#culture evolution

“The Evolution Of Culture”

The idea is that, like the self-organized autocatalytic sets postulated to be the earliest forms of life, a mind reach(es)a stage in which it is conceptually integrated when it becomes a primitive replicator. Integrated structure enables it to reason about one thing in terms of another, adapt ideas to new circumstances, frame new experiences in terms of previous ones, or combine information from different domains (as what happens with a joke). It should be stressed that it is not the presence of but the capacity for an integrated worldview that the human species came to possess. An infant may be born predisposed toward conceptual integration, but the process must begin anew in each young mind. The manner in which a worldview replicates is not all-at-once but piecemeal, through social exchange, often mediated by artifacts. Worldviews are therefore not so much replaced by as transformed into (literally) more evolved ones.