Cultural learning involves the complex adaptation of our senses so that they focus on four things: who to learn from, what to learn, and how and when to use the knowledge acquired.
Natural selection has equipped us so that evolution and culture rewires our brains making it possible to learn all the ideas, beliefs, motivations, values and practices we will need to survive in almost any environment.
Over generations, cumulative cultural adaptations have allowed us to develop sophisticated technologies, complex languages, psychologically-potent rituals, and effective public institutions.
Behind the screen there is an auto-catalytic feedback loop going on between culture and genes that is larger than the sum of the individuals making up the culture.
Evolving societies
Human societies, unlike those of other primates, are stitched together by culturally transmitted social norms that cluster into institutions. Social norms are rules instituted to regulate group behavior and to extend group survival.
Once certain norms are practiced long enough within a group, violations of standards will then be observed, judged and community sanctions handed down.
A universal sanction among human apes is the rule that stealing from those with good reputations always ruins the reputation of the thief.
Thus, it is our instincts that have evolved into a range of stable self-reinforcing culturally-learned and interlocking beliefs, practices and motivations that arise as people attend to and learn from each other.
As they are collected into packages of norms that regulate sex, mating choices, incest taboos, status, and alliances, the rules and sanctions remain anchored to our instincts. It is the society that determines which subsets of these norms and rules constitute the minimum necessary to avoid endangering group survival.
Even amongst rugged individualists, data across kinship clans in every area of the world, show that family and other kin-based institutions add value to life by providing a bigger and better communal safety net. In particular, in-laws expanded kinship ties beyond the immediate gene pool. Communal rituals added and further expanded the size of and strengthen communal ties and communal interdependence.
Through competition, the communities with the best mix of institutions and technology usually win out. They spread and scale-up by assimilating less efficient groups.
In the beginning, the psychology of norms were mere heuristics, communal rules of the road separating rights from wrongs. But the co-evolution of genes and culture, helped solidify rules over wider and wider domains as they enhanced the communal safety net and improved communal survival.
The outcome is that social norms create communities in which the health and survival of each individual depends on almost everyone else.
Cultural evolution has fashioned rituals, marriage systems, economic exchanges, and other institutions in order to activate, manipulate, and extend an interdependent psychology.
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