The Structure Of Cultural Revolutions

Abstract In this paper I will attempt to combine multiple evolutionary theories concerning the nature of science and culture to create an evolutionary model for explaining social change, focusing on conflict, revolution and resolution. This theory of “cultural change” will use terms borrowed from Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s dualinheritance theory, in which they apply an evolutionary model to the phenomena of human culture, and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions. To bridge the conceptual gap between the two I will bring into play David Hull’s philosophic theory that presents an evolutionary account of the interrelationships between social and conceptual development in science (Hull, 1988). I will argue that we can describe sociocultural evolution as possessing analogous aspects to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific progress. In this theory he explains how “normal” science is conducted, through empirical observation and experimentation, and transformed through a series of stages of revolutionary science culminating in a “paradigm shift” which functions to resolve the accumulation of scientific “anomalies”; scientific data which cannot be explained by the current scientific paradigm or theory. I will argue that culture, a product of the interaction between groups of human agents, consists of cultural variants. This is the term developed by Boyd and Richerson to denote cultural information: transmitted beliefs, ideas, practices, strategies, behaviors and preferences.

Furthermore societies can be theorized, analogously to Kuhn’s theory, to consist of “cultural paradigms”. A cultural paradigm describes a group’s accumulation of cultural variants ordered for the sake of cognitive and social coherence. A scientific paradigm describes a scientific group’s accumulation of scientific data and theories ordered for the sake of theoretical coherence, allowing it to continue its function of empirical “truth” finding. The evolutionary purpose of cultural paradigms is to give human agents a set of information that gives psychological coherence to the individual and groups of individuals. I will explain what coherence means, how it works and why it is important. When competing cultural variants enter into a group, or are innovated within a group, they can be similarly called “cultural anomalies”: a cultural variant or groups of cultural variants that pose to be in immediate competition with the status-quo or “norms” of a given social group(s). As in the Kuhnian model, normal science necessarily entails the accumulation of scientific data that doesn’t fit within the current paradigm. Analogously we can theorize that normal social development entails the accumulation of similar phenomena [anomalies] that challenge a given group’s cultural paradigm. This can operate within the entire hierarchy of societal group-size; i.e. most of the world’s cultures and social groups reject the shade of Islamic fundamentalism that led to the events on 9/11, an anomaly that has now challenged the near-universal cultural variants that reject this type

of aggression. And also within the small towns and villages in which these terrorists operate there is a struggle between these cultural variants for fitness resulting in competition often leading to the harm or death of members of both groups. I will argue that there are varying levels of cultural anomalies with a variety of effects on social group dynamics. To begin this paper I shall briefly run through past attempts at theorizing about cultural change and evolution. From there I will explicate the main theories devised in the 20th century that were designed to explain the phenomena of culture, focusing on their necessity and ingenuity in helping further our understanding of culture and their inevitable conceptual defects. I will then begin my dissection of each theory of science and culture I have listed above to show how their theoretical frameworks provide a stable ground for the model I am attempting to flesh out. Along the way I will also use a variety of sociological and philosophic research to substantiate my claims. Early Theories on Culture & Progress Sociocultural evolution is the termed used to denote theories concerned with describing the nature of social and cultural evolution. Prior to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection theorists hypothesized how societies develop, change, and sustain themselves and sought a logical pattern behind these movements. The Scottish Enlightenment gave us thinkers such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar who postulated that societies move through a series of

four stages; hunting and gathering, pastoralism and nomadism, agricultural, and finally a stage of commerce (wiki). August Comte formed an early version of what is now called sociology and Thomas Hobbes proclaimed that life before civilization was “nasty, brutish and short”. (With these conceptions came a new way for European dominance and imperialism to be seen as justified. The idea of social progress provided a logical teleology and sense of superiority in the eyes of more technologically developed nations, hence the Eurocentric belief systems concerning the undeveloped nature of Africans and indigenous peoples) Comte saw society as functioning like an organism subject to growth towards greater complexity and order, the Western culture and society being the pinnacle of this progress. This line of thinking, called progressivism came to be the accepted model of sociocultural evolution in the post-enlightenment era. In the latter half of the 19th century Karl Marx proposed his theory of historical materialism in which he theorized the best way to understand human nature and the progress of social life was to analyze the modes of material production necessary for survival. As Marx proclaimed, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”. Culture, for Marx, is merely an expression in human behavior in response to the mode of material production in a given society. Ideology was the term he used to describe this expression that

can be seen manifest in the arts, political and social institutions. The social hierarchy consists of a ruling class and working class. Power relations (primarily a means for exploitation of production of material resources) between the two keep society at equilibrium, while social conflict and revolution arise due to discord between the material productive forces of society and the existing relations of production or property relations (Marx, 1859) “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.” Marx’s model for social progress, more importantly, describes societies as following an evolutionary path (albeit a very loose conceptual analogy in contrast with Darwin’s evolutionary theory). After having read Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marx wrote to a friend in 1861 saying, “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle…”

Marx’s theory, however, was not heavily influenced (a common misconception) by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, mainly due to the fact that the Origin of Species came out eleven years after Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. Marx was most influenced by the philosophy of Georg Hegel, who saw the progress of human history as a dialectic process and movement from the “fragmentary” to the “real”; a progression towards rationality, power and “civilization”. Marx essentially reinterpreted Hegel’s sociocultural theory into materialist terms. These great thinkers had opened up the inquiry about social progress to be seen as naturalistic in a socio-historical framework. The immense importance of this was that it allowed philosophers to view social change as following a causal pattern that included the interaction of a complexity of cultural and biological components. Modern Theories of Culture and Progress At the beginning of the 20th century an increased skepticism in the unilineal theories (theories of group descent usually denoted to follow a teleological path) of social evolution of the previous century led cultural anthropologists to employ more sophisticated ethnography and empirical methods to disprove theories that postulated discrete “stages” of development in societies (wiki). By the 1930’s there had emerged a new field of study called neoevolutionism that incorporated data from archeology, paleontology and historiography that aimed at

eliminating any system of values that might “color” a scientists interpretation of the empirical data. “Neoevolutionism discards the determinism argument and introduces probability, arguing that accidents and free will greatly affect the process of social evolution.” (Wiki) The next major leap in evolutionary thinking about culture emerged in 1975 with E. O. Wilson’s now infamous book “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis”. In his book Wilson states, “Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior”. For Wilson, environmental cues evoke genetically programmed behavioral responses that we see as cultural artifacts. Cultural forms are essentially epiphenomenal “by-products” of underlying material causes (Atran, 2002). This has created one of the most heated debates in science of the 20th century. On one side of the debate you have theorists who argue for the importance of culture (as following a distinct, but analogous, process from biological evolution) in shaping the course of human evolution, and on the other sociobiologists whose genetic determinism makes culture peripheral to genetic information and variation. Theorists, seeing the difficulty in sociobiology’s theoretical power to explain the origins of the complexity of cultural behavior, began looking for a substance of culture that can be seen transmitted amongst humans. The most famous exponent of this view is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In his famous book The

Selfish Gene Dawkin’s theorized that culture evolved from parasitic bunches of transmittable units of gene-like information that invaded human brains in our early evolutionary stages of development. The discovery of genetic material has given us fundamental units of information to explain biological variation; memes fill the conceptual gap between genetic evolution and cultural evolution, allowing for culture to be seen as following an evolutionary path through the processes of reproduction, mutation and selection. Memes reproduce by self-replicating in human minds. A meme’s goal is towards selfpreservation through replication fidelity and fecundity, which sometimes contradicts the biological dictates of survival of its host organism. Recently a lack of supportive evidence has thrown serious doubt on this theory. To begin, if memes replicate and do so with a need for informational accuracy across memetic lineages then why do phenotypic cultural ideas, beliefs and behaviors seem to be so varied, especially when merely passing from one person to another. Cultural ideas are rarely imitated with high fidelity and if anything mutation of cultural ideas is the norm, not the exception. Picking up a stack of different newspapers and reading articles on the same topic demonstrates this point. Darwinian evolution cannot occur if mutation effects the information at a higher rate than high-fidelity replication (Atran, 2002). If memes are reducible units of self-replicating information, analogous to genes, then we should be able to see an

observable self-replicating structure jumping amongst human brains. We do not and therefore meme theory has a lot of explaining to do before it can be regarded, with any serious recognition, as a defensible scientific theory. On the other hand, the challenges meme theory faces does not shake a theory that rests on the assumption of information transferring amongst human brains. Information, although not structurally understood makes more sense for a theory showing the variety of human cultural behavior. Variants in cultural information need not be selfish-meme entities seeking to reproduce. As we sill see, the term cultural variant portrays a more accurate picture of the processes involved in cultural evolution. Dual-Inheritance Theory With the publication of The Origin of Species Charles Darwin had created a new paradigm for naturalistic observation and philosophic discussion. One the most important contribution’s in Origins has been his concept of population thinking, which Ernst Mayr called his key contribution to biology (Boyd, Richerson 2004). This concept allowed biologists to see populations of organisms as carrying a reservoir of inherited genetic information, and depending on which members had more beneficial variants of this information, there would be selection for fitness. This way of thinking allows scientists to explain the properties organisms exhibit such as eating habits, appendage functions and social behaviors. What is also does is provide a

foundation for a modern theory on cultural evolution, the most accepted of which is the model of cultural evolution created by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson in 1985. Their dual-inheritance theory posits that culture is crucial for understanding human behavior; “People acquire beliefs and values from the people around them, and you can’t explain human behavior without taking this reality into account”, states Boyd and Richerson in their book Not By Genes Alone. Culture is a part of biology also, and the evidence suggests that we evolved psychological mechanisms capable of complex social learning to better adapt to a rapidly changing environment during the Pleistocene (a period lasting from 1.8 million to 10,000 B.C.). The cost/benefit ratio of imitation, through a variety of psychological mechanisms, outweighed individual learning in our human ancestors during this period. Up to this point the paper the word culture has yet to be defined. I will use the definition Boyd and Richerson give, stating simply that “culture is information capable of affecting individuals’ behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission” (Boyd, Richerson 2004). At its evolutionary onset culture must have increased the reproductive success of our ancestors, although this does not exclusively explain the variety of behaviors humans exhibit today. With the help of Darwin’s population thinking concept we see human populations as composed of individuals whom transmit and store a

reservoir of cultural information (instead of solely genetic information). Evolved psychological social learning mechanisms allow this information transfer and retention to take place. Genes and Culture also co-evolve, an example of which can be seen in the cultural adoptions of agriculture and dairying that caused genetic selection for the traits to digest starch and lactose, respectively (wiki). Boyd and Richerson are also very skeptical of Dawkin’s meme theory and state, “a Darwinian account of culture does not imply that culture must be divisible into tiny, independent genelike bits that are faithfully replicated”. David Hull defends this position by showing why critics of cultural evolution theories, who insist there must be gene-like particles that increase and decrease in frequency relative to other replicators, are sorely mistaken (Hull, 1988). Critics are foremost mistaken about biological evolution and the role genes play. “Genes do not function in isolation but as parts of integrated gene complexes…” Hull states. Early evolutionary theory conceived of genes as carrying a single characteristic in a given organism. This one gene/one character was soon shown to be overly simple (Carlson, 1966). A theory of cultural evolution that incorporates the concept of information need not have the burden of proof (one meme, one belief/idea/value) to demonstrate evolution of this information occurs, just as biological evolution need not show that each gene is responsible for a particular physical characteristic. Instead multiple genes, interacting with one another,

form complex biological structures, and multiple cultural variants, interacting with one another, form complex cultural structures (e.g. human language). Cultural information should only be loosely understood as analogous to the gene model; the payoff is that it provides a firm conceptual foundation for explanatory power. Our lack of understanding of the physical structure of cultural variants need not be an impediment to our theorizing, just as early theorizing about gravity did not need a complete conceptual understanding of its nature. Cultural variants, a basic term describing cultural information, follow a Darwinian path amongst human populations and Boyd and Richerson have demonstrated with a variety of examples how we can see the effects of such a process. One of their most often cited examples is that of a study conducted by psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen, whom argue that the South (in America) is more violent statistically than the North because southern people have culturally acquired beliefs about personal honor that are different from their northern counterparts. The researched revealed that from 1865 to 1915 the homicide rate in the south was ten times the current rate for the whole United States (Boyd, Richerson 2004). Arguments and confrontations amongst southerners will more often lead to violence than they would in northern cities and towns. Their findings suggest that violence is not indiscriminate but rather directly related to a sense

of honor, so a southerner might be more likely to kill another person in a bar fight, but not any more likely to kill the individual behind the counter when robbing a liquor store from a similar robbery in the north. This explains the differences amongst southerners and northerners in terms of their cultural and economic histories. The people who immigrated to the south were mainly of Scott-Irish decent and were livestock herders. During the movement westward in the formation the United States law was difficult to enforce in areas of sparsely settles regions and livestock were easy to steal. Nesbit and Cohen postulated that a “culture of honor” developed in response to this environmental pressure so men could cultivate reputations as a deterrent to theft (Boyd, Richerson 2004). The question remains how exactly this process of cultural evolution occurs. Boy and Richerson give us a variety of mechanisms by which cultural variants are either accepted or rejected by individuals. They identify the two main processes that cause culture to change as consisting of an inertial part (the processes that tends to keep a population the same over a period of time) and a variety of forces (the processes that cause changes in the numbers of different type of cultural variants in a population). Forces include “random” forces and “decision-making” forces. The two random forces they name are cultural mutation and cultural drift. Cultural mutation occurs due to individual-level processes, such as misremembering an item of culture. Cultural drift

also occurs in a variety of ways. For instance, in a society where boat making is only understood by a few elders, and they happen to die, the cultural variants allowing individuals to build boats die out. Drift, like its biological evolutionary counterpart, can also occur when a group of individuals relocate and bring new cultural variants to another group of individuals. Decision-making forces include “guided variation” and “biased transmission”. Guided variation is defined as “nonrandom changes in cultural variants by individuals…from transformations during social learning” (Boyd, Richerson 2004). These can be purposive changes to stories you heard as a child, or changes in a recipe for pasta sauce. Biased transmission occurs in three unique ways. “Content-based bias” describes when individuals are more likely to learn or remember cultural variants based on their content, whether that is how well it associates with other cultural variants they’ve learned or because the structure of cognition makes some variants easier to acquire. A group of theorists have proposed that a child’s belief in ghosts or demons, which always entails them having human features and limitations, is acquired without cultural transmission but instead through innate neurological pathways that form a content-bias when thinking about such an entity. Parents need not teach their children that ghosts and demons can hear, see and interact with physical objects. These parameters are already hardwired into the child’s brain as possibilities of human action, which become translated

into the actions of metaphysical beings. Individuals then more easily assimilate this belief about ghosts and demons, and “content-based bias” is the term that describes the ease of this kind of cultural variant acquisition. “Frequency-based bias” is simply the mechanism that allows individuals to adopt cultural variants based on their commonness in their social group. The most advantageous variant is often likely to be the most common. And “model-based bias” is the force that makes individuals choose a trait based on the observable attributes of individuals who exhibit the trait. This includes imitating successful or prestigious individuals, or the disposition to imitate individuals similar to oneself. (Boyd, Richerson 2004) The immediate problem we see in this type of theory, being juxtaposed to biological evolution, is nicely summated in the book “Genes, Culture and Human Evolution”… “What is important to bear in mind is that natural selection, by definition, favors fitness enhancing properties of organisms; cultural selection, by contrast, may be driven by a host of complicated motives and this brings us, once again, to the limits of our knowledge” (Stone, Lirquin 2007). I will return to this problem and Boyd and Richerson’s theory to support claims I will make later in this paper. For now I turn to Thomas Kun’s theory of scientific revolutions, and coupled with the work of the philosopher David Hull, I will show why we can view the scientific

enterprise as composed of cultural and conceptual variants, subject to the same evolutionary pressures as biological and cultural evolution. From there I will propose why it is useful to view social groups consisting of cultural paradigms, much like science is composed of scientific paradigms, and how this can help our understanding of the origin of social conflict and see in a new light a variety of other observational data from sociology and psychology. Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions was a bombshell in conceptual theorizing about the nature of science. He postulated a series of stages that the scientific enterprise must necessarily go through in order to resolve and further its function of empirical “truth” finding. Truth is in quotations because Kuhn’s theory carries metaphysical weight concerning the nature of truth and the nature of the scientific pursuit of truth. If science merely functions as a means to resolve the shifting interpretation of empirical data, then truth becomes an obsolete metaphysical concept. Truth, in Kuhnian terms, is a function of the explanatory power of a scientific paradigm in which science is currently operating. The teleological underpinnings of science has been forever stripped away and an evolutionary model of scientific progress has replaced the hope of ever reaching a “true”, static model of the universe. Kuhn stressed the importance of historicizing science, viewing scientists in different ages as embodying historically dependent ideas

and strategies, thus avoiding attributing modern modes of thought to historical agents. The evolution of science occurs, not as an accumulation of facts, but rather through a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities (wiki). Normal science is conducted by making hypotheses concerning the natural world, doing experiments to collect empirical data and see how it fits into the current paradigm that science is operating within. This is what Kuhn calls puzzle solving, and most scientists spend their entire career doing it. Anomalies begin to appear, stretching the current paradigm to its conceptual limits. Some anomalies can be rejected as errors in observation while others are harder to dismiss and persist as genuine problems to be solved. There comes a point when enough anomalies accumulate that the current paradigm is thrown into doubt, and a handful of brave scientists must periodically embark on what Kuhn calls “revolutionary science”. These scientists create new solutions to solve the problem these anomalies pose. When enough scientists have accepted that this new model is needed and coherent enough for further use, a “paradigm shift” and the new scientific paradigm becomes the norm. Normal science continues and the process begins anew. The awareness of paradigm shifts show that new theories are not just incompatible with old theories, but incommensurable, lacking any comparability, hence the need for a revolution in scientific thinking. Kuhn essentially saw this as an evolutionary process and at the end of his book The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions, he says… “Successive stages in that development process (science) are marked by an increase in articulation and specialization. And the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal…of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exemplar”. (Kuhn, 1962).

David Hull has picked up where Kuhn has left off in the sense of explaining how this process actually follows an evolutionary path, as Boyd and Richerson’s describe in their dual-inheritance theory. Hull’s main concern in his book “Science as a Process” is how to explain how scientists choose between alternative views of the world. He does this by positing that individuals, whom make up the scientific community, are subject to socially inherited drives like credit acquisition. “Scientists want other scientists to recognize their contributions, and the most fundamental form of recognition is use, preferably with a formal acknowledgement” (Hull, 1988). Science, being composed of concepts (replicating, but not particulate entities), evolves and does so through human brains (scientists) by the same mechanisms in which cultural culture evolves. The nature of scientific evolution is most definitely unique in its manifestation of the evolutionary process but the process is nonetheless the underlying explanation for its

movement. David Hull writes… “I am concerned with change in our scientific conceptions about the world, conceptions that have changed too quickly for alterations in gene frequencies to have played any role.” Scientists act like individuals in social groups act. They treat their close “kin” with greater altruism and create alliances with like-minded scientists, while they compete with other scientists and their theories, forming research groups to further their claims and agendas. Instead of cultural variants, Hull gives us the term concepts, which he calls “historical entities”. I see the only difference the two as being a matter of complexity and replication. Scientific ideas tend to replicate much more accurately than do cultural ideas. This is for the benefit of the scientific community. But that’s not to say cultural variants don’t replicate with a fair amount of high fidelity, its just noting that the variety of cultural variants far exceeds that of the scientific community and because it does, cannot be easily understood with a textbook or a lecture, as professors might give on a scientific topic. Therefore, concepts can still be seen as cultural variants, but the necessity for calling them “concepts” stems from the nature of the organizational hierarchy that science exhibits. The crux of this idea is that science is a sociocultural process. “Science would not be very cumulative if succeeding generations of scientists did not build upon or at least play

off the work of earlier scientists” Hull writes. But understanding why and how scientists cooperate is a question all by itself, stemming from an evolutionary understanding of why humans cooperate as a species. (Natalie and Joseph Henrich show in their book “Why Humans Cooperate” that the answer lies in synthesizing dual-inheritance theory with evolutionary theories concerned with explaining altruistic behavior in humans and primates.) Cultural Paradigms Hull sees science as the process of conceptual evolution, with the forces of biased, un-biased, drift, mutation and selection acting upon the process. Scientific paradigms can now be seen as a grouping of these “conceptual” variants into organized structures, much like languages are. But languages and scientific paradigms are only a couple of the more organized groupings of variants that we encounter every day of our lives. Religions are complex groupings of cultural variants that replicate with high fidelity (As Scott Atran brilliantly explicates in his book “In Gods We Trust”). Methods on how to mix cement, build skyscrapers, and fly commercial airline jets are also a mix of complex, high fidelity replicating variants, that have a defined structure and system. But where can we take this analogy when talking about societies the world over? I propose that there be a systematic study of the combination of cultural paradigms; a set of cultural variants, arranged in a complex, coherent structure that gives

individuals interacting in groups a defined list of world-view limitations on behavior. As Boyd and Richerson acknowledged in their study of cultural differences, Americans in the South have cultural variants that make them more likely to kill when their honor is threatened or challenged. These variants should not be seen as merely isolated variants floating amongst other isolated variants, each contributing their function. Variants, like genes, act in concert with one another, a fact shown by Hull, and like genes give rise to complex structures. These structures themselves can be seen as wholes, with a defined set of functions in the real world. Cultural paradigms describes exactly that set of functions a related set of cultural variants exhibit. A town in Alaska might contain a cultural paradigm in which preservation of the wilderness defines the limitations on actions of individuals and provides a sense of security, stemming from what’s called a conformity bias: In which cultural variants are more likely to be accepted and passed on due to the frequency of individuals containing that variant in a given group. The more prevalent the variant, the higher the probably it will be accepted by another member. This, coupled with views about the family, societal structure, religion and economic philosophies (a list of ought’s and do not’s) create what I am calling a cultural paradigm. What is the use of describing groups of individuals as possessing cultural paradigms? In the same way that scientific paradigms is a useful concept when talking about the groupings of conceptual

variants that form a coherence picture of the natural world. In fact, one the main criteria that Kuhn said were necessary for scientific progress was that scientists see coherence in the data being collected. Individuals, I argue, also aim for the same coherence in their own lives. Lancelot Law Whyte, who worked with Einstein on his theory of special relativity, proposed to redefine how we view the two aspect of the mind called the conscious and the unconscious. He saw the goal of human mental activity as striving towards coherence and an “ordering tendency” that serves individual, social, and biological ends (Schumaker, 33). Michael Gazzaniga, author of “The Social Brain” repeats this message by arguing that the human brain evolved to be capable of ignoring one of its fundamental dictates of accurate reality testing by creating order where there is none, thus giving rise to order and coherence in the mental activities needed for survival. He postulates that the state all humans are in before order is achieved is that of tension; tension arises out of the highly stimulating flow of sensory information bombarding the human nervous system demanding the brain do something to create order by selectively integrating and disposing of bits of information. So how can we explain the seemingly indefinite array of social conflicts that arise everywhere in the world? I’m arguing that our evolved psychological mechanisms that accept or reject cultural variants based on modes of exclusion or inclusion dictate that cultural paradigms must deal with these

“anomalies” that threaten their coherent picture. The brain is trying to achieve equilibrium or coherence again. Cultural paradigms can also be seen as operating on multiple levels, exhibiting a hierarchy of complexes, competing and cooperating with one another. There is the paradigm that views capitalism as necessarily a good, or better, way of material transaction than earlier forms of commodity trading. This paradigm entails the belief in a version of a free market, and a multitude of beliefs trickling down from there. What sociology and psychology are missing is a unifying theory of how groups of individuals are formed through the evolution of cultural information, and how this accounts for change and conflict, both individually and socially. Max Gluckman, the famed anthropologist, theorized in the early 20th century that conflict and rebellion are inherent in society. As each group of individuals struggle to achieve their private interest conflict arises, but not towards revolution, as in Marxist theory, but towards resolution. Gluckman mainly saw the tensions in society tamed by the power of tradition. It can now be seen that tradition, in Gluckman’s sense, is really cultural paradigms consisting of cultural variants, evolving under the laws of cultural evolution! Gluckman saw the tendency of indigenous societies to reestablish coherence and order, giving more credence to a theory that entails the understanding of both cultural evolution and the biological dictates of the brain’s ordering/coherence system.

The nature of cultural anomalies must now briefly be discussed. Scientific anomalies consist of data that doesn’t fit with the current explanatory paradigm. The scientific community immediately ignores these at large, and only until enough have accumulated will scientists engage in revolutionary science to bring the coherence back to equilibrium. And equilibrium is exactly what game-theorists propose society operates within. A defined set of games in which the outcome is constantly weighed against positive and negative results. Coherence is what society aims for, just as in science. Anomalies are those cultural variants or cultural paradigms that threaten or compete with another cultural variants/paradigm. Clan members exercising violent physical force against blacks in the south stems from, and creates, a cultural anomaly that needs resolution. Martin Luther King and other black leaders, who challenged to re-envision racial conflict, could be seen as revolutionary scientists, brave enough to change the paradigm that is no longer coherent. The diffusion of their message has become widespread through individual adoption by the mechanisms of cultural evolution. But anomalies also occur at microscopic scales in cultural life. Differences of opinion on how a town government should allocate funds for social projects exemplify these types of anomalies. In fact just living in a community you are likely to encounter on a daily basis differences in opinion and worldview, some being wholly opposite to your own. I argue that

stereotypes are variants that reinforce a group’s paradigm by generalizing in a mockingly simple way the variants of another group. But these are obviously of much a different character than their scientific counterparts. For one they don’t necessarily entail revolution of any sort to be resolved. They usually work themselves out, or remain in perpetual conflict. But in science anomalies don’t necessarily entail revolution either, as seen in overlapping scientific paradigms, such as the paradigm of homeopathic medicine and the rest of mainstream scientific medical practices. These are incommensurable, but neither side seems to be looking for a resolution. Examples like this can been seen throughout the history of science. Anomalies of the macroscopic kind become more complex to elucidate. These entail multiple levels of cultural paradigms interacting with one another, with large groups of individuals adhering to variations of a phenotypic paradigm. Conflict that arises between counties like North Korea and the United States demonstrates this. For North Korea, proliferation of nuclear weapons is a necessary achievement to remain powerful and relevant in a globalizing world, while the United States views globalization as already decided in favor of their influence and mode of control. The question arises, when does conflict between paradigms result in violence, revolution, and other widely noticeable cultural changes? This is why I’m proposing a science of cultural paradigms to study the

structure and movement of these masses of cultural variants. Much still needs to be fleshed out, but an overarching theory such as this consolidates the social sciences into a coherent framework. I propose that we adopt the term Cultural Fluency to denote the level of paradigm conflict (anomalies) amongst groups that lead to various outcomes. Biological survival is not necessarily the only prerequisite for adopting a cultural variant, as mentioned earlier, so fleshing out why groups of individuals adopt cultural variants at the expense of their reproductive fitness is required to explain how groups become cultural fluent and how this fluency changes over time. Conclusion It is easier to conceive of scientific paradigms because the structure of each paradigm is explained, fleshed out, and doesn’t change as rapidly and in complexity as cultural paradigms do. The fact that scientific paradigm shifts can be clearly seen is a product of how clear scientific theories are presented and kept organized. The same cannot be said of cultural paradigms, in which cultural variants swirl in a frenzy for fitness, changing so rapidly that one-day Jews and Germans are living relatively peacefully together and the next day Jews are being systematically exterminated by Germans. Cultural change can almost be counted in seconds! What we have seen is a theory of cultural evolution, scientific evolution and how this applies to a theory of social change and conflict based on

Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. “One of the most distinctive features of the emergence of a scientific culture in modern Europe is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones” (Stephen Gaukroger, 2006). This is another illustration of how cultural variants formed into the particularities of “conceptual” variants of science. Gaukroger mentions the changing views of superiority the West had of itself as affecting the scientific enterprise. This illustrates the point that the scientific enterprise is merely a particular instance and unique manifestation of the cultural evolutionary drives inherent in all humans. As such it seems that Kuhn merely extracted the evolutionary process out of science because science is easier to grasp as a whole than cultural variants and the changes it exhibits. He glimpsed at a functioning of cultural change, taking place in the scientific enterprise, that no one else had before him. With this conceptual gap closed between culture and science, I hope I have showed with sufficient argumentation that a coherent theory is needed to explain the causes of cultural conflict and resolution that includes a more unified view of brain mechanics in relation to evolutionary pressures on cultural information.