Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Revenge of the Nerds 209genuine theory of cultural evolution. Taken literally, it predicts that culturalevolution works like this. A meme impels its bearer to broadcast it,and it mutates in some recipient: a sound, a word, or a phrase is randomlyaltered. Perhaps, as in Monty Python's Life of Brian, the audienceof the Sermon on the Mount mishears "Blessed are the peacemakers" as"Blessed are the cheesemakers." The new version is more memorableand comes to predominate in the majority of minds. It too is mangled bytypos and speakos and hearos, and the most spreadable ones accumulate,gradually transforming the sequence of sounds. Eventually theyspell out, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."I think you'll agree that this is not how cultural change works. A complexmeme does not arise from the retention of copying errors. It arisesbecause some person knuckles down, racks his brain, musters his ingenuity,and composes or writes or paints or invents something. Granted,the fabricator is influenced by ideas in the air, and may polish draft afterdraft, but neither of these progressions is like natural selection. Justcompare the input and the output—draft five and draft six, or an artist'sinspiration and her oeuvre. They do not differ by a few random substitutions.The value added with each iteration comes from focusing brainpoweron improving the product, not from retelling or recopying ithundreds of thousands of times in the hope that some of the malapropsor typos will be useful.Stop being so literal-minded! respond the fans of cultural evolution.Of course cultural evolution is not an exact replica of the Darwinian version.In cultural evolution, the mutations are directed and the acquiredcharacteristics are inherited. Lamarck, while being wrong about biologicalevolution, turned out to be right about cultural evolution.But this won't do. Lamarck, recall, was not just unlucky in his guessabout life on this planet. As far as explaining complex design goes, histheory was, and is, a non-starter. It is mute about the beneficent force inthe universe or all-knowing voice in the organism that bestows the usefulmutations. And it's that force or voice that's doing all the creative work.To say that cultural evolution is Lamarckian is to confess that one has noidea how it works. The striking features of cultural products, namelytheir ingenuity, beauty, and truth (analogous to organisms' complex adaptivedesign), come from the mental computations that "direct"—that is,invent—the "mutations," and that "acquire"—that is, understand—the"characteristics."Models of cultural transmission do offer insight on other features of