Elsevier

Biosystems

Volume 197, November 2020, 104208
Biosystems

Cultural life: Theory and empirical testing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104208Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • In cultural life, the unit of evolutionary selection is not the isolated idea but the group of interrelated ideas.

  • Between multiple units of evolutionary selection, there is homeostatic regulation. Within the units, there are variation-selection processes.

  • Variation-selection processes make the theoretical link between Shannon communication and dimensionality reductions (such as topic modeling).

  • Homeostatic regulation explains fashions, cultural diversification, as well as the evolution of common ethos across entire bodies of knowledge.

  • Diversification is a distinct (sixth) type of cooperation, present in both nature and culture.

Abstract

“What is life?” and Erwin Schrödinger's answer, “negative entropy”, inspired researchers in the 20th century to unite physics, chemistry, and physiology into a new synthesis that many believe to be an important foundation for life science today. Decades after Schrödinger, life scientists are still fascinated by the riddle that entropy can only accumulate in physical systems, which often leads to biological deterioration and death, but life finds ways to persist and prevail. So to say, life “negates” entropy. Can this fascination and research concept be broadened even further to human culture? Short after Schrödinger's publication, Claude Shannon coined the term “information entropy.” Information entropy accumulates when noise interferes during communication. Eventually, all useful information is lost. Yet, from this observation, something surprising can be inferred. Not only biological life but also cultural life has the ability to persist and prevail in spite of the accumulation of entropy. Does this insight mean that cultural life also negates entropy, in Schrödinger's sense? These questions guided me over several years of research during which I developed and tested a new theory of culture based on variation-selection processes and homeostatic regulation. My contribution is to discover that these two processes not only make statements about biological life. They also explain some of the most important phenomena of culture: returning fashions, polarization, diversification, cycles of growth and reform, and the formation of common ethos across entire bodies of knowledge. With access to big data and supercomputing, I tested my theory against hundreds of thousands of news, magazine articles, books, and TV transcripts as well as textual content collected from the social media. Historical, institutional, and geographical information was extracted from these data using a new method; and new interactive tools were created to interpret the results. What should not be missed when reading this article is that the theory proposed here reveals a striking equivalence between nature and culture. The article states this equivalence in mathematical terms, and contextualizes it in the history of science. The mathematical breakthrough is relevant because it aligns the humanities to science while also allowing for live evaluation of what I call “cultural diversification cycles.”

Keywords

Variation-selection processes
Homeostatic regulation
Negative entropy
Constructal law
Shannon communication
Quasispecies equation

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