Ingold on a Hypersphere
Ingold in his “An Anthropologist looks at Biology” draws inspiration from physics, developing a “Quantum Field Theory”-like prism through which we can analyse life, whatever that may be.
He offers a critique on Neo-Darwinism, the Dawkins “Selfish Gene” model and argues convincingly that that is a theory that is not complete. Neo-Darwinism is a structure which allows for a well-defined, if abstracted account of evolution, one that can be convincingly put to use analysing the kinds of systems where evolution through fitness for reproduction may emerge. To a limited extent is also predicts cultural evolution through the extension of memes into memetics.
While it is useful to identify some cultural artefacts as memes, memestry does not easily explain such things as mathematical theorems, except insofar as there may be cultural processes which could be evolving which afford the possibility, or increase the likelihood, that individuals may produce mathematical theorems.
It may be that this is true, but the level which it is happening at is far removed from brute reality of things. We know that Pythagoras proved that for a right angled triangle, the sum of the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of each of the other two sides. But we do not know how he would have described this statement, nor that his proof was. That others established proofs of this principal is known. That many different proofs exist is known. Clearly there must have been a benefit for knowing that this rule is true, because various methods for recognising this truth have been conserved across the millennia.
The reproducibility of these mathematical statements is obvious, but they are of a nature such that any ‘mutation’ would deviate from an empirical truth, so they are memetic structures. If that is all that there is (as an extremely strict Neo-darwinian may hold), then how are we to cognise necessary preconditions that encourage the emergence of people who are likely to develop useful mathematical theorems nearly simultaneously in cultures as diverse as pre-Alexandrian Greece and Zhou Dynasty China?
The intuitive response is that these people develop out as a consequence of systems of relations between peoples (if not base material, and in the absence of godly intervention, I’m not sure what else can be said to exist).
From the Neo-Darwinian perspective, a question about these systems of relations naturally arises, do these systems of relations between people map into the discrete mutable objects-of-evolution that are a necessary element of the memetic theory?
I’m not certain that they do, but to the extent that they do, our cultures would look a lot more like a bacterial colony, or slime mould, than the more familiar animal and plant organisms with which we share our environment.
Bacterial networks are of course in a state of dynamic equipoise with the environment that they share, one of the benefits of their sociality is horizontal gene transfer, therefore as the environment changes it is not necessary for each unit to spontaneously evolve a response; should there be an instantiation within the colony that has a genetic mutation that is relatively beneficial, given the existence of the environmental change, then that will diffuse through the colony. The co-colonists act as an insurance policy for each member, allowing them collectively to take a hit that individually they would not survive. Similarly, the distribution of resources is not flat, so we have found evidence of large physically dispersed networks of even different species of bacteria and fungi that facilitate the distribution of nutrients, or the dispersal of waste etc.
There are some clear homologues so between human cultures, and bacterial cultures. As a metaphor, this clearly would not rule out the neo-darwinian hypothesis, and could argue that that is the benefit of analysing life at the genetic level – because analysing it at the level of the individual in doesn’t capture the full range of activities that are possible in each instance of a bacterium.
But treating the gene as the base unit of analysis introduces another problem, the mere presence of a gene does not predict how it is used by the organism. The use that a gene is put to within an organism can vary in accordance to where it is expressed, the same gene in different tissues carries out different actions. Similarly, it would be hard to argue that GABA receptors in plants are carrying out the same functions as GABA receptors in animals. It is the relationship between the gene and the endo-environment of the organism, which it participates in the creation of, that mediates the activity of the gene. The study of the gene must also include the study of all that might happen the gene, which is a set of possibilities constrained and shaped by the organism’s internal environment, which in turn is mediated by its external environment. Furthermore the expression of the gene is moderated by the non-coding DNA in the chromosomes of the organisms (which may act as an analogue for the ‘systems of organisation between people’ if we continue to stretch the metaphor) thus we can imagine contrasting mutations in the non-coding DNA with cultural adaptations, and imagine them also diffusing across the boundaries of societies, regulating the activities of people, who are akin to individual genes, in the Neo-Darwinian frame.
This offers the Neo-Dawinian’s a robust response to Ingold’s critique, if we include factors such as intergenerational-methylation and use them as analogues for traditions, or other cultural activities that allow the memory of responses to past events to govern the cultural responses to future effects.
