Cultural Evolution of Narratives

So far, from all my research into and thinking about the cultural evolution of narratives and characters, a couple of things seem clear:
1. Stories do not belong to storytellers and story listeners, because all stories are reassemblies of fragments on loan and depend on shared narrative sources. That includes all "owners" of so-called trademarks and copyrights.
2. Though distinct, genres of stories depend on one another, for there is no such thing as a pure genre, and all tale types have a symbiotic relationship to one another.
Homer taught me this. Gilgamesh and the Bible taught me this. The Greek writers of tragedy and comedy taught me this. Beowulf taught me this. The Lancelot /Grail Cycle taught me this. Cervantes and Shakespeare taught me this. The 1001 Nights taught me this. Jean-Louis Desalles and Jack Zipes and Robert Irwin and Marina Warner and Marshall Poe and Terence Deacon and Mikhail Bakhtin and William Hansen and Arthur Frank and Michael Tomasello and Vladimir Propp and Albert Lord and Milman Parry and Walker Burkert and Marion Blute and Kate Distin and Stephen Shennan and Michael Drout and Melvin Konner and MANY more authors using our commons of the mind taught me this.

More soon.

The First Earth Day

I remember the first grainy, cheaply- printed, black and white, tube-mailed anti-pollution posters. They showed people wearing contemporary clothes but wearing gas masks. You could buy these posters at school through the Scholastic book service, which some of you may remember. I ordered one because I was seeing the air get thick and opaque in the years since since elementary school, from some of my favorite "staring-into-the-distance" spots. I thought maybe by the time I was grown-up the air would be clean, and I could once again see the moon rise over the Sierras from the hill near our house in Orangevale.

Study War No More.

After a decade of misconstrued (Iraq) and overextended (Afghanistan) wars, which saw thousands of young American men and women killed, maimed and psychologically damaged, not to speak of the many thousands of casualties on the other side, the American people are sick and tired of this series of military misadventures.

Barack Obama’s pirouette away from an unfathomable military adventure in Syria was, down deep, appreciated by the public, despite the torrent of propaganda from the Tea Party, with its undertones of racism and tinges of Confederate symbolism, depicting the president as weak and indecisive.

But Trumpolino is known for aggression rather than diplomacy. Even the Pentagon doesn’t ask for the kind of military budget he will be slashing public services and much needed programs to pay for. From war, you cannot expect peace of any kind other than that of the absence of life, the wind blowing through devastated cities and villages.

Selection Pressures in Cultural Evolution

Though a detailed description of social selection pressures may be as difficult as a detailed description of the ecological selection pressures acting on populations of organisms, the notion of selection pressure is a useful one. Its vagueness enables it to capture an otherwise ungraspable totality⎯an environment⎯of causal factors. Social selection pressures are indicated by their expression in memic functional adaptation, although this is not to say that the term selection pressure should be avoided because of suspicions of circularity. The vagueness of the term may be understood in terms of the problem of specifying whether a feature is a selected adaptation or the result of memetic drift. The concept of drift refers to the random component in descriptions of selection. This arises from our epistemic incapacity when it comes to identifying deterministic selection pressures. This incapacity is not only due to the difficulty of identifying past selection pressures. It is also due to the stochastic (and therefore temporal) character of the selection process itself: whether a pressure will turn out, in the long run, to be selective or non selective, is a fact that may only be decided after the fact.

A more telling problem, perhaps, for the description of selection pressures comes from another angle. An objection that is likely to be raised against the observation of selection pressures and the observation and functional analysis of memetic adaptations ⎯especially of social forms with latent, seldom recognised functions⎯is that the analysis may be accused of being ‘ideological’ rather than empirical. Such analysis might be accused of being an exercise in partisan cultural criticism. This criticism has some validity, because, in the reflexive science of sociology, the empirical observation of a functional trait is likely to be difficult given the heterophenomenological* nature of memetic functions. What one observer sees as a latent ideological function becomes, at another’s insistence, a mere trifle of popular culture. Ideology critique and cultural criticism have long recognised their predicament of semantic immanence ( Adorno?) For now I shall only say that, in the case of observing the self-serving functions of social features, we might not recognise them unless we recognise that, along with the selfish character of replicators, there are powerful, localised, social and psychological selection pressures selecting and maintaining them. I can only concede, however, that descriptions of selection pressures may well themselves be subject to the selection pressure of finding a description primarily to support one’s claims about a particular functional adaptation⎯a sleight of hand that can abuse the potential for circularity in adaptationist analysis. I might add that, given the ideological, memetic character of gender and sexual norms, this is a problem that also infects analyses of sexual selection in evolutionary psychology.

*Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena.