Steven J. Dick - Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context

Cosmic evolution, the idea that the universe and its constituent parts are constantly evolving, has become widely accepted only in the last 50 years. It is no coincidence that this acceptance parallels the span of the Space Age. Although cosmic evolution was first recognized in the physical universe early in the 20th century, with hints even earlier, the relationships among planets, stars, and galaxies, and the evolution of the universe itself, became much better known through the discoveries by planetary probes and space telescopes in the latter half of the century. It was also during the last 50 yearsa century after Darwin proposed that evolution by natural selection applies to life on our own planetthat researchers from a variety of disciplines began to seriously study the possibilities of extraterrestrial life and the biological universe.

But there is a third component to cosmic evolution beyond the physical and the biological. Even if we only know of culture on one planet so far, cultural evolution has been an important part of cosmic evolution on Earth, and perhaps on many other planets. Moreover, it also dominates the other two forms of evolution in terms of its rapidity. Humans were not much different biologically 10,000 years ago, but one need only look around to see how much we have changed culturally. Yet, unlike the study of biological evolution, which has made great progress since Darwins Origin of Species , the scientific study of cultural evolution languished after Darwins death for the better part of a century. Only within the past few decades has significant progress been made, and concerned with advancing their fledging science, cultural evolutionists have yet to expand their thinking beyond their current planetary sample-of-one concerns. But if life and intelligence do exist beyond Earth, it is likely that culture will arise and evolve. In this volume authors with diverse backgrounds in science, history, and anthropology consider culture in the context of the cosmos, including the implications of the cosmos for our own culture.

Expanding the horizons of the science of cultural evolution to include a cosmic context has many potential benefits. As biology has benefited from broader cosmological considerations, the science of cultural evolution could also benefit from thinking in more general, theoretical terms about the origin and evolution of cultures. As cultural evolutionists broaden their minds to include cosmic perspectives, their insights could help guide the already substantial and continuing search for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. Not least, a cultural evolutionary science that includes a cosmic context should allow for a better understanding of the relationships among physical, biological, and cultural evolutionsteps perhaps toward a cosmic evolutionary synthesis. All of these benefits could inform the future of humanity and life in the universe. Conversely, greater attention to these problems should help us understand how our expanding knowledge of the cosmos impacts culture and cultural evolution.

We are acutely aware that culture is an amorphous and ambiguous term, with an uneasy relationship to its cousin society. Like many complex concepts, dwelling on perfect definitions of culture, and in particular, cultural evolution, can be tricky and perhaps even distracting, because there are often blurry boundaries and intractable counter-examples. But despite the importance of clear distinctions and definitions, imperfect definitions should not prevent exploratory analysis. Often, in pursuing analyses that tolerate imperfect definitions, we find contexts and usages that help clarify, however unsatisfying those definitions may still ultimately remain. Indeed, in this book, we do not focus explicitly on defining cultural evolution, or, for that matter, life, intelligence, and culture. These matters are touched on in various ways in some chapters, but it was not an explicit intention of this effortindeed, the authors invoke varying uses of culture. Nevertheless, perhaps increased clarity will come from considering the broader and theoretical explorations of the authors contributions.

This volume is divided into three parts, beginning with the nature and history of cosmic evolution, then focusing on cultural evolution, and finally tackling more explicit themes of the relationships between cosmos and culture. In Part 1, Eric Chaisson, an astronomer whomore than anyonehas explored the significance and possibilities of cosmic evolution over the last three decades, provides an overarching and coherent perspective of the subject from a scientific point of view. Steven Dick, an astronomer and historian of science who has written widely on extraterrestrial life and astrobiology, offers an overview of the history of the idea of cosmic evolution, how it has affected culture so far, and its implications for humanitys future.

Part 2 focuses on cultural evolution itself, and as such is dominated by authors in the social sciences and humanities. Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Canada who has become deeply involved with the SETI community, provides an overview of the field of cultural evolution, or social evolution as she terms it. She makes it clear why the field is a difficult one fraught with dangers, even in the terrestrial context. One of the central problems in the field has been the lack of a robust theory, but toward that goal the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the author of Darwins Dangerous Idea , supports the notion of memes (the cultural equivalent to genes) as a cultural evolution model, and finds that cultural possibility is far less constrained than genetic possibility. Indeed, psychologist Susan Blackmore, well known for her book The Meme Machine , warns in this section that the blind replication of memes can be extremely destructiveand possibly cause extinction. She provides an intriguing alternative Drake Equation for survivability of intelligent civilizations based on memes and kinds of replication. Howard Bloom provokes us with a very broad notion of culture and a multiplanet mandate deeply rooted in evolution. Systems theorist John Smart draws from a number of unique disciplines, applying an informational, evolutionary, and developmental systems model to understand the universe and the role of culture within it.

NASA engineer and scientist Mark Lupisella opens Part 3 by exploring a framework for the relationships between the cosmos and culture, and offers a cosmocultural perspective whereby the coevolution of cosmos and culture gives rise to cosmic value. But why worry about cosmos and culture? Physicist Paul Davies argues that life, mind, and culture are of fundamental significance to the grand story of the cosmos because life is based on a universal Darwinian mechanism that has allowed the cosmos to generate its own self-understanding through science, rational reasoning, and mathematics that may ultimately lead to cultural evolution on a large enough scale to allow the universe to both create and steer itself toward its destiny. This suggests a potential abundance of life in the cosmos, and astronomer Seth Shostak argues that human beings, like other intelligent species, may pass through a short self-destruction bottleneck and survive for very long time periods after dispersal in space, giving rise to many long-lived technologically advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy. If so, one of the great questions is whether humans can communicate with extraterrestrials, and Doug Vakoch, a psychologist at the SETI Institute who has written broadly on interstellar communication, explores the potential utility of using our understanding of cosmic evolution to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence.