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.