the phrase "predisposed toward none." I believe that an evolutionary psychologist would say that we are predisposed toward some, though that predisposition might be overruled by cultural norms.

The question remains, how does Gould's vision of cultural evolution differ, if at all, from the vision Boyd and Richerson developed in the 1980s? In The Panda's Thumb, Gould's second collection of essays, he offers the theory that cultural evolution uses Lamarckian inheritance instead of just natural selection to transmit heritable traits. I am not sure that that idea has aged well, but I have to think about it more.

Philosophical Digression

Extremes of genetic determinism tend to be on the right side of the political/social spectrum (for example, Nazi theories of racial purity), and extremes of Lamarckian evolution tend to be on the left side of the spectrum (for example, Lysenko's purging of genetic research under Stalin). Gould's passionate rejection of genetic determinism and his suggestions of Lamarckian cultural evolution indicate, if any indication was needed, that he leans toward the left side of that one-dimensional political spectrum.

The word truth has many definitions. In my own musings on the nature of truth, I often think about two of those definitions. One of them focuses on factual accuracy. There is a whole school of philosophy that ponders how a statement about the world corresponds to a state of affairs in the world. That definition is related to the German word wahr or the related Latin word veritas.

With the rise of natural philosophy and the physical sciences in the 1600s, observation—as opposed to, say, contemplation—was given a privileged place in the discovery of knowledge. One could write whole libraries about philosophers such as Plato, St. Augustine, Hume, Kant, etc. and their relationship to factual accuracy and the existence of an observable world.

Another, very different definition of the word truth relates to group loyalty. Am I true to a cause, to my school, to my nation, etc.? This definition relates to the German word treu. In a social group, when a bully wants to assert dominance over others in the group, the bully might insist that the social truth is directly and obviously opposite to factual accuracy, such as when, in Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew", Petruchio insists that Katherina call the sun the moon.

To me, part of the point of some philosophical skepticism of the physical sciences boils down to an argument that scientific claims belong to the treu aspect of truth rather than the veritas aspect of truth. An extreme version of the philosophy that references Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions says that major scientific theories are like clothes fashions; they come and go, and one paradigm is incommensurate with its successor. The extreme version refuses to admit that scientific claims can be falsified.

I reject that argument in its pure form, but I hold to a slightly different claim that all statements purporting to be true have at least a little bit of treu. You cannot escape it. The best you can do is minimize it and guard against letting it dominate like a bully. Even in a situation where there is a clearly defined question about the world and a straightforward, accurate observation of the world that answers that question, even just deciding which question to ask adds an element of treu to the situation. For example, asking whether some of the change in the climate is caused by human activity has political implications, and studying the question might be taboo within some social groups.

The challenge to students of cultural evolution—where the stakes for treu are quite high—is to do careful and accurate work to find the veritas about how cultural evolution works. It is further complicated, because different theories of cultural evolution might predispose adherents to different philosophies of the nature of truth.

I like Gould's work in part because, though he is partisan in his promotion of his theory and its social implications, he spends most of his time reasoning over the evidence or pointing out the lack of it. He does not insist that we call the sun the moon, though he might be stubborn in his belief that genes cannot predispose human behavior.

Bibliography

Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1977.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1980.

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Post-Script

No part of this text was generated by an AI LLM, despite the frequent use of the m-dash.

CELC: Is Memetics Still Dead? Yes, Margaret, it's still dead.

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson) into my critical framework. This entry discusses that discipline.

Back in 2012, I wrote a review of the Susan Blackmore book The Meme Machine, which I entitled: "Memetics as a science is still dead." I adopted in that review the arguments made by Steven Pinker in his book, How the Mind Works. Pinker argued that the brain thinks thoughts like the stomach processes food: it is a machine that does things. The theory of memetics supposes that the brain is just fertile top soil in which memes can grow and replicate and compete against each other and undergo natural selection. (Granted, I am simplifying here for the purposes of ridicule.)

The theory of cultural evolution argues that recent human evolution has been strongly driven by a gene-culture coevolution. That raises the question: is cultural evolution simply memetics by another name?

The answer is no, they are not the same. And, to repeat myself, memetics as a science is still dead. Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson even wrote an article skillfully rebutting the idea that they were the same. They argue that proponents of memetics labor under five major misunderstandings about cultural evolution.

One major difference between the theory of cultural evolution and the theory of memetics is that cultural evolution posits that individuals actively want to learn and adopt cultural knowledge. It's not that our brains are fertile top soil for the meme that can out-compete other memes. We seek out and imitate prestigious other members of our community, and we adopt the cultural traits of those we esteem.

Years ago, I enjoyed reading essays by Stephen Jay Gould where he criticized religiously-based creationism. What I noticed was that he would use the frontal attack on creationism, an easy target, to make a back-handed attack on sociobiology at the same time. He would criticize creationism, but he would then end with something along the lines of, "and sociobiology is just as bad, but going the other way."

It turns out that the article cited below has a similar double attack. The authors criticize memetics, which is an easy target, but then they criticize some critics of memetics as having a bad model of cultural evolution going the other way. They then try to articulate a superior model for cultural evolution between the two misguided extremes. In this way, the article is quite entertaining and informative. They even score debating points against Steven Pinker, whose criticism of memetics so inspired me decades ago.

In their conclusion, they argue that the misunderstandings of the memetics debate all stem from "a tendency to think categorically rather than quantitatively" (133-134). We like to place things in simple categories, and the process of cultural evolution is much more complex than can be characterized by a simple category.

Henrich, J., R. Boyd, and P. J. Richerson. (2008). "Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution." Human Nature, 19(2), 119-137. doi:10.1007/s12110-008-9037-1 For a copy at Harvard, Click Here.