Cultural evolution

Human interaction is uniquely dynamic in relation to what goes in other parts of the animal world, leading to incessant large- and small-scale transitions in our societies. This is due to an unrivalled ability among humans to intellectually handle what is not present, either because it is concealed or because it is absent from the actual setting. In turn, this ability depends on a similarly unique capacity for sequential thinking, not seen in other parts of the animal world.

Through the ages, the magnitude of human interaction has grown immensely; today it is profoundly global in many respects. This also means that an ever-growing number of increasingly differentiated activities are increasingly coordinated, which is to say that human interaction is getting increasingly complex. This is so since, by my definition, the more coordination there is between the interactive parts in a system, the more complex it is – provided that other factors or circumstances remain the same. Or, differently put, given the level of coordination, the more differentiated it is, the more complex it is, as illustrated in Figure 1.

It should be added that growing complexity often goes hand in hand with ‘simplification’.

These long-term transformations are culturally driven in the sense that they do not have any modifications of the human genome as preconditions, despite the fact that such modifications nevertheless do evolve, although at a slow pace in comparison to the pace of cultural change. Of course, this does not mean that cultural change ever gets disconnected from or becomesindependent of its peculiar genetic basis that we, as humans, embody. There would be no cultural evolution without the ever-ongoing ‘investment’ of our species-specific genome into the cultural system. Furthermore, it cannot be excluded that the gradual gene modifications that do take place may have an impact on the cultural fate of the human society, and probably have had such an impact. Still, cultural change would happen nevertheless, that is, with or without such an impact.

The dynamism of human society manifests itself in many different ways, partly as a process directed towards the differentiation of functions, habits and things, and partly as an oscillation between differentiation and homogenisation.