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.