Fernández-Armesto - A foot in the river : why our lives change - and the limits of evolution

We live on a weird planet.

As far as we know, all the others are pretty much inert. Gases and dust swirl. Occasional cosmic eventsexperienced on Earth, too, such as a blip in an orbit, the tilt of an axis, an errant meteormay alter the environment. But most changes on most planets happen predictably, within a narrow compass, or are measurable on a slow scale of millions of years.

Earth is not like that. Sci-fi writers who strain to imagine strange worlds might as well look inward, at the wild, untrackable, unparalleled oddness of our own.

Earth is, to us, the most interesting large lump in the cosmos, not just because we live on it and it matters most to us, but also becauseobjectively speakinga lot happens on it. For two reasons, Earth is the scene of vast, rapid changes, unreplicated anywhere else that we know of: first, because our planet has life, and organic systems are more dynamic than inorganic ones; second, because Earth has uscultural animals. And culture, which is the subject of this book, is even more volatile than biota.

By culture I mean behaviourincluding mental behaviour, such as thoughts and attitudesacquired by learners, transmitted by teachers or exemplars, and adopted widely. People use the word loosely to mean many different things: civilization; high culture; elaborate social organization; the peculiar features of a particular society; the commonalities that make individuals identify with a group; and hundreds of variants, with many nuances, on all these definitions. Underlying every usage, however, and uniting them all, is the bedrock of the word: differentiation from nature.

Culture is part of nature, in an unchallengeable sense: it happens inside nature and cannot happen without it. But in equally obvious ways it is useful to distinguish the cultural part of nature from what is merely natural. Some of what we do comes to us without any conscious input of our own. We share it with other creatures in the same measure as we share their ancestry or their physical environment: that is mere nature. Other behaviour can vary from group to group; we learn it from other members of our own groupour parents, for instance, or our professors and peers: that is culture.

It is proper to speak of culture apart from nature, just as it is to speak of Essex, say, apart from England, or of an organ apart from the body to which it belongs, only if one is aware that the larger term always includes the smaller, and that consideration of neither is complete without the other. At times, especially in the West, people have pressed the distinction too far by treating culture as if nature had nothing to do with it, but that is not a reason for refusing to acknowledge that culture might have peculiar features that distinguish it from the rest of nature.

Nature and culture are not mutually independent: each influences the other. But the balance is a battleground. Scholars and scientists fight over it. The answer to the question why do we have culture? lies, I think, in the realm of nature: the simple (but, as we shall see, insufficient) answer is it is natural for us to be cultural. The question why do we have cultures?in the plural or, to put almost the same question another way, why does culture change?is, I want to suggest, not answerable in the same way. I propose to explore that question by posing two possibilities: whether evolution or some analogous process is the answer, and whether cultural change happens beyond the limits of evolutions explanatory power. The purpose of this book is to contribute a new response to what perhapsas we puzzle over strangers comportment, or ponder alien ways of life, or contemplate the variety of our conduct, or compare the commonalities and curiosities that link and part us from other creaturesis the most perplexing property of human beings: why we behave as we do.

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Humans are not the only creatures with culture; over the last sixty years or so, scientists have identified culture among many primate species and claimed it for many others, including examples to be paraded in this book, like the menagerie of some fantastic Barnum or Bailey, such as dolphins, whales, elephants, rats, and even bacteria. Human cultures, however, are different: in comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable. Communities become differentiated, as they change in contrasting and inconsistent ways: that is true, as we shall see, of any cultural species, but the processes involved happen incalculably more often, with a perplexingly greater range of variation, among humans than among any other animals. Human cultures register the constant series of changes that we call history; they self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering and apparentlynow and for most of the recent pastaccelerating speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place.

A lifetimes study of history has convinced me that one of the great problemsunsolved by the scientists and sociologists who have confronted it and rarely even broached among historiansis why have human societies grown so different from each other? Or, to express a similar question with the comparative emphasis that I think will lead us to a solution: why, compared with those of other animals who lead social lives, are humans so mutable? It is one of the most basic and pervasive questions, but we have no agreed answer. The question raises, in turn, a matter of enduring and apparently unclinchable controversy: how far the laws of evolution might provide solutions. Does evolution or something like it regulate culture as well as organic life? Is all behaviour the result of evolved traits? If not, where lie the limits between what evolution can explain and what is beyond evolution? For historians, one might express the subject of this book as why do we have history at all? Why do the changes we call history happen? Why do we humans alone have historyor, at least, so much more of it than other animals? For biologists, a way of putting the same problem might be: is culture an effect or aspect of biology? Or is there more to it? People with no disciplinary bias might put it like this: why do humans behave so differently from other animals?