Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind

by Mark Pagel

  Whether another sentient being like ourselves would reappear is impossible to know, but we do know that there is no reason to rule it out. The sentient being that walks this planet is upright, bipedal, naked, has superb eye-hand coordination, good color eyesight, highly dexterous hands, and is capable of social learning. I suspect that were we able to replay our cultural evolution, we would get many of the same things we have now, because our cultures will always have had a tendency to come up with and retain innovations that we are good at using or good at exploiting. This is an obvious point, but it is easy to forget how much it determines the cultural innovations we see around us today and that we developed throughout our history. Wheels were invented several times independently in different parts of the world, as were stone tools, clothes, spears, bows and arrows, atlatls (spear throwers), boats, shelters, agriculture, and fishing technologies.

  The nature of our physical world and of our bodies makes not just these inventions but even the forms they took nearly inevitable. For example, bicycles were invented sometime in the nineteenth century, and their principles have remained unchanged since. They were probably destined to be part of our societies from the moment we first emerged as modern humans, having only to await the equally inevitable accumulation of the metallurgical and other technologies that made them possible. So, too, perhaps were hammers, steam engines, airplanes, toasters, and computers. For the same reason there are probably also some things that, if we thought hard enough, we could rule out will ever be a part of our societies. Strap-on wings, telepathy machines, and color television programs in the ultraviolet spectrum have never caught on and probably never will because none exploits our innate abilities.

  Uniquely in the case of our species, this interplay between our genes pushing us toward particular outcomes and our cultures producing technologies that respond to our talents means that the goalposts of our existence are constantly being shifted. But even the shifting is somewhat predictable because it must fit in with what we are disposed to want to do and are capable of doing, and so cultural developments merely reduce the demand for old skills, while raising it for others. Increasingly, there is little need for the backbreaking physical labor that might have built our modern societies, and so little need for the physiques that did this work. Instead, the modern world will call for a more domesticated set of abilities, among them mental agility, concentration, and communication skills. Culture has not yet finished sorting us by our talents.

  CHAPTER 4

  Religion and Other

  Cultural “Enhancers”

  That the arts and religion evolved to enhance

  the expression of our social behaviors

  THE ARTS, MUSIC, and religion are what many people have in mind when they refer to “culture.” This is so-called high culture, there to move, uplift, entertain, or console us. But what really seems to distinguish these cultural forms is that they can lodge in our brains and exert a grip on us that is sometimes beyond our control. They can wrench our emotions, make us believe things that are false, cause us to steal, fight, or even die for them, bring us to rapture, get us to construct monuments and halls to them, beguile and intrigue us, and get us to lay down large sums of money. Unlike other aspects of our cultures, the arts, music, and religion can affect us these ways without feeding or clothing us; they do not provide shelter, and they do not change the weather or smite our enemies. They can even get us to act on their behalf when they provide nothing. Crowds flock to see Kazimir Malevich’s 1918 painting White on White, a monochrome board of white. During John Cage’s composition for piano entitled 4' 33”, a pianist sits at a keyboard for four minutes thirty-three seconds without playing. Audiences can find it difficult to know when the piece has begun or ended (see for yourself; 4' 33” can be downloaded from the Internet). In the Gospel of John, 20:29, Jesus says to Thomas, who has doubted him, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

  Why do we have the arts, music, and religion, and why can they seemingly command our attention and allegiance? These are not questions we can easily ignore, or write off as obvious, saying, “we just like them.” We do like them, but this just raises the further question of why, from an evolutionary perspective, our minds have evolved to be attracted to these cultural forms. Something about them is of such significance to us that human societies have for thousands of years supported entire classes of people—the priesthood or knowledge elite, artists and musicians, but also poets and magicians, storytellers and shamans—who do not make any direct product that enhances our chances of survival and reproduction. Rather, their existence derives solely from appealing to our appetites of mind, whims, and aesthetic tastes.

  But this should give us pause. Natural selection is a stern and severe master that generally avoids profligacy—in a competitive and evolving world, the things we do, in general, must pay their way. If I spend my days in pursuit of religious truth or artistic beauty while you are out bringing home game, I may be content, but not survive the night. If you are amassing an army across the valley while we have a good night’s singing, you might overrun us by morning. So we are entitled to ask what the arts and religion have been good for throughout our evolution, not just now in modern societies that—awash with money and free time—allow us to pursue aesthetic, psychological, and hedonistic pleasures. We want to know why our early ancestors welcomed them into their lives, and how they could have afforded to do so.

  In trying to answer these questions I want to develop the idea that the arts, music, and religion evolved in our distant past as what I will call cultural enhancers. We can think of an enhancer as something that exists solely to promote the interests of a replicator inside its vehicle. Here is an example from genetics. Short strings of DNA in our genomes known as genetic enhancers exist solely to help genes function more effectively within their bodies or vehicles. For instance, genes for growth need to be active early in life but less so or even not at all later in life. Genes for eyes need to be switched off in the backs of our heads, but switched on in the front. Genes solve this problem by recruiting genetic enhancers that tell them when and where to be switched on or off. This serves the gene’s interests by helping it to make a better vehicle, and this means the gene is more likely to survive and be passed on. What makes genetic enhancers fascinating is that they do not make anything of their own that we use to build our bodies (for instance, they do not make proteins). Like poets and magicians, genetic enhancers also do not make any direct product that enhances our chances of survival and reproduction. Rather, it appears that genes have recruited them solely to influence how much they are expressed in different parts of our bodies or at different times.

  I will use the term cultural enhancer to refer to cultural forms we have recruited because they help us to express ourselves more effectively as replicators inside our cultural survival vehicles. Their existence might be yet another example of remarkable convergence between the ways that biological and cultural evolution have solved similar problems. For instance, prehistoric people might have discovered that they could recruit something like what we now might call the arts, music, and religion to elicit or motivate emotions, to strengthen beliefs or resolve, to transmit information, to increase cohesion or remind people of shared history and interests. Like a gene in a body, we might have used these enhancers to alter our “expression” at different times and places in our societal vehicles, and in ways that served us. Maybe it is to gain courage before battle or seek hope in the face of uncertainty. To prehistoric people, the arts and religion might have been like having a class of performance-enhancing drugs (another class of enhancers we have built, if only in more modern times) at their fingertips. Like genetic enhancers they needn’t produce any direct product, such as a better blade or spear, that directly affects our chances of survival and reproduction. Instead, they will have evolved to “alter our expression” by having access to our emotions and pleasure centers because these are the parts of our makeup that motiva
te us to behave. And this could explain our attraction to them—and even our weaknesses for them—in the modern world.

  BRAIN CANDY

  I WILL have far more to say about religion in this chapter than about art and music, and some might even see it as a folly or confusion to combine them. After all, art and music are aesthetic forms, whereas religion is doctrinal. But I beg the reader’s indulgence because in spite of the differences among these cultural forms, I suggest they are linked by having been recruited and shaped by us to play the role of cultural enhancers.

  Still, the suggestion that we groomed the arts and religion to serve us must confront the simpler idea that these cultural elements might exist for no other reason than that they have evolved to be good at manipulating, exploiting, or taking advantage of us to aid their transmission—not to help us. Culturally transmitted ideas, behaviors, and objects, or memes do not share the same route into the future as our genes do. Unlike our genes, whose survival depends upon keeping our bodies alive, culturally transmitted elements can jump directly from mind to mind. This means they will have a tendency to evolve toward forms that get us to talk about them, sing them, perform them, build models of them, or anything else that gets us to transmit them into someone else’s mind, even sometimes at our expense. Of course, not all cultural transmitted elements evolve to take advantage of us. Most of what we think of as our accumulated knowledge and technology takes the form of culturally transmitted ideas and instructions that help us to survive and prosper. These elements serve a useful purpose to us, and that makes us want to retain them, and share them with others. But the feature of memes we have to bear in mind is that there is no necessary reason they have to help us: whatever form makes them likely to be transmitted, they will be likely to adopt.

  Perhaps, then, the arts and religion are little more than hedonistic or exploitative mind drugs or brain candy. We like them, or suffer from them, because we can’t help it! Thus, we make paintings, songs, and stories, and we invent religions. We pass these elements of culture one to another by word of mouth or by producing objects. At each stage of the retelling, singing, or drawing or sculpting of some object, changes creep in—some by accident, others by design. Most of these changes work against the cultural form, but others will make the items more visually attractive, memorable, psychologically compelling, and even perhaps irresistible. Elements that fail to compete for our attention will be cast off, but the survivors will be those whose allure outpaces our minds’ defenses, allowing them to bypass our normal filters, and grab our attention or acquire unnerving abilities to control our emotions—like crack cocaine, only ingested differently. Karl Marx said almost exactly this about religion when he described it as “the opium of the people.”

  The nature of cultural evolution means that some memes evolve as parasites that live at our expense. Indeed, religion has been described as a culturally transmitted virus of the mind, and if this is true, it makes no sense to ask what we get from them. Religions would owe their existence simply to the fact that they are good at exploiting us to aid their transmission; we cannot shake them off, and they compel us to teach them to others, especially our children. If religion is such a virus and has gripped you already, you won’t believe this, but the charge that religions are parasites cannot just be dismissed. For example, everyone has received chain letters promising good luck if sent on, but warning or even threatening bad luck if not. Chain letters are not religions, of course, but like them, they have a tendency to play on our hopes and fears. It is an inevitable truth of cultural evolution that you are likely to receive the most compelling versions of these chain letters—the ineffective ones will have been ignored and simply faded away, but the best will have mutated to forms that cause anxiety and then control your actions, getting you to send them on to someone else.

  Other aspects of culture get us to aid their survival and reproduction, often without our even being aware of them or costing us anything. In the biological world, such things are called commensals. Cattle egrets are small birds that spend their time around cattle whose hooves churn the soil, exposing insects and worms the egrets like to eat. The egrets’ presence costs the cattle nothing; the cattle might not even be aware of them, but neither do the cattle obviously benefit from having them around. A cultural commensal might take the form of an advertising jingle we cannot get out of our minds. It is difficult to see how singing one either benefits or harms us unless we do it uncontrollably or perhaps too absentmindedly in public, but this singing surely aids the transmission of the jingle. This is what it has evolved to do, and if it lifted its head too high above the parapet of your awareness, you would probably jettison it. It is a melancholy thought that our brains are reservoirs of the leftover detritus of thousands of these commensals; most of us can remember advertising jingles from our youth, and they have a knack of popping back into our minds unexpectedly. But this is just what we expect of a system that will inevitably evolve in the direction of taking advantage of us. They will multiply and we will be largely unaware of them.

  Cutthroat competition among cultural forms to attract our attention is why the best art galleries can take our breath away, the Old Master paintings are so good, why the classics are such good literature, why the best films are the old ones, why we so frequently return to styles of times past—so-called retro fads in dress, music, and design—and why the best songs grab hold of our emotions. It is not that everything was better long ago, just that the survivors we see today were the best of their time. Thus, there might have been many Homers alive at the same time writing their own Iliads, but whose stories could not compete with Homer’s. Then the Iliad went on to see off all competitors for the next 3,000 years. Equally, we can be sure there was plenty of other art, music, and fashion created at the same time as other classic works that has long since vanished, been pulped, or painted over. So good are the survivors at influencing our minds, people have over the centuries shown themselves willing to travel great distances to see them, lay down huge sums or extort and murder to own them, or risk their well-being or lives to steal them—indeed, that is why these cultural elements have survived.

  Because the arts, music, and religion are not bound by the usual constraints of physics and nature that constrain objects with some overt function—such as a toaster or a bicycle—the range of forms can expand without limit. As we grow inured to the forms that have been tried, this leaves a more and more extreme or even bizarre set of untried forms to be explored. Many rejected the first Impressionist paintings as vague, Matisse’s colors as garish, Mark Rothko’s panels of color and hues, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, or Andy Warhol’s soup cans as lacking substance and talent. These now seem tame by comparison to the London artist Tracey Emin, whose art installation of an unkempt bed made headlines, or Damien Hirst, who displayed a shark cut lengthwise and pickled in formaldehyde. In The Guardian on January 17, 2002, the director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art at the time, Ivan Massow, declaimed “the British art world is in danger of disappearing up its own arse… . Most concept art I see now is pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat that I wouldn’t accept even as a gift.”

  In 2004, at the Tate Britain gallery in London, a cleaner threw out a bag of rubbish. Awkwardly, this bag of rubbish was part of an art installation, this one by Gustav Metzger. In 2006, the artist David Hensel contributed a carved head to London’s Royal Academy of Art. The head reclined on a bone-shaped wooden rest set on top of a plinth, but it got separated during shipping and was returned to Hensel. The empty plinth, with wooden rest, was exhibited and later sold at auction. The lesson of cultural evolution of art forms is that the progression to minimalism such as this, and eventually to nothingness, is as inevitable as the progression to greater garishness is in the other direction. Maybe this is what the historian E. H. Gombrich meant when he said: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” Jules Renard, the French writer (1864–1910), adopted a more economic tone: “Th
e beauty of literature. I lose a cow. I write about her death, and this brings me in enough to buy another cow.”

  A PSYCHOLOGICAL PREDISPOSITION TO RELIGION?

  THIS ACCOUNT of the evolution of cultural forms treats our minds as passive receptacles. But of course they are not. We have biases in the ways our minds work, and we have likes and dislikes. These biases constrain the forms that cultural evolution is most likely to take because competing forms must evolve to take advantage of the peculiar environment of our minds. Thus, most musicians play a limited range of instruments, and most singers sing from a limited range of song styles. It is no accident that we find the tones our musical instruments make so pleasing and emotionally resonant: it was the varieties of these instruments throughout our history which best conformed to our tastes that we retained. Even when we have freed ourselves of instruments by creating music electronically on computers, we often get the computers to imitate musical instruments. Most artists paint the same range of subjects, and most fiction follows one of a small number of basic plots—some say as few as seven—and even most of these include sex, love, money, betrayal, or death.