Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted; men, who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies (Hume, Reference Hume1748, p. 135).
When we are confronted with the tremendous variety of cultural patterns exhibited by our kind worldwide, patterns marked by differences so wide that they involve even biologically central factors such as mating systems (for an extreme case, see Hua, Reference Hua2001), there is a temptation to fall into either of two opposite interpretive errors. On the one hand, to conclude that culture is all, that anything goes, because human nature is a blank slate on which culture inscribes its writ with impunity. Or, on the other, to conclude that, because the differences run so deep, there must be differences in the human natures that support the diverse societal patterns, that is, that somehow we differ in kind from one another.
Duncan Stibbard–Hawkes and Chris von Rueden (S&R) show us, by means of a broad-based survey and scrutiny of one branch of this variety, namely, traditional subsistence cultures, how to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of these temptations, not by a hand-waving “a little bit of each,” but by tracing just how culture intervenes to equip a determinate, species-wide, and species-specific human nature for the wide range of societal patterns humans exhibit.
They do so by showing us how, through their “process” approach, human motivations that we all recognize, under conformity to a set of constraints that ultimately derive from ecological circumstances but proximally are mediated by the norms and conventions of the culture, issue in societal patterns that contrast with our own, namely egalitarian ones.
Crucially, those norms and conventions, which jointly constitute the group’s ethos, do not dictate equality of outcomes, nor do they stipulate primacy of the group over the individual. Instead, they afford individuals the means to maintain personal integrity, autonomy, and respect under conditions in which they in fact are materially dependent on others and rather directly so, as the first empty-handed return from a three-day strenuous chase in the bush will demonstrate.
S&R’s rich analysis of the ways in which the ethos of traditional subsistence groups accomplishes this end is a boon not only to our comprehension of the ethnographic record but also to our self-understanding as well. Whence, then, this ethos, whose causal levers are so intricate and subtle that it has been misunderstood even by some of those who dedicated their lives to the study of the groups who are its carriers? The question leads directly to the secret of human culture, a secret which recent decades of research on the dynamics of intergenerational transmission of cultural lore without natural selection have done much to illuminate (Kirby, Reference Kirby1998: Komarova & Nowak, Reference Komarova and Nowak2003, Section 3.2.2. Neutral Dynamics; Henrich, Reference Henrich2016; Enquist, Ghirlanda, & Lind, Reference Enquist, Ghirlanda and Lind2023).
The only way to acquire cultural goods is to learn them. New generations acquire the behaviors, norms, and other cultural goods from their current carriers. When the aggregate population-wide pool of such information exceeds the capacity of single learners to absorb in toto, each learner becomes an information bottleneck at which the items of the pool compete for access to the next generation. This imposes a dynamic of data compression on the process. Over many generations of iterated learning/transmission through the learner bottlenecks of a multitude, the content of the cultural goods undergoes shaping by the constraints under which the transmission occurs, be they attributes of the environment in which it takes place or of its inhabitants through which it takes place. When this purely statistical process, which takes place over many generations without cognizance of its agents, reaches a population-wide stable state, as explored by computer modeling in the sources just cited, that population has acquired a shared ethos or culture.
That ethos, shaped by both environmental and agent constraints, comes to fit and adapt its carrying population to the environment it inhabits. It, in effect, comes to serve as a purely cultural buffer between the two, and as long as the buffering is not assimilated genetically, mankind stays a single species despite the range of niches it occupies, from the arctic wastes to the equatorial rain forests and everything in between, some deserts included.
How remarkable, in fact unique, this “one species, one nature, many niches” human novelty is can be intuited by way of a thought experiment. Beavers, like humans, are “niche constructors” (Odling-Smee, Laland, & Feldman, Reference Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman2003). They buffer their life space by elaborate dams and lodges of their own construction. Imagine, then, a species of mutant beaver – a single species – which builds freshwater dams and lodges in Scandinavia, snow-lodges in the Arctic, kelp-lodges on the Pacific littoral, and lodges of sand fused by saliva in the Gobi Desert. Impossible, of course, for anything even remotely resembling the beavers of biology. Impossible, among other things, because to the extent that this hypothetical species occupied those environments, natural selection would see to it that it adapted to them on a genetic basis. It would thus undergo obligatory speciation to give rise to new Arctic, Pacific, and Desert beaver species by routine modes of selection, or it would not occupy those new environments at all.
Traditional subsistence cultures, like all of us, being members of what Richard Alexander called the “uniquely unique species” (Alexander, Reference Alexander1990), avoid this fate through embeddedness in a mode of culture which, not least through the human singularity of language (Smith & Szathmáry, Reference Smith and Szathmáry1995), has become cumulative (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, Reference Tomasello, Kruger and Ratner1993). It is thus a pleasure, with S&R’s help, to welcome the subsistence cultures to the fold of our common humanity, without running afoul of David Hume’s sage advice.
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Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted; men, who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies (Hume, Reference Hume1748, p. 135).
When we are confronted with the tremendous variety of cultural patterns exhibited by our kind worldwide, patterns marked by differences so wide that they involve even biologically central factors such as mating systems (for an extreme case, see Hua, Reference Hua2001), there is a temptation to fall into either of two opposite interpretive errors. On the one hand, to conclude that culture is all, that anything goes, because human nature is a blank slate on which culture inscribes its writ with impunity. Or, on the other, to conclude that, because the differences run so deep, there must be differences in the human natures that support the diverse societal patterns, that is, that somehow we differ in kind from one another.
Duncan Stibbard–Hawkes and Chris von Rueden (S&R) show us, by means of a broad-based survey and scrutiny of one branch of this variety, namely, traditional subsistence cultures, how to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of these temptations, not by a hand-waving “a little bit of each,” but by tracing just how culture intervenes to equip a determinate, species-wide, and species-specific human nature for the wide range of societal patterns humans exhibit.
They do so by showing us how, through their “process” approach, human motivations that we all recognize, under conformity to a set of constraints that ultimately derive from ecological circumstances but proximally are mediated by the norms and conventions of the culture, issue in societal patterns that contrast with our own, namely egalitarian ones.
Crucially, those norms and conventions, which jointly constitute the group’s ethos, do not dictate equality of outcomes, nor do they stipulate primacy of the group over the individual. Instead, they afford individuals the means to maintain personal integrity, autonomy, and respect under conditions in which they in fact are materially dependent on others and rather directly so, as the first empty-handed return from a three-day strenuous chase in the bush will demonstrate.
S&R’s rich analysis of the ways in which the ethos of traditional subsistence groups accomplishes this end is a boon not only to our comprehension of the ethnographic record but also to our self-understanding as well. Whence, then, this ethos, whose causal levers are so intricate and subtle that it has been misunderstood even by some of those who dedicated their lives to the study of the groups who are its carriers? The question leads directly to the secret of human culture, a secret which recent decades of research on the dynamics of intergenerational transmission of cultural lore without natural selection have done much to illuminate (Kirby, Reference Kirby1998: Komarova & Nowak, Reference Komarova and Nowak2003, Section 3.2.2. Neutral Dynamics; Henrich, Reference Henrich2016; Enquist, Ghirlanda, & Lind, Reference Enquist, Ghirlanda and Lind2023).
The only way to acquire cultural goods is to learn them. New generations acquire the behaviors, norms, and other cultural goods from their current carriers. When the aggregate population-wide pool of such information exceeds the capacity of single learners to absorb in toto, each learner becomes an information bottleneck at which the items of the pool compete for access to the next generation. This imposes a dynamic of data compression on the process. Over many generations of iterated learning/transmission through the learner bottlenecks of a multitude, the content of the cultural goods undergoes shaping by the constraints under which the transmission occurs, be they attributes of the environment in which it takes place or of its inhabitants through which it takes place. When this purely statistical process, which takes place over many generations without cognizance of its agents, reaches a population-wide stable state, as explored by computer modeling in the sources just cited, that population has acquired a shared ethos or culture.
That ethos, shaped by both environmental and agent constraints, comes to fit and adapt its carrying population to the environment it inhabits. It, in effect, comes to serve as a purely cultural buffer between the two, and as long as the buffering is not assimilated genetically, mankind stays a single species despite the range of niches it occupies, from the arctic wastes to the equatorial rain forests and everything in between, some deserts included.
How remarkable, in fact unique, this “one species, one nature, many niches” human novelty is can be intuited by way of a thought experiment. Beavers, like humans, are “niche constructors” (Odling-Smee, Laland, & Feldman, Reference Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman2003). They buffer their life space by elaborate dams and lodges of their own construction. Imagine, then, a species of mutant beaver – a single species – which builds freshwater dams and lodges in Scandinavia, snow-lodges in the Arctic, kelp-lodges on the Pacific littoral, and lodges of sand fused by saliva in the Gobi Desert. Impossible, of course, for anything even remotely resembling the beavers of biology. Impossible, among other things, because to the extent that this hypothetical species occupied those environments, natural selection would see to it that it adapted to them on a genetic basis. It would thus undergo obligatory speciation to give rise to new Arctic, Pacific, and Desert beaver species by routine modes of selection, or it would not occupy those new environments at all.
Traditional subsistence cultures, like all of us, being members of what Richard Alexander called the “uniquely unique species” (Alexander, Reference Alexander1990), avoid this fate through embeddedness in a mode of culture which, not least through the human singularity of language (Smith & Szathmáry, Reference Smith and Szathmáry1995), has become cumulative (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, Reference Tomasello, Kruger and Ratner1993). It is thus a pleasure, with S&R’s help, to welcome the subsistence cultures to the fold of our common humanity, without running afoul of David Hume’s sage advice.
Acknowledgments
None.
Financial support
The author did not receive any external funding.
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.