Reply to Jay & Sonny's posts to the Yahoo public group on Human-Ethology
Craig Mackay
Thank you for your interest in my new book "SuperGenes: what really
makes us human". Let me start by saying that the entire book is
essentially summarised in the first chapter so that is all you really
need to read! Subsequent chapters are intended to provide background
and proper justification for the assertions made in the first chapter.
The SuperGene concept is intended to cover everything about a human
being that is not coded in his or her DNA so yes, it does have a lot
to do with culture and cultural evolution. What I try to do however
is to provide a framework within which we can understand that cultural
evolution must be taken much more seriously and that it happens in a
much more all-encompassing way than is often thought. Concepts such
as memetics as well as most descriptions of cultural transmission
emphasise pieces of information or ideas, and ignore the more complex
whole which is really what matters. The view expressed in the book is
that our behaviour in any social situation is better understood as the
complete content of our mind expressing an appropriate subset in a way
that maximises its appropriateness and therefore influence in that
situation. The complete content of our mind is continually updated
because of our experiences of others and so evolves continually. That
is true of everyone we come into contact with. The contents of our
mind are expressed differently in different social environments in a
way analogous to the way that our biological genes are expressed
differently in different cellular environments. It is this analogy
that led me to call these our SuperGenes. Because these SuperGenes
are being continually selected for and against and being continually
updated to maximise their reproductive success in a dynamic social
environment they let us evolve much more rapidly than is ever possible
biologically. Hence "super" genes. It is increasingly clear that
relatively little of our social behaviour is encoded in our biological
genes. Our capacity and success as social animals may have its origin
in biology (many species are well socialised) but I am convinced that
the extraordinary speed with which our society evolves makes it most
unlikely that biology has very much to do with it at all, so I think
Tinbergen is wrong at least in the application of his ideas to humans.
Essentially I think that we humans have discovered that the
evolutionary limitation of our biology can be overcome by evolving our
society and behaviour and it is this that we really want to propagate.
Unlike biological genes which can only be propagated to a small
number of offspring, our SuperGenes can be propagated to anyone older,
younger, childless or not.
I do not argue that social adaptation is so very different now from
what it was in the past. I do not know anything about what happened
millions of years ago to tribes hunter-gatherers (and nor does anyone
else despite the assertions of evolutionary psychologists, for
example). What is changing is our society, and it is our adaptation
to that evolving society that dominates our behaviour. The book tries
to understand the forces that are directing our evolution so strongly
in these terms and to reach a concilience between sociology, social
psychology, behavioural studies and evolutionary ideas.
Best wishes
Craig Mackay.