7. Culture inheritance mechanisms

               
                During Darwin's time, the theory of fused heredity prevailed. It was believed that the traits of parents are passed on to children due to hereditary material distributed throughout the organisms. Some believed that blood was such a material. It turned out according to this theory that a tall father and a short mother should have children of average height. But everyone knows that this is not always the case.
                Jenkin, criticizing Darwin, showed, without questioning the theory of fused heredity, that Darwin's theory cannot explain evolutionary change. Jenkin's conclusion that Charles Darwin's ideas do not work was erroneous. They would not work if the hypothesis of fused heredity had solid experimental confirmation, but it was purely speculative. Now it is already difficult to understand why Charles Darwin backed down.
                In subsequent editions of his book, he increasingly deviated from the original, correct version of the theory, while simultaneously trying to develop his theory of heredity, which would remove Jenkin's objections from the agenda.
                Charles Darwin himself made a lot of efforts to develop an adequate theory of heredity, but the article by G. Mendel, published 8 years after his famous book, which contains 3 laws of inheritance, experimentally established by him on the properties of pea hybrids, Charles Darwin, or not understood its significance for the theory of evolution, or did not read it at all.
               Population genetics, developed later, solved the problem of heredity, and Charles Darwin's theory and genetics merged into the synthetic theory of evolution (STE), which combined Darwinian selection and genetics.
              But STE did not affect the cultural evolution of man, because cultural evolution has its own replicators - MEMs, which you cannot see through a microscope. MEMs, by themselves, are not complete replicators of cultural evolution, such as genes for biological evolution. Genes are immortal because, being copied with almost absolute precision, they pass from generation to generation unchanged. Genes replicate as part of the DNA double helix. The ability to replicate accurately is a property of it.
             As a result, the nucleus of every cell of the body contains the same set of genes (genome). Why is this needed? And what are the consequences at the level of the construction of an organism (in ontogeny) and at the level of populations?
In ontogeny, the presence of the same genomes in each cell leads to the impossibility of selection, the shutdown of Darwinian evolution at this level. Evolution is here replaced by the process of cooperative building. This is due to the fact that selection, which ultimately always comes down to the selection of genes, is impossible, since the genes are the same in every cell. But the construction does not remain uncontrolled. The correctness of this construction is monitored by numerous feedback systems. The main such system is the immune system.
                At the level of organisms (phenotypes), inheritance is determined not by individual genes, but by the accuracy of transmission of the entire genome to a new generation. Due to the specificity of the division of germ cells (meiosis) and the peculiarities of the sexual process, the fertilized cell of a new organism (zygote) receives a genome from the shuffling of the parents' genome. Having received a different genome from the parental, children only look like their parents and are certainly not their clones. That is why, although genes are replicated with amazing accuracy, parental traits are not inherited so unambiguously.
                If they were transmitted mirror-accurate, then there would be no variation in the species, the children would be clones of their parents. The species would reproduce itself from generation to generation. A population that does not change over time, does not adapt, is doomed. To avoid this, some change in species characteristics is required during inheritance. The peculiarity of the inheritance of the genetic traits of an organism (shuffling of the genomes of the parents) also ensures the variability of organisms in populations, which is necessary for natural selection and evolution of species. The accuracy of gene replication turns out to be important only for the level of ontogeny.
                Cultural evolution begins at the level of individual organisms in society. At this level, selection begins in the human population, not only genetic, but also the main selection - cultural. The fact that MEMS are imprecise replicators cannot in any way affect the processes of cultural evolution.
                But now we will talk about how they preserve the most important properties of the culture of society in the new generation while inheriting them.


                TRADITIONS.

              Cultural evolution is the construction of a civilization from dissimilar elements, combining them into structures, creating a hierarchy, taking into account individual characteristics. People are initially different in mentality, therefore, the construction of structures occurs as a self-assembly from elements with complementary features.
                For self-organization to take place, appropriate conditions must be created. Initially, such conditions were apparently the establishment of certain traditions in the societies of our distant ancestors of hunters and gatherers.
                Traditions gradually cover many aspects of the life of ancient people. They regulate behavior, so that a person did not have to think about how to act in some situations, and he acted in the traditional way. And this simplified life, made it predictable and understandable for others.
                Traditions relate to trade and wars with neighbors for resources, methods of building dwellings, making tools, and so on, which cannot be enumerated. At one time it was the tradition of weaving bast shoes, while in others it was to take selfies as a keepsake.
                As you drive through the old towns and villages, you will notice that the architecture of the different localities indicates a strong building tradition. Now they are gradually leaving and people are building, who is in what, depending on the availability of funds and imagination.               
                The way in which information is conveyed through tradition is still important today. In his actions, 90% or more, a person uses someone else's learned experience. The mind can only correct something depending on the situation.
                The establishment of behavioral-changing traditions is common in many animals. These are permanent rookeries for some, pastures and seasonal movements for others. The more diverse and numerous traditions are, the more information is passed from one generation to the next.
             The language of communication and a developed mind allowed a person to create a larger number of traditions related to different aspects of activity.

               For man, traditions changed behavior and thinking, coordinated his actions in populations, making the populations of ancient people more united in their actions and aspirations. These evolutionary traditions have been partially preserved up to our time. We are guided by them and now in many of our actions.


                INSTITUTIONS.

                Traditions are passed on through upbringing and education. Upbringing and education are social institutions that serve to transfer (inherit) the acquired experience. Upbringing and education preserve knowledge accumulated and filtered by generations, which may not be related to traditions, but is useful for people. Upbringing and education is the creation of special information channels with the help of dedicated people. Cultural MEMS now not only spread chaotically in the brains of the population, but mainly spread through the created channels. Channels are social institutions with their servants.
                Another important social institution is religion. Religions were a select part of traditions and moral principles, framed appropriately with god or gods, saints and the concept of eternal life, heaven and hell. Religion is already an institution with its own ministers of worship, contributing to the replication of religious views around which large ethnic groups of a certain faith are formed. As an institution, religions contributed to the cohesion of individual tribes into large settlements, which ultimately caused the development of civilization, as previously mentioned.
                The experience preserved by religious institutions relates to the moral rules of social life, overcoming genetic cruelty by developing some social restrictions on behavior in society. Without these restrictions, life in large communities would be impossible, and without unification into large agglomerations, the construction of civilization is impossible.
                At the same time, religion postulated some ideas about the universe, which, as it turned out, have nothing to do with reality. For example, the idea of a flat earth in the center of the world under the firmament. And that was also useful until a better explanation emerged. Religious myths were useful because people wanted to have an idea of the structure of the world. Otherwise, there would be complete chaos in the minds in this matter, approximately the same as astrologers are trying to plant in their heads today.
                And under these religious myths, Ptolemy managed to build a model that more or less correctly reflected the apparent movement of stars and planets. What sophisticated mind does one need to possess to build a similar model of the universe, which has held out under the protection of the church for about two thousand years?


                WRITING,  MEDIA,  INTERNET.

                The turning point in the creation of tools for cultural inheritance was the invention of writing. Along the way, material carriers of the letter arise. The clay plates and birch bark letters that have come down to us became the first suitable carriers of information. The invention of paper greatly simplified the process, made it more convenient.
                Writing can be viewed as a tool for organizing the dissemination of cultural MEMs. In addition to writing, broadcasting information to future generations requires widespread literacy. Similar processes of writing and spreading literacy took place in different isolated human populations, which proves their evolutionary relevance.
                Writing as the ability to record information on external media is somewhat similar to the genetic code recorded by a sequence of nucleotides on DNA. DNA in this analogy is like paper.
                Paper and typography put the process of cultural inheritance on an industrial basis. It became possible to govern cities and states on the basis of issued decrees and laws. The very rules for managing large masses of people are evolving, and it becomes possible to create hierarchically organized large societies.
                The emergence of the telegraph, telephone, postal service, railways, sea transport, and, finally, radio made it possible to cover the entire globe by means of communication, which enormously expanded the possibilities of cultural inheritance, significantly brought together societies distant from each other, showing at the same time that, despite the genetic compatibility, they turned out to be incompatible in cultural terms due to centuries of disunity.
                Over the last century, additional mechanisms of cultural inheritance have appeared (media, cinema, television, the Internet, social networks) that link all of humanity into a kind of superpopulation.
                MEMs have become reliable vertical and horizontal replicators of culture, ensured the rapid and accelerating cultural evolution of man. Under these conditions, the process of globalization cannot but begin.
                The cultural evolution of man became possible, led to the development of civilization, because man himself created the missing Homo sapiens tools for vertical inheritance of cultural replicators of MEMs, making it possible that which is forbidden for genes - the inheritance of acquired properties. In this case, cultural achievements.
                Thus, for the implementation of cultural evolution in humans, all three components of any evolution of living things turned out to be completely - variability (variability of mentality in a population), social selection and MEMs, as imprecise replicators.
                Taking into account the listed human inventions, MEMs have a wide opportunity to replicate both vertical, between generations, and horizontal between societies of the same generation.
               MEMs have become full-fledged replicators that implement the functions of cultural inheritance, and genetics, the processes of meiosis and sexual reproduction, continue to create instinctual variability in generations. Therefore, cultural evolution, which has all the necessary attributes, continues.