Purpose of Cultural Mechanics

Hi everyone. My name is Matt Thompson. I'm starting to blog as a tool to force me to actually start writing, instead of simply taking notes and musing in the blank moments of the day.

I'm interested in the topic of why humans behave they way they do, and how and why those behaviors change over time. It's a vast topic, and there is no space here to fully write that story, nor would anyone really be interested in reading it here.

Yet I have been thinking about the topic of cultural change in one form or another for about two decades. My endurance in continuing to explore it is driven by how utterly lacking I find traditional or prevailing narratives of human cultural change, the importance of culture, or even the nature of culture itself. Every time I delve into a new topic, I'm surprised by the lack of coherence or universality in the statements that are made about how cultural change takes place.

I should make a disclaimer that while I was an academic for 15 years (Biology undergrad, Biology PhD, postdocs), I am not academically trained in areas that would traditionally be thought of as having anything to say about culture. So, yes, I'm constantly running the risk of being a dilettante. The only exception is a single course I took as an undergraduate in Chinese anthropology, where I learned the lasting cultural impact of Confucianism. Instead, here are the topics where I am very knowledgable if not expert: plant physiology, ecosystem ecology, evolutionary biology, cell and molecular biology, low Reynolds number computational fluid dynamics, business strategy and operations, and product management in tech startups.

So I'm going to be humble here. I don't have the authority to speak to this topic, and I promise never to argue from authority. But I do have arguments. I also have a strong sense that as a community of 7 billion souls hurtling through space, we already know enough to finish the puzzle. My motive is just an interest in putting together a few more pieces.

As I go, I will address the following core topics:

• The right way to define culture so that it can be the most useful in explaining cultural change.
• The evolutionary concept of "persistence" (the much more informative and backward-looking version of "fitness") and how it forms the foundation of our understanding of the utility of human culture.
• Since persistence isn't a common concept, I'll just say that the concept of persistence states that any one evolutionary lineage is the result of a massively inefficient historical process through which essentially all members of the lineage are rendered reproductively moot, and only a small sliver persists. Life cannot be understood outside the context of persistence.
• Persistence contrasts with fitness in that "persistence" seeks to understand a lineage's history, while "fitness" implies predictions about the lineage's future. The one is historical, concrete, and not tied down to any one mode of evolutionary change, while the other is abstract (and rarely successfully empirical) and probably over-ambitious, as well as tied to a single mode of change, natural selection. The two concepts are related, since an estimate of tomorrow's fitness (however inaccurate) will eventually become yesterday's persistence.
• Once you understand the concept of persistence, you can quickly see that "which will survive?" is the wrong question, and the right one is "what did this lineage do to optimize its survival?" Because every lineage has survived to the present day, it is reasonable to ask what tools have they employed, in a general sense, to make it this far. It is easy to extend this argument to say that there is no organism on earth (or throughout the universe) that does not have a set of tools for maximizing its own persistence, if only because the lack of those tools would mean that there wouldn't be anything to talk about in the first place.
• These tools tend to be life history strategies, for example: (1) have 10,000s of offspring and a small number will survive; (2) set up founder colonies in as many geographies as possible; (3) go through different stages in your life cycle depending on environmental conditions, e.g., long-lasting fungal spores generated in times of stress; (4) die soon after reproduction to avoid wasting resources that could be consumed by the next generation; (5) care for your young to ensure that they make it to reproductive maturity; and (6) share knowledge and behaviors that maximize persistence (i.e., culture), among others.
• Culture is one tool that has helped some lineages (notably Homo sapiens) to maximize the odds of their own persistence.
• The nature and development of individual human cognition is a huge driver and constraint on human cultural mechanics.
• Human community demographic structure is the foundation of a new thinking around cultural mechanics
• The ways in which this more open, useful, and generalized concept of culture bleeds into other topics that are not traditionally specific to human culture, for instance: elephant or primate culture, the evolution of life on earth, cellular inheritance, technological change in human societies, why some government policies work and others don't, our ongoing struggle to find an approach to the coming low-growth, low labor utilization, high climate pressure economy, the importance of developing the right habits, the utterly disgraceful way in which we talk about the history of slavery and the black experience in the United States, or paradigm shifts in science.

Don't worry if none of this makes a lot of sense right now. It makes sense in my head. I just need to do the work to make it clear and understandable. I'm quite certain more topics will be added with time. More soon.