Thomas Hobbes

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Thomas Hobbes
Born	5 April 1588 Westport, Wiltshire, England
Died	4 December 1679 (aged 91) Derbyshire, England
Alma mater	Magdalen Hall, Oxford
Era	17th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Social contract, classical realism, empiricism, determinism, materialism, ethical egoism
Main interests	Political philosophy, history, ethics, geometry
Notable ideas	Modern founder of the social contract tradition; life in the state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"; bellum omnium contra omnes

Thomas Hobbes (/hɒbz/; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, was an English philosopher who is considered one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, which expounded an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, ethics, and general philosophy.

Though on rational grounds a champion of absolutism for the sovereign, Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law that leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.^[6] His understanding of humans as being matter and motion, obeying the same physical laws as other matter and motion, remains influential; and his account of human nature as self-interested cooperation, and of political communities as being based upon a "social contract" remains one of the major topics of political philosophy.

Early life and education

Thomas Hobbes was born at Westport, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England, on 5 April 1588.^[7] Born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes later reported that "my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear."^[8] His childhood is almost completely unknown, and his mother's name is unknown.^[9] His father, Thomas Sr., was the vicar of Charlton and Westport. Thomas Hobbes, the younger, had a brother Edmund, about two years older, and a sister. Thomas Sr. was involved in a fight with the local clergy outside his church, forcing him to leave London and abandon the family. The family was left in the care of Thomas Sr.'s older brother, Francis, a wealthy merchant with no family. Hobbes Jr. was educated at Westport church from age four, passed to the Malmesbury school, and then to a private school kept by a young man named Robert Latimer, a graduate of the University of Oxford. Hobbes was a good pupil, and around 1603 he went up to Magdalen Hall, the predecessor college to Hertford College, Oxford.^[10][11][12] The principal John Wilkinson was a Puritan, and he had some influence on Hobbes.

At university, Hobbes appears to have followed his own curriculum; he was "little attracted by the scholastic learning". He did not complete his B.A. degree until 1608, but he was recommended by Sir James Hussey, his master at Magdalen, as tutor to William, the son of William Cavendish, Baron of Hardwick (and later Earl of Devonshire), and began a lifelong connection with that family.^[13]

Hobbes became a companion to the younger William and they both took part in a grand tour of Europe in 1610. Hobbes was exposed to European scientific and critical methods during the tour, in contrast to the scholastic philosophy that he had learned in Oxford. His scholarly efforts at the time were aimed at a careful study of classic Greek and Latin authors, the outcome of which was, in 1628, his great translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, the first translation of that work into English from a Greek manuscript. It has been argued that three of the discourses in the 1620 publication known as Horea Subsecivae: Observations and Discourses also represent the work of Hobbes from this period.^[14]

Although he associated with literary figures like Ben Jonson and briefly worked as Francis Bacon's amanuensis, he did not extend his efforts into philosophy until after 1629. His employer Cavendish, then the Earl of Devonshire, died of the plague in June 1628. The widowed countess dismissed Hobbes, but he soon found work, again as a tutor, this time to Gervase Clifton, the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, 1st Baronet. This task, chiefly spent in Paris, ended in 1631 when he again found work with the Cavendish family, tutoring William, the eldest son of his previous pupil. Over the next seven years, as well as tutoring, he expanded his own knowledge of philosophy, awakening in him curiosity over key philosophic debates. He visited Florence in 1636 and was later a regular debater in philosophic groups in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne.

In Paris

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes's first area of study was an interest in the physical doctrine of motion and physical momentum. Despite his interest in this phenomenon, he disdained experimental work as in physics. He went on to conceive the system of thought to the elaboration of which he would devote his life. His scheme was first to work out, in a separate treatise, a systematic doctrine of body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, at least as motion or mechanical action was then understood. He then singled out Man from the realm of Nature and plants. Then, in another treatise, he showed what specific bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation, knowledge, affections and passions whereby Man came into relation with Man. Finally he considered, in his crowning treatise, how Men were moved to enter into society, and argued how this must be regulated if Men were not to fall back into "brutishness and misery". Thus he proposed to unite the separate phenomena of Body, Man, and the State.^{[citation needed]}

Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country riven with discontent, which disrupted him from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. However, by the end of the Short Parliament in 1640, he had written a short treatise called The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. It was not published and only circulated as a manuscript among his acquaintances. A pirated version, however, was published about ten years later. Although it seems that much of The Elements of Law was composed before the sitting of the Short Parliament, there are polemical pieces of the work that clearly mark the influences of the rising political crisis. Nevertheless, many (though not all) elements of Hobbes's political thought were unchanged between The Elements of Law and Leviathan, which demonstrates that the events of the English Civil War had little effect on his contractarian methodology. However, the arguments in Leviathan were modified from The Elements of Law when it came to the necessity of consent in creating political obligation. Namely, Hobbes wrote in The Elements of Law that Patrimonial kingdoms were not necessarily formed by the consent of the governed, while in Leviathan he argued that they were. This was perhaps a reflection either of Hobbes's thoughts about the engagement controversy or of his reaction to treatises published by Patriarchalists, such as Sir Robert Filmer, between 1640 and 1651.^{[citation needed]}

When in November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded the Short, Hobbes felt that he was in disfavour due to the circulation of his treatise and fled to Paris. He did not return for 11 years. In Paris, he rejoined the coterie around Mersenne and wrote a critique of the Meditations on First Philosophy of Descartes, which was printed as third among the sets of "Objections" appended, with "Replies" from Descartes, in 1641. A different set of remarks on other works by Descartes succeeded only in ending all correspondence between the two.

Hobbes also extended his own works in a way, working on the third section, De Cive, which was finished in November 1641. Although it was initially only circulated privately, it was well received, and included lines of argumentation that were repeated a decade later in Leviathan. He then returned to hard work on the first two sections of his work and published little except a short treatise on optics (Tractatus opticus) included in the collection of scientific tracts published by Mersenne as Cogitata physico-mathematica in 1644. He built a good reputation in philosophic circles and in 1645 was chosen with Descartes, Gilles de Roberval and others to referee the controversy between John Pell and Longomontanus over the problem of squaring the circle.

Civil war in England

The English Civil War broke out in 1642,^[15] and when the royalist cause began to decline in mid-1644,^[16] the king's supporters fled to Europe.^[17] Many came to Paris and were known to Hobbes. This revitalised Hobbes's political interests and the De Cive was republished and more widely distributed. The printing began in 1646 by Samuel de Sorbiere through the Elsevier press at Amsterdam with a new preface and some new notes in reply to objections.

In 1647, Hobbes took up a position as mathematical instructor to the young Charles, Prince of Wales,^[18] who had come over from Jersey around July. This engagement lasted until 1648 when Charles went to Holland.

Frontispiece from De Cive (1642)

The company of the exiled royalists led Hobbes to produce Leviathan, which set forth his theory of civil government in relation to the political crisis resulting from the war. Hobbes compared the State to a monster (leviathan) composed of men, created under pressure of human needs and dissolved by civil strife due to human passions. The work closed with a general "Review and Conclusion", in response to the war, which answered the question: Does a subject have the right to change allegiance when a former sovereign's power to protect is irrevocably lost?

During the years of composing Leviathan, Hobbes remained in or near Paris. In 1647, a serious illness that nearly killed him disabled him for six months. On recovering, he resumed his literary task and completed it by 1650. Meanwhile, a translation of De Cive was being produced; scholars disagree about whether it was Hobbes who translated it.

In 1650, a pirated edition of The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic was published.^[19] It was divided into two small volumes (Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policie and De corpore politico, or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politick).^[20] In 1651, the translation of De Cive was published under the title Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and Society. Meanwhile, the printing of the greater work proceeded, and finally appeared in mid-1651, titled Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil. It had a famous title-page engraving depicting a crowned giant above the waist towering above hills overlooking a landscape, holding a sword and a crozier and made up of tiny human figures.

The work had immediate impact. Soon, Hobbes was more lauded and decried than any other thinker of his time. The first effect of its publication was to sever his link with the exiled royalists, who might well have killed him. The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics. Hobbes appealed to the revolutionary English government for protection and fled back to London in winter 1651. After his submission to the Council of State, he was allowed to subside into private life in Fetter Lane.

Leviathan

Frontispiece of Leviathan

In Leviathan, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments and creating an objective science of morality. This gave rise to social contract theory. Leviathan was written during the English Civil War; much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war.

Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and their passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). The description contains what has been called one of the best known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state humankind would be in, were it not for political community:^[21]

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.^[22]

In such a state, people fear death, and lack both the things necessary to commodious living, and the hope of being able to toil to obtain them. So, in order to avoid it, people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population and a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede some rights for the sake of protection. Any power exercised by this authority cannot be resisted, because the protector's sovereign power derives from individuals' surrendering their own sovereign power for protection. The individuals are thereby the authors of all decisions made by the sovereign.^[23] "he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he himself is the author, and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself, no nor himself of injury because to do injury to one's self is impossible". There is no doctrine of separation of powers in Hobbes's discussion.^[24] According to Hobbes, the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers, even the words.^[25]

Opposition

John Bramhall

In 1654 a small treatise, Of Liberty and Necessity, directed at Hobbes, was published by Bishop John Bramhall.^[26] Bramhall, a strong Arminian, had met and debated with Hobbes and afterwards wrote down his views and sent them privately to be answered in this form by Hobbes. Hobbes duly replied, but not for publication. However, a French acquaintance took a copy of the reply and published it with "an extravagantly laudatory epistle".^{[citation needed]} Bramhall countered in 1655, when he printed everything that had passed between them (under the title of A Defence of the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent or Extrinsic Necessity). In 1656, Hobbes was ready with The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, in which he replied "with astonishing force"^{[citation needed]} to the bishop. As perhaps the first clear exposition of the psychological doctrine of determinism, Hobbes's own two pieces were important in the history of the free-will controversy. The bishop returned to the charge in 1658 with Castigations of Mr Hobbes's Animadversions, and also included a bulky appendix entitled The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale.

John Wallis

Hobbes opposed the existing academic arrangements, and assailed the system of the original universities in Leviathan. He went on to publish De Corpore, which contained not only tendentious views on mathematics but also an erroneous proof of the squaring of the circle. This all led mathematicians to target him for polemics and sparked John Wallis to become one of his most persistent opponents. From 1655, the publishing date of De Corpore, Hobbes and Wallis went round after round trying to disprove each other's positions. After years of debate, the spat over proving the squaring of the circle gained such notoriety that it has become one of the most infamous feuds in mathematical history.

Atheism

Hobbes has been accused of atheism, or (in the case of Bramhall) of teachings that could lead to atheism. This was an important accusation, and Hobbes himself wrote, in his answer to Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan, that "atheism, impiety, and the like are words of the greatest defamation possible".^[27] Hobbes always defended himself from such accusations.^[28] In more recent times also, much has been made of his religious views by scholars such as Richard Tuck and J. G. A. Pocock, but there is still widespread disagreement about the exact significance of Hobbes's unusual views on religion.

As Martinich has pointed out, in Hobbes's time the term "atheist" was often applied to people who believed in God but not in divine providence, or to people who believed in God but also maintained other beliefs that were inconsistent with such belief. He says that this "sort of discrepancy has led to many errors in determining who was an atheist in the early modern period".^[29] In this extended early modern sense of atheism, Hobbes did take positions that strongly disagreed with church teachings of his time. For example, he argued repeatedly that there are no incorporeal substances, and that all things, including human thoughts, and even God, heaven, and hell are corporeal, matter in motion. He argued that "though Scripture acknowledge spirits, yet doth it nowhere say, that they are incorporeal, meaning thereby without dimensions and quantity".^[30] (In this view, Hobbes claimed to be following Tertullian, whose views were not condemned in the First Council of Nicaea.) Like John Locke, he also stated that true revelation can never disagree with human reason and experience,^[31] although he also argued that people should accept revelation and its interpretations for the reason that they should accept the commands of their sovereign, in order to avoid war.

Later life

Tomb of Thomas Hobbes in St John the Baptist's Church, Ault Hucknall in Derbyshire

In 1658, Hobbes published the final section of his philosophical system, completing the scheme he had planned more than 20 years before. De Homine consisted for the most part of an elaborate theory of vision. The remainder of the treatise dealt cursorily with some of the topics more fully treated in the Human Nature and the Leviathan. In addition to publishing some controversial writings on mathematics and physics, Hobbes also continued to produce philosophical works. From the time of the Restoration, he acquired a new prominence; "Hobbism" became a byword for all that respectable society ought to denounce. The young king, Hobbes' former pupil, now Charles II, remembered Hobbes and called him to the court to grant him a pension of £100.

The king was important in protecting Hobbes when, in 1666, the House of Commons introduced a bill against atheism and profaneness. That same year, on 17 October 1666, it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred "should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness... in particular... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan".^[32] Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers. At the same time, he examined the actual state of the law of heresy. The results of his investigation were first announced in three short Dialogues added as an Appendix to his Latin translation of Leviathan, published in Amsterdam in 1668. In this appendix, Hobbes aimed to show that, since the High Court of Commission had been put down, there remained no court of heresy at all to which he was amenable, and that nothing could be heresy except opposing the Nicene Creed, which, he maintained, Leviathan did not do.

The only consequence that came of the bill was that Hobbes could never thereafter publish anything in England on subjects relating to human conduct. The 1668 edition of his works was printed in Amsterdam because he could not obtain the censor's licence for its publication in England. Other writings were not made public until after his death, including Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1662. For some time, Hobbes was not even allowed to respond, whatever his enemies tried. Despite this, his reputation abroad was formidable, and noble or learned foreigners who came to England never forgot to pay their respects to the old philosopher.

His final works were an autobiography in Latin verse in 1672, and a translation of four books of the Odyssey into "rugged" English rhymes that in 1673 led to a complete translation of both Iliad and Odyssey in 1675.

Death

In October 1679 Hobbes suffered a bladder disorder, and then a paralytic stroke, from which he died on 4 December 1679, aged 91.^[33] His last words were said to have been, "A great leap in the dark," uttered in his final conscious moments.^[34] His body was interred in St John the Baptist's Church, Ault Hucknall, in Derbyshire.^[35]

Works (Bibliography)

• 1602. Latin translation of Euripides' Medea (lost).
• 1620. Three of the discourses in the Horae Subsecivae: Observation and Discourses (A Discourse of Tacitus, A Discourse of Rome, and A Discourse of Laws).^[36]
• 1626. De Mirabilis Pecci, Being the Wonders of the Peak in Darby-shire, (a poem first published in 1636)
• 1629. Eight Books of the Peloponnesian Warre, translation with an Introduction of Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• 1630. A Short Tract on First Principles, British Museum, Harleian MS 6796, ff. 297–308: critical edition with commentary and French translation by Jean Bernhardt: Court traité des premiers principes, Paris, PUF, 1988 (authorship doubtful: this work is attributed by some critics to Robert Payne).^[37]
• 1637 A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (in Molesworth's edition the title is The Whole Art of Rhetoric). A new edition has been edited by John T. Harwood: The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. (Authorship probable: While Karl Schuhmann firmly rejects the attribution of this work to Hobbes, disagreeing with Quentin Skinner, who has come to agree with Schuhmann, a preponderance of scholarship disagrees with Schuhmann's idiosyncratic assessment.)^[38]
• 1639. Tractatus opticus II (British Library, Harley MS 6796, ff. 193–266; first complete edition 1963)^[39]
• 1640. Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (circulated only in handwritten copies, first printed edition, without Hobbes's permission in 1650)
• 1641. Objectiones ad Cartesii Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Third series of Objections)
• 1642. Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Tertia de Cive (Latin, first limited edition)
• 1643. De Motu, Loco et Tempore (first edition 1973 with the title: Thomas White's De Mundo Examined)^[40]
• 1644. Part of the Praefatio to Mersenni Ballistica (in F. Marini Mersenni minimi Cogitata physico-mathematica. In quibus tam naturae quàm artis effectus admirandi certissimis demonstrationibus explicantur)
• 1644. Opticae, liber septimus, (written in 1640) in Universae geometriae mixtaeque mathematicae synopsis, edited by Marin Mersenne (reprinted by Molesworth in OL V pp. 215–48 with the title Tractatus Opticus)
• 1646. A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (Harley MS 3360; Molesworth published only the dedication to Cavendish and the conclusion in EW VII, pp. 467–71)
• 1646. Of Liberty and Necessity (published without the permission of Hobbes in 1654)
• 1647. Elementa Philosophica de Cive (second expanded edition with a new Preface to the Reader)
• 1650. Answer to Sir William Davenant's Preface before Gondibert
• 1650. Human Nature: or The fundamental Elements of Policie (first thirteen chapters of The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, published without Hobbes's authorisation)
• 1650. Pirated edition of The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, repackaged to include two parts:
  • Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policie (chapters 14–19 of Part One of the Elements of 1640)
  • De Corpore Politico (Part Two of the Elements of 1640)
• 1651. Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society (English translation of De Cive)^[41]
• 1651. Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil
• 1654. Of Libertie and Necessitie, a Treatise
• 1655. De Corpore (Latin)
• 1656. Elements of Philosophy, The First Section, Concerning Body (anonymous English translation of De Corpore)
• 1656. Six Lessons to the Professor of Mathematics
• 1656. The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (reprint of Of Libertie and Necessitie, a Treatise, with the addition of Bramhall's reply and Hobbes's reply to Bramahall's reply)
• 1657. Stigmai, or Marks of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church Politics, and Barbarisms of John Wallis
• 1658. Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Secunda De Homine
• 1660. Examinatio et emendatio mathematicae hodiernae qualis explicatur in libris Johannis Wallisii
• 1661. Dialogus physicus, sive De natura aeris
• 1662. Problematica Physica (translated in English in 1682 as Seven Philosophical Problems)
• 1662. Seven Philosophical Problems, and Two Propositions of Geometru (published posthumously)
• 1662. Mr. Hobbes Considered in his Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners. By way of Letter to Dr. Wallis (English autobiography)
• 1666. De Principis & Ratiocinatione Geometrarum
• 1666. A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (published in 1681)
• 1668. Leviathan (Latin translation)
• 1668. An Answer to a Book published by Dr. Bramhall (published in 1682)
• 1671. Three Papers Presented to the Royal Society Against Dr. Wallis. Together with Considerations on Dr. Wallis his Answer to them
• 1671. Rosetum Geometricum, sive Propositiones Aliquot Frustra antehac tentatae. Cum Censura brevi Doctrinae Wallisianae de Motu
• 1672. Lux Mathematica. Excussa Collisionibus Johannis Wallisii
• 1673. English translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
• 1674. Principia et Problemata Aliquot Geometrica Antè Desperata, Nunc breviter Explicata & Demonstrata
• 1678. Decameron Physiologicum: Or, Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy
• 1679. Thomae Hobbessii Malmesburiensis Vita. Authore seipso (Latin autobiography, translated into English in 1680)

Posthumous works

• 1680. An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, And the Punishment thereof
• 1681. Behemoth, or The Long Parliament (written in 1668, unpublished at the request of the King, first pirated edition 1679)
• 1682. Seven Philosophical Problems (English translation of Problematica Physica, 1662)
• 1682. A Garden of Geometrical Roses (English translation of Rosetum Geometricum, 1671)
• 1682. Some Principles and Problems in Geometry (English translation of Principia et Problemata, 1674)
• 1688. Historia Ecclesiastica Carmine Elegiaco Concinnata

Complete editions

• Thomae Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera Philosophica quae Latina Scripsit, Studio et labore Gulielmi Molesworth, (Londini, 1839–1845). 5 volumes. Reprint: Aalen, 1966 (= OL).

• Volume I. Elementorum Philosophiae I: De Corpore
• Volume II. Elementorum Philosophiae II and III: De Homine and De Cive
• Volume III. Latin version of Leviathan.
• Volume IV. Various concerning mathematics, geometry and physics.
• Volume V. Various short works.

• The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; Now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth, Bart., (London: Bohn, 1839–45). 11 volumes. Reprint London, 1939-–; reprint: Aalen, 1966 (= EW).

• Volume 1. De Corpore translated from Latin to English.
• Volume 2. De Cive.
• Volume 3. The Leviathan
• Volume 4.

• TRIPOS ; in Three Discourses:

• I. Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy
• II. De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law
• III. Of Liberty and Necessity

• An Answer to Bishop Bramhall's Book, called "The Catching of the Leviathan"
• An Historical Narration concerning Heresy, and the Punishment thereof
• Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes
• Answer to Sir William Davenant's Preface before "Gondibert"
• Letter to the Right Honourable Edward Howard

• Volume 5. The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, clearly stated and debated between Dr Bramhall Bishop of Derry and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury.
• Volume 6.

• A Dialogue Between a Philosopher & a Student of the Common Laws of England
• A Dialogue of the Common Law
• Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, and of the Counsels and Artifices By Which They Were Carried On From the Year 1640 to the Year 1660
• The Whole Art of Rhetoric (Hobbes's translation of his own Latin summary of Aristotle's Rhetoric published in 1637 with the title A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique)
• The Art of Rhetoric Plainly Set Forth. With Pertinent Examples For the More Easy Understanding and Practice of the Same (this work is not of Hobbes but by Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike, 1584)
• The Art of Sophistry

• Volume 7.

• Seven Philosophical Problems
• Decameron Physiologicum
• Proportion of a straight line to half the arc of a quadrant
• Six lessons to the Savilian Professors of the Mathematics
• ΣΤΙΓΜΑΙ, or Marks of the absurd Geometry etc. of Dr Wallis
• Extract of a letter from Henry Stubbe
• Three letters presented to the Royal Society against Dr Wallis
• Considerations on the answer of Dr Wallis
• Letters and other pieces

• Volume 8 and 9. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, translated into English by Hobbes.
• Volume 10. The Iliad, and The Odyssey, translated by Hobbes into English
• Volume 11. Index.

Posthumous works not included in the Molesworth editions

• The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, edited with a preface and critical notes by Ferdinand Tönnies, London, 1889 (first complete edition).
• Short Tract on First Principles, in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, Appendix I, pp. 193–210.^[42] (this work is now attributed to Robert Payne).^[43]
• Tractatus opticus II (1639, British Library, Harley MS 6796, ff. 193–266): first partial edition in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, Appendix II, pp. 211–26; first complete edition (but omitting the diagrams) by Franco Alessio, Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 18, 1963, pp. 147–228.
• Critique du 'De mundo' de Thomas White, edited by Jean Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones, Paris, 1973, with three appendixes:
  • De Motibus Solis, Aetheris & Telluris (pp. 439–47: a Latin poem on the movement of the Earth).
  • Notes in English on an ancient redaction of some chapters of De Corpore (July 1643; pp. 448–60: MS 5297, National Library of Wales).
  • Notes for the Logica and Philosophia prima of the De Corpore (pp. 461–513: Chatsworth MS A10 and the notes of Charles Cavendish on a draft of the De Corpore: British Library, Harley MS 6083).
• Of the Life and History of Thucydides, in Hobbes's Thucydides, edited by Richard Schlatter, New Brunswick, pp. 10–27, 1975.
• Three Discourses: a Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes (TD), edited by Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene Saxonhouse, Chicago, 1975.
  • A Discourse upon the Beginning of Tacitus, in TD, pp. 31–67.
  • A Discourse of Rome, in TD, pp. 71–102.
  • A Discourse of Law, in TD, pp. 105–19.
• Thomas Hobbes' A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (British Library, Harley MS 3360). Critical Edition by Elaine C. Stroud, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1983.
• Of Passions, Edition of the unpublished manuscript Harley 6093 by Anna Minerbi Belgrado, in: Rivista di storia della filosofia, 43, 1988, pp. 729–38.
• The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Noel Malcolm, Oxford: the Clarendon Edition, vol. 6–7, 1994 (I: 1622–1659; II: 1660–1679).

Translations in modern English

• De Corpore, Part I. Computatio Sive Logica. Edited with an Introductory Essay by L C. Hungerland and G. R. Vick. Translation and Commentary by A. Martinich. New York: Abaris Books, 1981.
• Thomas White's De mundo Examined, translation by H. W. Jones, Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1976 (the appendixes of the Latin edition (1973) are not enclosed).

New critical editions of Hobbes' works (in progress)

• Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Clarendon Press (10 volumes published of 27 planned).
• Traduction des œuvres latines de Hobbes, under the direction of Yves Charles Zarka, Paris: Vrin (5 volumes published of 17 planned).

Cultural evolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.

Cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, was originally developed in the 19th century by anthropologists stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology and organizational studies. Previously, it was believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations, but anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise in consequence of a combination of social, evolutionary and biological influences.^[3][4]

There have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including dual inheritance theory, sociocultural evolution, memetics, cultural evolutionism and other variants on cultural selection theory. The approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin but in how they conceptualize the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories and methods that they apply to its study. In recent years, there has been a convergence of the cluster of related theories towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right.^[5][6] In 2017, the Cultural Evolution Society held its inaugural meeting in Jena, Germany.

History

Aristotle thought that development of cultural form (such as poetry) stops when it reaches its maturity.^[7] In 1873 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it was written: "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere in disadvantage".^[8]

Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself.^[9] He argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.

Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as Comte and Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen^[12] single out David George Ritchie and Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism. Despite the stereotypical image of social Darwinism that developed later in the century, neither Ritchie nor Veblen were on the political right.

The early years of the 20th century and particularly the First World War saw biological concepts and metaphors shunned by most social sciences. Even uttering the word evolution carried "serious risk to one's intellectual reputation." Darwinian ideas were also in decline following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics but were revived, especially by Fisher, Haldane and Wright, who developed the first population genetic models and as it became known the modern synthesis.

Cultural evolutionary concepts, or even metaphors, revived more slowly. If there was one influential individual in the revival it was probably Donald T. Campbell. In 1960^[13] he drew on Wright to draw a parallel between genetic evolution and the "blind variation and selective retention" of creative ideas; work that was developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965^[14] (a work that includes references to other works in the then current revival of interest in the field. Campbell (1965 26) was clear that he understood cultural evolution not as an analogy "from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general model for quasiteleological processes for which organic evolution is but one instance".

Others pursued more specific analogies notably the anthropologist F. T. (Ted) Cloak who argued in 1975^[15] for the existence of learnt cultural instructions (cultural corpuscles or i-culture) resulting in material artefacts (m-culture) such as wheels.^[16] The argument thereby introduced as to whether cultural evolution requires neurological instructions continues to the present day.

Unilinear theory

In the 19th century cultural evolution was thought to follow a unilineal pattern whereby all cultures progressively develop over time. The underlying assumption being that Cultural Evolution itself led to the growth and development of civilization ^[3][17][18]

Thomas Hobbes in the 17th Century declared indigenous culture to have "no arts, no letters, no society" and he described facing life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He, like other scholars of his time, reasoned that everything positive and esteemed resulted from the slow development away from this poor lowly state of being.^[3]

Under the theory of unilinear Cultural Evolution, all societies and cultures develop on the same path. The first to present a general unilineal theory was Herbert Spencer. Spencer suggested that humans develop into more complex beings as culture progresses, where people originally lived in "undifferentiated hordes" culture progresses and develops to the point where civilization develops hierarchies. The concept behind unilinear theory is that the steady accumulation of knowledge and culture leads to the separation of the various modern day sciences and the build-up of cultural norms present in modern-day society ^[3][17]

In Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877), Morgan labels seven differing stages of human culture: lower, middle, and upper savagery; lower, middle, and upper barbarism; and civilization. He justifies this staging classification by referencing societies whose cultural traits resembled those of each of his stage classifications of the cultural progression. Morgan gave no example of lower savagery, as even at the time of writing few examples remained of this cultural type. At the time of expounding his theory, Morgan's work was highly respected and became a foundation for much of anthropological study that was to follow.

Cultural particularism

There began a widespread condemnation of unilinear theory in the late 19th century. Unilinear cultural evolution implicitly assumes that culture was borne out of the United States and Western Europe. That was seen by many to be racist, as it assumed that some individuals and cultures were more evolved than others.^[3]

Franz Boas, a German-born anthropologist, was the instigator of the movement known as 'cultural particularism' in which the emphasis shifted to a multilinear approach to cultural evolution. That differed to the unilinear approach that used to be favoured in the sense that cultures were no longer compared, but they were assessed uniquely. Boas, along with several of his pupils, notably A.L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, changed the focus of anthropological research to the effect that instead of generalizing cultures, the attention was now on collecting empirical evidence of how individual cultures change and develop.^[3]

Multilinear theory

Cultural particularism dominated popular thought for the first half of the 20th century before American anthropologists, including Leslie A. White, Julian H. Steward, Marshall D. Sahlins, and Elman R. Service, revived the debate on cultural evolution. These theorists were the first to introduce the idea of multilinear cultural evolution.^[3]

Under multilinear theory, there are no fixed stages (as in unilinear theory) towards cultural development. Instead, there are several stages of differing lengths and forms. Although, individual cultures develop differently and cultural evolution occurs differently, multilinear theory acknowledges that cultures and societies do tend to develop and move forward.^[3][19]

Leslie A. White focused on the idea that different cultures had differing amounts of 'energy', White argued that with greater energy societies could possess greater levels of social differentiation. He rejected separation of modern societies from primitive societies. In contrast, Steward argued, much like Darwin's theory of evolution, that culture adapts to its surroundings. 'Evolution and Culture' by Sahlins and Service is an attempt to condense the views of White and Steward into a universal theory of multilinear evolution.^[3]

Memetics

Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene proposed the concept of the "meme", which is analogous to that of the gene. A meme is an idea-replicator that can reproduce itself, by jumping from mind to mind via the process of one human learning from another via imitation. Along with the "virus of the mind" image, the meme might be thought of as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.), which spreads among the individuals of a population. The variation and selection in the copying process enables Darwinian evolution among memeplexes and therefore is a candidate for a mechanism of cultural evolution. As memes are "selfish" in that they are "interested" only in their own success, they could well be in conflict with their biological host's genetic interests.

Consequently, a "meme's eye" view might account for certain evolved cultural traits, such as suicide terrorism, that are successful at spreading meme of martyrdom, but fatal to their hosts and often other people.

Evolutionary epistemology

"Evolutionary epistemology" can also refer to a theory that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge and argues that units of knowledge themselves, particularly scientific theories, evolve according to selection. In that case, a theory, like the germ theory of disease, becomes more or less credible according to changes in the body of knowledge surrounding it.

Evolutionary epistemology is a naturalistic approach to epistemology, which emphasizes the importance of natural selection in two primary roles. In the first role, selection is the generator and maintainer of the reliability of our senses and cognitive mechanisms, as well as the "fit" between those mechanisms and the world. In the second role, trial and error learning and the evolution of scientific theories are construed as selection processes.

One of the hallmarks of evolutionary epistemology is the notion that empirical testing alone does not justify the pragmatic value of scientific theories but rather that social and methodological processes select those theories with the closest "fit" to a given problem. The mere fact that a theory has survived the most rigorous empirical tests available does not, in the calculus of probability, predict its ability to survive future testing. Karl Popper used Newtonian physics as an example of a body of theories so thoroughly confirmed by testing as to be considered unassailable but were nevertheless overturned by Einstein's bold insights into the nature of space-time. For the evolutionary epistemologist, all theories are true only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived.

Popper is considered by many to have given evolutionary epistemology its first comprehensive treatment, bur Donald T. Campbell had coined the phrase in 1974.^[20]

Dual Inheritance Theory

Taken from the main page:

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution."

Criticism and controversy

As a relatively new and growing scientific field, cultural evolution is undergoing much formative debate. Some of the prominent conversations are revolving around Universal Darwinism,^[14][21] dual inheritance theory,^[22] and memetics.^{[23][24][25][26]}

More recently, cultural evolution has drawn conversations from multi-disciplinary sources with movement towards a unified view between the natural and social sciences. There remains some accusation of biological reductionism, as opposed to cultural naturalism, and scientific efforts are often mistakenly associated with Social Darwinism. However, some useful parallels between biological and social evolution still appear to be found.^[27]

Criticism of historic approaches to Cultural Evolution:

Cultural evolution has been criticized over the past two centuries that it has advanced its development into the form it holds today. Morgan's theory of evolution implies that all cultures follow the same basic pattern. Human culture is not linear, different cultures develop in different directions and at differing paces, and it is not satisfactory or productive to assume cultures develop in the same way.^[28]

A further key critique of cultural evolutionism is what is known as "armchair anthropology". The name results from the fact that many of the anthropologists advancing theories had not seen first hand the cultures they were studying. The research and data collected was carried out by explorers and missionaries as opposed to the anthropologists themselves. Edward Tylor was the epitome of that and did very little of his own research.^[25][28]Cultural evolution is also criticized for being ethnocentric, cultures are still seen to be attempting to emulate western civilization. Under ethnocentricity, primitive societies are said to be not yet at the cultural levels of other western societies^[28][29]

Much of the criticism aimed at cultural evolution is focused on the unilinear approach to social change. Broadly speaking in the second half of the 20th century the criticisms of cultural evolution have been answered by the multilinear theory. Ethnocentricity, for example, is more prevalent under the unilinear theory.^[28][25][29]

Some recent approaches, such as Dual Inheritance Theory, make use of empirical methods including psychological and animal studies, field site research, and computational models.

Dual inheritance theory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.

'Culture', in this context is defined as 'socially learned behavior', and 'social learning' is defined as copying behaviors observed in others or acquiring behaviors through being taught by others. Most of the modelling done in the field relies on the first dynamic (copying) though it can be extended to teaching. Social learning at its simplest involves blind copying of behaviors from a model (someone observed behaving), though it is also understood to have many potential biases, including success bias (copying from those who are perceived to be better off), status bias (copying from those with higher status), homophily (copying from those most like ourselves), conformist bias (disproportionately picking up behaviors that more people are performing), etc.. Understanding social learning is a system of pattern replication, and understanding that there are different rates of survival for different socially learned cultural variants, this sets up, by definition, an evolutionary structure: cultural evolution.^[4]

Because genetic evolution is relatively well understood, most of DIT examines cultural evolution and the interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.

Theoretical basis

DIT holds that genetic and cultural evolution interacted in the evolution of Homo sapiens. DIT recognizes that the natural selection of genotypes is an important component of the evolution of human behavior and that cultural traits can be constrained by genetic imperatives. However, DIT also recognizes that genetic evolution has endowed the human species with a parallel evolutionary process of cultural evolution. DIT makes three main claims:^[5]

Culture capacities are adaptations

The human capacity to store and transmit culture arose from genetically evolved psychological mechanisms. This implies that at some point during the evolution of the human species a type of social learning leading to cumulative cultural evolution was evolutionarily advantageous.

Culture evolves

Social learning processes give rise to cultural evolution. Cultural traits are transmitted differently from genetic traits and, therefore, result in different population-level effects on behavioral variation.

Genes and culture co-evolve

Cultural traits alter the social and physical environments under which genetic selection operates. For example, the cultural adoptions of agriculture and dairying have, in humans, caused genetic selection for the traits to digest starch and lactose, respectively.^{[6][7][8][9][10][11]} As another example, it is likely that once culture became adaptive, genetic selection caused a refinement of the cognitive architecture that stores and transmits cultural information. This refinement may have further influenced the way culture is stored and the biases that govern its transmission.

DIT also predicts that, under certain situations, cultural evolution may select for traits that are genetically maladaptive. An example of this is the demographic transition, which describes the fall of birth rates within industrialized societies. Dual inheritance theorists hypothesize that the demographic transition may be a result of a prestige bias, where individuals that forgo reproduction to gain more influence in industrial societies are more likely to be chosen as cultural models.^[12][13]

View of culture

People have defined the word "culture" to describe a large set of different phenomena.^[14][15] A definition that sums up what is meant by "culture" in DIT is:

Culture is socially learned information stored in individuals' brains that is capable of affecting behavior.^[16][17]

This view of culture emphasizes population thinking by focusing on the process by which culture is generated and maintained. It also views culture as a dynamic property of individuals, as opposed to a view of culture as a superorganic entity to which individuals must conform.^[18] This view's main advantage is that it connects individual-level processes to population-level outcomes.^[19]

Genetic influence on cultural evolution

Genes affect cultural evolution via psychological predispositions on cultural learning.^[20] Genes encode much of the information needed to form the human brain. Genes constrain the brain's structure and, hence, the ability of the brain to acquire and store culture. Genes may also endow individuals with certain types of transmission bias (described below).

Cultural influences on genetic evolution

Culture can profoundly influence gene frequencies in a population.

Lactase persistence

One of the best known examples is the prevalence of the genotype for adult lactose absorption in human populations, such as Northern Europeans and some African societies, with a long history of raising cattle for milk. Until around 7,500 years ago,^[21] lactase production stopped shortly after weaning,^[22] and in societies which did not develop dairying, such as East Asians and Amerindians, this is still true today.^[23][24] In areas with lactase persistence, it is believed that by domesticating animals, a source of milk became available while an adult and thus strong selection for lactase persistence could occur,^[21][25] in a Scandinavian population the estimated selection coefficient was 0.09-0.19.^[25] This implies that the cultural practice of raising cattle first for meat and later for milk led to selection for genetic traits for lactose digestion.^[26] Recently, analysis of natural selection on the human genome suggests that civilization has accelerated genetic change in humans over the past 10,000 years.^[27]

Food processing

Culture has driven changes to the human digestive systems making many digestive organs, like our teeth or stomach, smaller than expected for primates of a similar size,^[28] and has been attributed to one of the reasons why humans have such large brains compared to other great apes.^[29][30] This is due to food processing. Early examples of food processing include pounding, marinating and most notably cooking. Pounding meat breaks down the muscle fibres, hence taking away some of the job from the mouth, teeth and jaw.^[31][32] Marinating emulates the action of the stomach with high acid levels. Cooking partially breaks down food making it more easily digestible. Food enters the body effectively partly digested, and as such food processing reduces the work that the digestive system has to do. This means that there is selection for smaller digestive organs as the tissue is energetically expensive,^[28] those with smaller digestive organs can process their food but at a lower energetic cost than those with larger organs.^[33] Cooking is notable because the energy available from food increases when cooked and this also means less time is spent looking for food.^[29][34][35]

Humans living on cooked diets spend only a fraction of their day chewing compared to other extant primates living on raw diets. American girls and boys spent on average 8 and 7 percent of their day chewing respectively, compared to chimpanzees who spend more than 6 hours a day chewing.^[36] This frees up time which can be used for hunting. A raw diet means hunting is constrained since time spent hunting is time not spent eating and chewing plant material, but cooking reduces the time required to get the day's energy requirements, allowing for more subsistence activities.^[37] Digestibility of cooked carbohydrates is approximately on average 30% higher than digestibility of non cooked carbohydrates.^[34][38] This increased energy intake, more free time and savings made on tissue used in the digestive system allowed for the selection of genes for larger brain size.

Despite its benefits, brain tissue requires a large amount of calories, hence a main constraint in selection for larger brains is calorie intake. A greater calorie intake can support greater quantities of brain tissue. This is argued to explain why human brains can be much larger than other apes, since humans are the only ape to engage in food processing.^[29] The cooking of food has influenced genes to the extent that, research suggests, humans cannot live without cooking.^[39][29] A study on 513 individuals consuming long term raw diets found that as the percentage of their diet which was made up of raw food and/or the length they had been on a diet of raw food increased, their BMI decreased.^[39] This is despite access to many non thermal processing, like grinding, pounding or heating to 48 deg. c. (118 deg. F).^[39] With approximately 86 billion neurons in the human brain and 60–70 kg body mass, an exclusively raw diet close to that of what extant primates have would be not viable as, when modelled, it is argued that it would require an infeasible level of more than nine hours of feeding everyday.^[29] However, this is contested, with alternative modelling showing enough calories could be obtained within 5–6 hours per day.^[40] Some scientists and anthropologists point to evidence that brain size in the Homo lineage started to increase well before the advent of cooking due to increased consumption of meat^[28][40][41] and that basic food processing (slicing) accounts for the size reduction in organs related to chewing.^[42] Cornélio et al. argues that improving cooperative abilities and a varying of diet to more meat and seeds improved foraging and hunting efficiency. It is this that allowed for the brain expansion, independent of cooking which they argue came much later, a consequence from the complex cognition that developed.^[40] Yet this is still an example of a cultural shift in diet and the resulting genetic evolution. Further criticism comes from the controversy of the archaeological evidence available. Some claim there is a lack of evidence of fire control when brain sizes first started expanding.^[40][43] Wrangham argues that anatomical evidence around the time of the origin of Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago), indicates that the control of fire and hence cooking occurred.^[34] At this time, the largest reductions in tooth size in the entirety of human evolution occurred, indicating that softer foods became prevalent in the diet. Also at this time was a narrowing of the pelvis indicating a smaller gut and also there is evidence that there was a loss of the ability to climb which Wrangham argues indicates the control of fire, since sleeping on the ground needs fire to ward off predators.^[44] The proposed increases in brain size from food processing will have led to a greater mental capacity for further cultural innovation in food processing which will have increased digestive efficiency further providing more energy for further gains in brain size.^[45] This positive feedback loop is argued to have led to the rapid brain size increases seen in the Homo lineage.^[46][40]

Mechanisms of cultural evolution

In DIT, the evolution and maintenance of cultures is described by five major mechanisms: natural selection of cultural variants, random variation, cultural drift, guided variation and transmission bias.

Natural selection

Cultural differences among individuals can lead to differential survival of individuals. The patterns of this selective process depend on transmission biases and can result in behavior that is more adaptive to a given environment.

Random variation

Random variation arises from errors in the learning, display or recall of cultural information, and is roughly analogous to the process of mutation in genetic evolution.

Cultural drift

Cultural drift is a process roughly analogous to genetic drift in evolutionary biology.^[47][48][49] In cultural drift, the frequency of cultural traits in a population may be subject to random fluctuations due to chance variations in which traits are observed and transmitted (sometimes called "sampling error").^[50] These fluctuations might cause cultural variants to disappear from a population. This effect should be especially strong in small populations.^[51] A model by Hahn and Bentley shows that cultural drift gives a reasonably good approximation to changes in the popularity of American baby names.^[50] Drift processes have also been suggested to explain changes in archaeological pottery and technology patent applications.^[49] Changes in the songs of song birds are also thought to arise from drift processes, where distinct dialects in different groups occur due to errors in songbird singing and acquisition by successive generations.^[52] Cultural drift is also observed in an early computer model of cultural evolution.^[53]

Guided variation

Cultural traits may be gained in a population through the process of individual learning. Once an individual learns a novel trait, it can be transmitted to other members of the population. The process of guided variation depends on an adaptive standard that determines what cultural variants are learned.

Biased transmission

Understanding the different ways that culture traits can be transmitted between individuals has been an important part of DIT research since the 1970s.^[54][55] Transmission biases occur when some cultural variants are favored over others during the process of cultural transmission.^[56] Boyd and Richerson (1985)^[56] defined and analytically modeled a number of possible transmission biases. The list of biases has been refined over the years, especially by Henrich and McElreath.^[57]

Content bias

Content biases result from situations where some aspect of a cultural variant's content makes them more likely to be adopted.^[58] Content biases can result from genetic preferences, preferences determined by existing cultural traits, or a combination of the two. For example, food preferences can result from genetic preferences for sugary or fatty foods and socially-learned eating practices and taboos.^[58] Content biases are sometimes called "direct biases."^[56]

Context bias

Context biases result from individuals using clues about the social structure of their population to determine what cultural variants to adopt. This determination is made without reference to the content of the variant. There are two major categories of context biases: model-based biases, and frequency-dependent biases.

Model-based biases

Model-based biases result when an individual is biased to choose a particular "cultural model" to imitate. There are four major categories of model-based biases: prestige bias, skill bias, success bias, and similarity bias.^[5][59] A "prestige bias" results when individuals are more likely to imitate cultural models that are seen as having more prestige. A measure of prestige could be the amount of deference shown to a potential cultural model by other individuals. A "skill bias" results when individuals can directly observe different cultural models performing a learned skill and are more likely to imitate cultural models that perform better at the specific skill. A "success bias" results from individuals preferentially imitating cultural models that they determine are most generally successful (as opposed to successful at a specific skill as in the skill bias.) A "similarity bias" results when individuals are more likely to imitate cultural models that are perceived as being similar to the individual based on specific traits.

Frequency-dependent biases

Frequency-dependent biases result when an individual is biased to choose particular cultural variants based on their perceived frequency in the population. The most explored frequency-dependent bias is the "conformity bias." Conformity biases result when individuals attempt to copy the mean or the mode cultural variant in the population. Another possible frequency dependent bias is the "rarity bias." The rarity bias results when individuals preferentially choose cultural variants that are less common in the population. The rarity bias is also sometimes called a "nonconformist" or "anti-conformist" bias.

Social learning and cumulative cultural evolution

In DIT, the evolution of culture is dependent on the evolution of social learning. Analytic models show that social learning becomes evolutionarily beneficial when the environment changes with enough frequency that genetic inheritance can not track the changes, but not fast enough that individual learning is more efficient.^[60] For environments that have very little variability, social learning is not needed since genes can adapt fast enough to the changes that occur, and innate behaviour is able to deal with the constant environment.^[61] In fast changing environments cultural learning would not be useful because what the previous generation knew is now outdated and will provide no benefit in the changed environment, and hence individual learning is more beneficial. It is only in the moderately changing environment where cultural learning becomes useful since each generation shares a mostly similar environment but genes have insufficient time to change to changes in the environment.^[62] While other species have social learning, and thus some level of culture, only humans, some birds and chimpanzees are known to have cumulative culture.^[63] Boyd and Richerson argue that the evolution of cumulative culture depends on observational learning and is uncommon in other species because it is ineffective when it is rare in a population. They propose that the environmental changes occurring in the Pleistocene may have provided the right environmental conditions.^[62] Michael Tomasello argues that cumulative cultural evolution results from a ratchet effect that began when humans developed the cognitive architecture to understand others as mental agents.^[64] Furthermore, Tomasello proposed in the 80s that there are some disparities between the observational learning mechanisms found in humans and great apes - which go some way to explain the observable difference between great ape traditions and human types of culture.

Cultural group selection

Although group selection is commonly thought to be nonexistent or unimportant in genetic evolution,^[65][66][67] DIT predicts that, due to the nature of cultural inheritance, it may be an important force in cultural evolution. Group selection occurs in cultural evolution because conformist biases make it difficult for novel cultural traits to spread through a population (see above section on transmission biases). Conformist bias also helps maintain variation between groups. These two properties, rare in genetic transmission, are necessary for group selection to operate.^[68] Based on an earlier model by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman,^[69] Boyd and Richerson show that conformist biases are almost inevitable when traits spread through social learning,^[70] implying that group selection is common in cultural evolution. Analysis of small groups in New Guinea imply that cultural group selection might be a good explanation for slowly changing aspects of social structure, but not for rapidly changing fads.^[71] The ability of cultural evolution to maintain intergroup diversity is what allows for the study of cultural phylogenetics.^[72]

Historical development

The idea that human cultures undergo a similar evolutionary process as genetic evolution goes back at least to Darwin^[73] In the 1960s, Donald T. Campbell published some of the first theoretical work that adapted principles of evolutionary theory to the evolution of cultures.^[74] In 1976, two developments in cultural evolutionary theory set the stage for DIT. In that year Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene introduced ideas of cultural evolution to a popular audience. Although one of the best-selling science books of all time, because of its lack of mathematical rigor, it had little effect on the development of DIT. Also in 1976, geneticists Marcus Feldman and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza published the first dynamic models of gene–culture coevolution.^[75] These models were to form the basis for subsequent work on DIT, heralded by the publication of three seminal books in the 1980s.

The first was Charles Lumsden and E.O. Wilson's Genes, Mind and Culture.^[76] This book outlined a series of mathematical models of how genetic evolution might favor the selection of cultural traits and how cultural traits might, in turn, affect the speed of genetic evolution. While it was the first book published describing how genes and culture might coevolve, it had relatively little effect on the further development of DIT.^[77] Some critics felt that their models depended too heavily on genetic mechanisms at the expense of cultural mechanisms.^[78] Controversy surrounding Wilson's sociobiological theories may also have decreased the lasting effect of this book.^[77]

The second 1981 book was Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman's Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach.^[48] Borrowing heavily from population genetics and epidemiology, this book built a mathematical theory concerning the spread of cultural traits. It describes the evolutionary implications of vertical transmission, passing cultural traits from parents to offspring; oblique transmission, passing cultural traits from any member of an older generation to a younger generation; and horizontal transmission, passing traits between members of the same population.

The next significant DIT publication was Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's 1985 Culture and the Evolutionary Process.^[56] This book presents the now-standard mathematical models of the evolution of social learning under different environmental conditions, the population effects of social learning, various forces of selection on cultural learning rules, different forms of biased transmission and their population-level effects, and conflicts between cultural and genetic evolution. The book's conclusion also outlined areas for future research that are still relevant today.^[79]

Current and future research

In their 1985 book, Boyd and Richerson outlined an agenda for future DIT research. This agenda, outlined below, called for the development of both theoretical models and empirical research. DIT has since built a rich tradition of theoretical models over the past two decades.^[80] However, there has not been a comparable level of empirical work.

In a 2006 interview Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson expressed disappointment at the little attention afforded to DIT:

"...for some reason I haven't fully fathomed, this most promising frontier of scientific research has attracted very few people and very little effort."^[81]

Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown attribute this lack of attention to DIT's heavy reliance on formal modeling.

"In many ways the most complex and potentially rewarding of all approaches, [DIT], with its multiple processes and cerebral onslaught of sigmas and deltas, may appear too abstract to all but the most enthusiastic reader. Until such a time as the theoretical hieroglyphics can be translated into a respectable empirical science most observers will remain immune to its message."^[82]

Economist Herbert Gintis disagrees with this critique, citing empirical work as well as more recent work using techniques from behavioral economics.^[83] These behavioral economic techniques have been adapted to test predictions of cultural evolutionary models in laboratory settings^[84][85][86] as well as studying differences in cooperation in fifteen small-scale societies in the field.^[87]

Since one of the goals of DIT is to explain the distribution of human cultural traits, ethnographic and ethnologic techniques may also be useful for testing hypothesis stemming from DIT. Although findings from traditional ethnologic studies have been used to buttress DIT arguments,^[88][89] thus far there have been little ethnographic fieldwork designed to explicitly test these hypotheses.^[71][87][90]

Herb Gintis has named DIT one of the two major conceptual theories with potential for unifying the behavioral sciences, including economics, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology and political science. Because it addresses both the genetic and cultural components of human inheritance, Gintis sees DIT models as providing the best explanations for the ultimate cause of human behavior and the best paradigm for integrating those disciplines with evolutionary theory.^[91] In a review of competing evolutionary perspectives on human behavior, Laland and Brown see DIT as the best candidate for uniting the other evolutionary perspectives under one theoretical umbrella.^[92]

Relation to other fields

Sociology and cultural anthropology

Two major topics of study in both sociology and cultural anthropology are human cultures and cultural variation. However, Dual Inheritance theorists charge that both disciplines too often treat culture as a static superorganic entity that dictates human behavior.^[93][94] Cultures are defined by a suite of common traits shared by a large group of people. DIT theorists argue that this doesn't sufficiently explain variation in cultural traits at the individual level. By contrast, DIT models human culture at the individual level and views culture as the result of a dynamic evolutionary process at the population level.^[93][95]

Human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychologists study the evolved architecture of the human mind. They see it as composed of many different programs that process information, each with assumptions and procedures that were specialized by natural selection to solve a different adaptive problem faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors (e.g., choosing mates, hunting, avoiding predators, cooperating, using aggression).^[96] These evolved programs contain content-rich assumptions about how the world and other people work. As ideas are passed from mind to mind, they are changed by these evolved inference systems (much like messages get changed in a game of telephone). But the changes are not random. Evolved programs add and subtract information, reshaping the ideas in ways that make them more "intuitive", more memorable, and more attention-grabbing. In other words, "memes" (ideas) are not like genes. Genes are copied faithfully as they are replicated, but ideas are not. It’s not just that ideas mutate every once in awhile, like genes do. Ideas are transformed every time they are passed from mind to mind, because the sender's message is being interpreted by evolved inference systems in the receiver.^[97][98] There is no necessary contradiction between evolutionary psychology and DIT, but evolutionary psychologists argue that the psychology implicit in many DIT models is too simple; evolved programs have a rich inferential structure not captured by the idea of a "content bias". They also argue that some of the phenomena DIT models attribute to cultural evolution are cases of "evoked culture"—situations in which different evolved programs are activated in different places, in response to cues in the environment.^[99]

Human sociobiologists try to understand how maximizing genetic fitness, in either the modern era or past environments, can explain human behavior. When faced with a trait that seems maladaptive, some sociobiologists try to determine how the trait actually increases genetic fitness (maybe through kin selection or by speculating about early evolutionary environments). Dual inheritance theorists, in contrast, will consider a variety of genetic and cultural processes in addition to natural selection on genes.

Human behavioral ecology

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) and DIT have a similar relationship to what ecology and evolutionary biology have in the biological sciences. HBE is more concerned about ecological process and DIT more focused on historical process.^[100] One difference is that human behavioral ecologists often assume that culture is a system that produces the most adaptive outcome in a given environment. This implies that similar behavioral traditions should be found in similar environments. However, this is not always the case. A study of African cultures showed that cultural history was a better predictor of cultural traits than local ecological conditions.^[101]

Memetics

Memetics, which comes from the meme idea described in Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, is similar to DIT in that it treats culture as an evolutionary process that is distinct from genetic transmission. However, there are some philosophical differences between memetics and DIT.^[102] One difference is that memetics' focus is on the selection potential of discrete replicators (memes), where DIT allows for transmission of both non-replicators and non-discrete cultural variants. DIT does not assume that replicators are necessary for cumulative adaptive evolution. DIT also more strongly emphasizes the role of genetic inheritance in shaping the capacity for cultural evolution. But perhaps the biggest difference is a difference in academic lineage. Memetics as a label is more influential in popular culture than in academia. Critics of memetics argue that it is lacking in empirical support or is conceptually ill-founded, and question whether there is hope for the memetic research program succeeding. Proponents point out that many cultural traits are discrete, and that many existing models of cultural inheritance assume discrete cultural units, and hence involve memes.^[103]

Criticisms

A number of criticisms of DIT have been put forward.^{[104][105][106]} From some points of view, use of the term ‘dual inheritance’ to refer to both what is transmitted genetically and what is transmitted culturally is technically misleading.^{[citation needed]} Many opponents cite horizontal transmission of ideas to be so "different" from the typical vertical transmission (reproduction) in genetic evolution that it is not evolution. However, 1) even genetic evolution uses non-vertical transmission through the environmental alteration of the genome during life by acquired circumstance: epigenetics, and 2) genetic evolution is also affected by direct horizontal transmission between separate species of plants and strains of bacteria: horizontal gene transfer. Other critics argue that there can be no "dual" inheritance without cultural inheritance being "sequestered" by the biotic genome.^{[citation needed]} Evidence for this process is scarce and controversial. Why this is a demand of critics, however, can be considered unclear as it refutes none of the central claims laid down by proponents of DIT.

More serious criticisms of DIT arise from the choice of Darwinian selection as an explanatory framework for culture. Some argue, cultural evolution does not possess the algorithmic structure of a process that can be modeled in a Darwinian framework as characterized by John von Neumann^[107] and used by John Holland to design the genetic algorithm.^[108] Forcing culture into a Darwinian framework gives a distorted picture of the process for several reasons. First, some argue Darwinian selection only works as an explanatory framework when variation is randomly generated.^{[citation needed]} To the extent that transmission biases are operative in culture, they mitigate the effect of Darwinian change, i.e. change in the distribution of variants over generations of exposure to selective pressures.^{[citation needed]} Second, since acquired change can accumulate orders of magnitude faster than inherited change, if it is not getting regularly discarded each generation, it quickly overwhelms the population-level mechanism of change identified by Darwin; it ‘swamps the phylogenetic signal’.^{[citation needed]} DIT proponents reply that the theory includes a very important role for decision-making forces.^[109] As a point of history, Darwin had a rather sophisticated theory of human cultural evolution that depended on natural selection "to a subordinate degree" compared to "laws, customs, and traditions" supported by public opinion.^[110] When critics complain that DIT is too "Darwinian" they are falsely claiming that it is too dependent on ideas related to the neodarwinian synthesis which dropped Darwin's own belief that the inheritance of acquired variation is important and which ignored his ideas on cultural evolution in humans.^[111]

Another discord in opinion stems from DIT opponents' assertion that there exists some "creative force" that is applied to each idea as it is received and before it is passed on, and that this agency is so powerful that it can be stronger than the selective system of other individuals assessing what to teach and whether your idea has merit.^{[citation needed]} But if this criticism was valid then it would be comparatively much easier to argue an unpopular or incorrect concepts than it actually is. In addition, nothing about DIT runs counter to the idea that an internally selective process (some would call creativity) also determines the fitness of ideas received and sent. In fact this decision making is a large part of the territory embraced by DIT proponents but is poorly understood due to limitations in neurobiology.

Related criticisms of the effort to frame culture in Darwinian terms have been leveled by Richard Lewontin,^[112] Niles Eldredge,^[113] and Stuart Kauffman.