Sociotype and cultural evolution: The acceleration of cultural change alongside industrial revolutions
Section snippets
Introduction: constancy of the “sociotype” versus acceleration of cultural change
The main argument of the present work may be summarized as a paradox: that there is a constancy of our overall cognitive capability in relation with the external world, symbolized by and rooted in the “sociotype” limitations, that strongly conditions the dynamic processes of culture—underlying the general rhythms of maintenance, decay, and replacement of cultural items.
First, what do we mean by the sociotype? Recently coined from two independent sources (Marijuán et al., 2017; see also Berry,
Evolutionary background
Sociality is an essential trait of the human species—as Aristotle put in The Politics, Book 1: “man is by nature a political animal.” Indeed a number of crucial novelties of our evolutionary and historical past revolve around the complexification of essential aspects of sociality: origins of language, emotional communication, in-group behavior, cooking and sharing of food, domestication of other species, cultural systems, morals and ethics, religious and legal codes, political institutions,
Competitive “Planckian” nature of the quantitative sociotype
Two aspects of the sociotype results are relevant to our present concerns. First, the developmental or ontogenetic arch that can be appreciated in the age distribution of the sociotype results. And second, the competitive processes underlying the sociotype figures, which surface via the Planckian Distribution Equation.
That there is an ontogenetic arch described by the sociotype along the development of the individual is not difficult to visualize (Berry and De Geest, 2012). It looms under our
Universal patterns of decay
In a recent approach, Candia et al. (2019) study the decay of attention and the collective memory in a variety of cultural products, using data on domains such as scientific publications, patents, songs, movies, and biographies. They test the hypothesis that the decay of the attention received by these cultural products involves interactions in two different domains: communicative memory and cultural memory. The former relates to oral exchanges and the latter to records on material supports,
The idea of generations
Plutarch, in his biography of Lycurgus, cites three verses in which three generations of Spartans boast about their own might. The verses are supposed to be recited by each choir of warriors:
The old ones: We have been very strong warriors.
The young: We are: if you have won - look us in the face.
The boys: But we will be much stronger still.
The exchange appears in one of the emblematic texts of José Ortega y Gasset (1933) about the method of generations. Evidently, generations refer to the most
As the economy grows …
Fundamental economic factors have been often cited as the main movers of social evolution. The extent to which they directly contribute to accelerate the rhythms of replacement and decay of cultural items – becoming a proxy for intergenerational change – is an essential part of our argument.
For simplification, if we consider the ‘natural’ interval of 30 years for the successive generations, there is a striking fact to observe (partially commented in 4.3): that the deepest cultural and social
As the economy grows … the past recedes
As the economy has fantastically expanded, what has happened with the world of culture, with the permanence and decay of cultural items and ways of life?
Looking in generational terms, the steady economic accumulation we are referring could be seen as if every successive generation had been able to build by itself a new material world of paramount size – often bigger – than the received one from the previous generation. Two physical worlds factically amalgamated into one: the old and the new
The fourth industrial revolution
An obvious continuation of the above is that along the periods of slow social change distinguishing between generations is difficult. Conversely, when social change is very fast, differences between generations are magnified (Kortti, 2011). Precisely we have called ‘revolutionary’ to those periods of economic and social upheaval when cultures and traditions are radically changed. About the so called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, according to the proposer of the term (Schwab, 2015), it is a
Concluding comments
It has been a dense conceptual excursion. From the sociotype term, a new construct that attempts the qualitative and quantitative description of the social niches to which humans are adapted, we have jumped to the attention economy present in our social interactions, to the competition underlying the decay of cultural items, to the emergence of the generational phenomenon, to the economic proxy of cultural change, and finally to the consequences of the explosive growth of industrial revolutions.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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2021, BioSystemsCitation Excerpt :The sociotype is then a functional group and in humans “the sociotype means both the bonding structures of the social environment and the dynamics of social interactions to which individuals of our species would be evolutionarily adapted” (Marijuán and Navarro, 2020). Marijuán et al. (2019) and Marijuán and Navarro (2020) empirically verified the similar fabric of the social world in the individual life. In this sense, each social group will have a particular behaviour which could be differentiated from the others, and it could affect the evolution of this social group.
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