6 From Typo to Thinko: When Evolution Graduated to Semantic Norms

Natural selection edits with an eye only toward what the message says, not to what it means. Do we need a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution? In one sense, certainly. It is obvious that there are patterns of cultural change—evolution in the neutral sense— and any theory of cultural change worth more than a moment's consideration will have to be Darwinian in the minimal sense of being consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection of Homo sapiens. Our species name is well chosen, and it is culture that makes us the knowing hominid, so a minimally Darwinian theory of culture must hold that the phenotypic traits that make cumulative culture possible— mainly, language and the habits of sociality—evolved by natural selection, unaided by what I call skyhooks: saltations in Design Space that could not be the outcome of standard evolutionary mechanisms (Dennett 1995). This minimal Darwinism is simply the denial of the hypothesis that culture is, as it were, a miracle, a gift from God. 1 It maintains in one way or another that natural selection eventually provided the foundations for culture, which then took off and elaborated itself under some regime that explains the patterns of cultural change, but that regime need not itself be Darwinian in any interesting sense. For instance, the standard model is an economic one. The theorist says, in effect, if Darwin will give me Homo economicus, a social group of rational, self-interested individuals getting and spending, saving and making and trading, I can then use the intentional stance (Dennett 1971, 1987) as the explanatory framework for describing and accounting for the patterns of cultural evolution. This economic model is used not just by economists, of course; it is tacitly presupposed by historians and anthropologists and all the other theorists who treat culture as composed of goods, possessions of the people, who husband them in various ways, wisely or foolishly. People