Memetic Evolution
From Mbscientific_wiki
Memetic Evolution as Impetus for Social/Cultural Evolution, Societal Knowledge Trees
So that's how ideas get created, through abstraction. The unstable (bad) ones eventually die off and the stable (good) ones perpetuate, just like everything else in the morphological flows. That perpetuation happens by the way of memetic evolution. Once good ideas are corroborated and applied, they can be copied and improved upon. Say, you have a problem and you create an abstraction (a mental model) to solve it; then you construct a solution and you implement it. Now if the solution turns out to be a good one, it is adopted (mimicked) and somebody else improves on it, and someone else improves on the improvement, and pretty soon you have a whole genre of practice. That is Memetic Evolution. Take the case of moving about, for example:
So not only the morphological flow of a valid abstraction can lead a life of it's own (in the case of walking from sandals to shoes to boots to designer athletic shoes) it can spawn other flows with their own evolutionary lifelines, as in the case of riding, driving and flying.
Lets look at that in more detail. So you start with a problem, moving around. Everyone had do it, so having good footwear must have been a domain of substantial focus. And I imagine every tribe had a cottage industry of making footwear. So not only a person constructed the knowledge tree of making footwear, but the better footwear ideas got passed around from generation to generation. So in the end you have a footwear making knowledge tree that is an aggregate of all of the contributions from all of the people in all of the contributing generations. The knowledge tree of making footwear becomes part of the culture of the tribe. Part of the cultural costumes. Furthermore, as tribes traded goods, including footwear, the knowledge tree got transferred. In doing so the knowledge trees of making footwear among local tribes coalesce, creating regional cultural hallmarks. Part of regional cultural costumes. That means that the natural tendency for knowledge trees to coalesce to perform functions of necessity or desire becomes the impetus for cultural and social evolution. This point is the key to our social/cultural evolution. Via memetic evolution, knowledge trees accumulate within the society, forming the societal knowledge trees, which themselves expand over time as coming generations and outside influences contribute to it. That will segue into the next chapter, our social evolution.
But lets stay with our current example, the evolution of knowledge trees addressing the problem of moving about. Somewhere along the line, some 10,000 years ago or so, folks domesticated pack animals and started to use them for moving about. Horses became the riding animal of choice and the knowledge tree of using horses for moving about started to get assembled. First that knowledge tree grew among a tribe, then it was transferred and coalesced among local tribes, saddle styles and riding styles and various functions got invented and perfected. So that became part of the local and regional cultures. The knowledge tree of riding horses became the impetus and hallmark for social and cultural evolution. But if you look at the knowledge tree of riding horses, it is not there in isolation. It amalgamates with the knowledge tree of animal husbandry, leather-wear craftsmanship, seasonal migration, herding and agriculture routines, militarism etc. So assembly of one knowledge tree, by the virtue of creating functionalities gives/gets impetus to other knowledge trees and they all co-evolve together, rendering social/cultural evolution.
Then sometime after the invention of the steam engines, the idea of horseless carriages started to percolate. And, in relatively short order the knowledge tree for engineering cars was assembled. If you consider the scope of the knowledge tree of car engineering and use, it is an amalgam of many knowledge trees that go into making all of the different parts of a car and deploying and operating the car in large numbers and high speeds. All of these knowledge trees coalesce to create the hallmarks of our current cultures of mobility, wealth and status.
Then the knowledge tree of flying was assembled. The scope of that effort was and is by definition global, just by the virtue of the range of flight. So that knowledge tree was and is the impetus and hallmark for national and global social/cultural evolution.
So the assembly of the knowledge trees for moving about gave impetus to social evolution as well as social expansion, that by now covers the globe. So it appears that societal knowledge trees and cultures are one and the same thing. Knowledge, specifically the functionalities that they establish, engenders behavioral aspects of the people of a society, i.e. the culture of the society. And as new knowledge is gained, corroborated and implemented, as new tools and devices are built, deployed and used, then the culture of the society evolves. That is the biological mechanism of our social/cultural evolution.
Remember how long term memory became instinctive, that is how societal knowledge trees, cultures become ingrained. After a culture is set in, generation after generation, the modes of behavior gain instinctive traction, a cultural momentum sets in. Cultural momentum, as we will see later has insidious traction. As a rule, once set, cultural momentum is so deeply ingrained in social practices that it can only be altered catastrophically, i.e. it gets destroyed and rebuilt; through warfare, famine, otherwise one calamity or other. We will see this aplenty in the next chapter.
As interesting and important as solving the problem of moving about is in social/cultural evolution, in the next chapter we will cover the pillars of social/cultural evolution, i.e. the evolution of religious governance, science, economics, modern democracies and military expansion.
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