Semiotic coevolution by organic and sociocultural selection

The role of culture in evolution: A semiotic or information approach?

Where I find great interest in Cousins's contribution is in the way he puts forth the cultural and the social feature of the species. He presents us with the idea that the first humans played an active role in their own evolution, yet indirectly: giving themselves a particular niche, a man-made niche, early humans set themselves within a new environment, as we broadly call it in biology, an environment they now have to adapt to. The old opposition between nature and man-made might be out of place here. Still, the point that needs to be stressed is that through the design ¹ of a niche, human must be considered an agent of his own species evolution. Being an agent means that human can intentionally move the way evolution goes, but it does not mean he has full—or even any—control on the outcome, as obviously many other factors are in competition for evolutionary change.

In the classical view of selection in biology, the environment is thought as the physical, material environment. Introducing the concept of niche construction, selection can take place under various types of pressures, including for instance the social structure of a community, or the use and function of language within that community. I would like to develop this point. Indeed, adaptation becomes not only a matter of survival, in terms of avoiding death, getting access on food, and mating opportunities, but also a matter of efficiency within a community. ² This is an important point, as selection and the strives for survival is no longer just physical—and a matter of physical strength or fitness—but becomes also cultural, social, and semiotic. The strength is no longer only conceived as a resistance to diseases, or winning over a competitor, but also in social terms, ³ and fitness to a cultural and semiotic environment. The next question that arises is then: What is this culture made of?

In order to discuss culture, Cousins focuses on knowledge. Terms used by Cousins such as “cultural knowledge” (p. 165) or “social knowledge” (p. 165) are very general. Consequently, Cousins raises the question of the nature of knowledge (p. 165). Instead of diving into the complex issue of defining knowledge from an epistemological standpoint, Cousins takes a “quintessential example” of cultural knowledge: The example of language. He can now examine two alternative accounts of language: Language as information, the computational approach, and language as meaning, the semiotic approach. The construction of a niche is important to the phylogenetic hypothesis not only to open the range of selection pressures that are considered, including social and cultural dimension, but also to bring about the role of language in the evolution of human species. Cousins convincingly argues in favor of the semiotic model throughout the article. Let us know briefly look at the criteria of his philosophical investigation.

The first criterion is how well both accounts of language fit with the evolutionary principle that selection pressures are invariant. If it was to assimilate a fixed set of grammar rules, Cousins argues, this principle is not respected because language has changed a lot throughout the kind of timespan evolution is concerned with. Thus, the semiotic account better fits this principle. In addition, the basic feature of meaning-making could be the ability to make reference (Cousins, 2012), which has changed little through evolution, and is actually still a primordial action for ontogenetic development of language. In addition, the semiotic approach accounts for the fact languages are continuously changing, by endorsing a view where meaning is not in the signs themselves but reconstructed by the interpretants in the context and culture of the particular communication.

The second criterion addresses the issue of the neural precursor to the capacity of language. Here again, the semiotic account provides a better candidate with the capacity of reference, which draws a continuous line with the non-human communication capacities, such as alarm cries referring to specific predators.

The third criterion examines the link between language and tools. This is a very interesting relation made by Cousins, as in education it has become familiar to use Vygotksy's concept of thought instrument (Vygotsky & Luria, 1999) to speak a language. Indeed, it sounds plausible that language was useful or even required for the development of tools all the way until making a cultural technology. For Cousins, it is the opportunity to remind us that our ancestors “did not wait for the transition to Homo to begin making tools; rather it was toolmaking that helped ⁴ bring this transition about” (p. 178).

The social dimension that Cousins brings forward in these few lines needs to be stressed. Indeed, it is a promising route for understanding more clearly how learning can have an phylogenetic effect indirectly, meaning without endorsing a Lamarckian view. ⁵ Yet, it is not very clear how social, cultural, and learning are considered in his account of evolution through a niche construction. I will come back on this point.

For now, the philosophical investigation leads us to consider with Cousins that the semiotic approach also provides a better explanation for the link between the capacity to use tools and the capacity to use or even develop language. Cousins argues that in the semiotic approach both rely on the same “socially shared process of meaning-making,” while the information processing approach assumes that tools or elements of language contain information as such. Yet, the material world is ineffective at requiring learning capabilities as tool using or crafting, and as language or learning. As cousins rightly stresses, “There is nothing in the immediate environment to guide each step in the process; knowing what to do next.” An experimental illustration of this point is given by Gruber, Muller, Strimling, Wrangham, and Zuberbühler (2009) in a study about traces of culture in apes communities: Wild chimpanzees of one community are using stick to eat honey out of a deep hole in a log, while wild chimpanzees of another community usually scoop honey with leaves. The researcher leaves a stick in the honey hole for the chimpanzees of the second community: They lick the stick and throw it away. No chimpanzee of the culture “discover” the affordance of the stick just because it stands in the honey. The concept of affordances is sometimes assumed to refer to properties of the object, that any individual would learn just but coming in contact with it. Yet, the original concept of Gibson (1977) does not imply any meaning in the object, the meaning belongs to individuals and their cultures.

In conclusion, Cousins supports a semiotic coevolution rather than an informational coevolution. The semiotic is related to a continuous model of language phylogenetic development, where each incremental change leads to more complex forms of language. On this basis, Cousins evaluates the incompleteness thesis and amends it.

A social and cultural framework for meaning instead of incompleteness

The semiotic coevolution envisaged with new selection pressures brought by the gradual construction of a symbolic niche stands apart from the incompleteness thesis in cultural anthropology in the fact that coevolution may always have a next step ahead, it is nevertheless complete. Cousins demonstrates that the idea of incompleteness draws from an implicit assumption that information or meaning are in the selection pressures themselves, from a naïve psychology based on objectivism.

Here, I would like to point out that Baldwin does not fall into this critique. Also an accurate psychologist, Baldwin is known to have inspired Piaget's genetic epistemology, ⁶ and he provides a detailed account of the organic balance between environmental pressures and the species accommodations through the reorganization of internal structures in response of genetic change. This structural-functionalism ensures not to fall into objectivism, nor into a Lamarckian direct impact of learning onto genetic material.

For Cousins, if the coevolution through the construction of a cultural niche does not imply incompleteness, it is because the niche in itself does not require any specific outcome of learning, but just the capacity to learn. Now, this capacity has been well developed throughout human evolution and cannot be called incomplete. In this view, the actual responses to adaptive problems produced by a species engaged in a semiotic coevolution are truly creative. Human evolution is thus conceived as an unpredictable outcome about which we can only reconstruct causal factors afterwards, in accordance with the epistemology of biology (Rumelhard, 2000), and not as a shaping of the species that is totally determined by the selection pressures exerted on passive individuals, like in the neo-Darwinian synthesis. This last remark brings us to the point that Cousins must discuss, after presenting extensively the example of cultural knowledge through the example of language and tools: Do we need culture at all, or is it only about learning language?

Of course, addressing all domains at once would be inconvenient for a clear reasoning, and Cousins chose to focus on cognitive aspects being functional for the survival. Still, other dimensions of culture such as the emotional and affective, or value-laden items and rituals, must play an important role in a semiotic coevolution. More interestingly, Cousins points out that the diverse innovations on the evolutionary route of our ancestors could only become semiotic “by virtue of the collective interpretations of individual subjects” (p. 184). This emphasis on the social shows how culture can be a selection force: The fitness of an individual is not just about finding an effective way to use learning to confront physical reality, but it is about finding a way to learn that is similar enough to the ways of others within the niche. In this sense, the fitness to the niche is partly arbitrary and directly depends on the culture created by the community over long periods of time. Cousins call the cultural background into which individuals semiotic ontogenetic development has to fit “ideational frameworks” (p. 184), of which the main function is to allow for the community to fall onto a “consensus of perception.” This consensus is, indeed, necessary for communication to even be possible, and also make of culture something quite stable, as research about social representation have clearly stressed (Doise, 1989; Duveen & Lioyd, 1990; Marková, 2007, for instance). This point shows, again, how important is the social nature of culture for Cousins's proposal of a semiotic coevolution.

The “social” is of course a very broad term, so broad that it is sometimes hard to know what it designates. As I understand the stimulating proposal of Cousins for a semiotic coevolution, the backbone of the social considered in his lines is more precisely what we could call education. Be it formal or informal, based on language practices or imitation of the elder or even just a doing with, it is about this huge endeavor every generation of humans has to endorse to ensure success in the species survival: Trying to provide the new generation with the means to reconstruct the meaning accumulated throughout a long history—and a long evolution could we now add. Culture is not learned by being exposed to a given material environment: It is transmitted and must be reconstructed by the learner, or it is lost. As Bruner once wrote, “culture cannot be discovered: it is transmitted or forgotten” (Shulman & Keislar, 1973, p. 93). The “social” in Cousins's contribution should therefore be taken in consideration for semiotic coevolution in a more fundamental level, as an educational endeavor without which genes are totally ineffective at bringing about the so-called capacities that are selected through a phylogenetic process.

As Darwin states, selection is a response to adaptive problems. Such adaptive problems can be part of the niche itself: What about the need to better regulate social order or the community growth, what about sharing resources in a way that ensures organization and peace within the community? As the adaptive problems out of the species niche, such as external dangers or lack of food, decreases through the development of a stronger niche, the selection pressures internal to the niche might grow in importance for the species survival. We can particularly feel the challenges of the niche pressures today, in our worldwide developed niche of Homo Sapiens, be it in the threat on the planet ecosystem or, more self-centered, in the fact we have about one billion human suffering from hunger everyday in our global community, and seemingly as many or even more dying from causes related to obesity.

Because culture is transmitted through education, formal or informal teaching (such as planting crop with your parents) must be considered as part of the phylogenetic process of fitness to the environment. It is not only the ability to learn that matters but also the actual learning opportunities throughout individuals life in a given culture. Thus, developing education can be understood as the crucial aspect of developing the niche for genetic change supporting mental capacities. This is obviously not only about the past phylogenetic evolution but still valid now in our highly developed social organizations or communities, where many children with phylogenetically well-selected abilities still cannot develop them ontogenetically, because of a lack of parental and school opportunities for learning, or even because of more subtle discrimination within a school context (Rochex & Crinon, 2011, for instance), a discrimination that is interestingly related to language. There is also a question to raise about the social organization fitness, which appears to me a fundamental aspect of the phylogenetic process. Is a given social organization, or a cultural feature fit for a long lasting survival? Example in Ancient history of communities disappearing because of political or more generally cultural flaws are many, the most famous may be the mysterious Easter Island disaster.

Of course, it does not mean that education was formal or even language-based from the beginning. As it has been shown in genetic epistemology (Piaget, 1974) and through educational research (Vergnaud, 2009), knowledge is first operative (or procedural, but in a way that the situation where procedures are used is included in the know-how) and only later predicative (or declarative, i.e., language based) and maybe even later meta-cognitive (with the awareness of knowing and how to learn).

In sum, Cousins raises a very important issue relating selection pressures to social behavior and fitness to culture. Yet, in his already dense contribution, the proactive “educational effort” receives less attention than deserved in his discussion. Taking example on today, the educational effort is not only massive, but also necessary: Without any education—but do we need to recall such an evidence—we would not survive any habitat. So much so that it is not exaggerated to state that an effective education still constitutes one of the main challenge for humanity survival today.

Perspectives for semiotic coevolution

Cousins sorts the dispute as a philosophical question. However, it should also be addressed as an empirical one: We have now a body of work in education about the nature of learning. The difference between information and meaning is not only a question of paradigm, or is wrongly a question of paradigm. It should be a question of the type of knowledge we consider. Indeed, assuming that all knowledge has one same nature is an oversimplified understanding which can not accurately make sense of educational issues. Still, I tend to agree with Cousins that the knowledge we are interested in with evolution is rather the complex knowledge, ⁷ for it is the development of higher mental capacities that we are focusing on, and in this case, the semiotic approach is definitely more relevant than the information processing metaphor, as Cousins convincingly demonstrates. ⁸

Cousins's article is not only important for convincingly showing that evolutionary theorist can find relevant explanation of the processes at stake in phylogenetic development in semiotics and cultural psychology. It also contributes in reviving Bladwin's account to the evolution theory. Baldwin's contribution to biology was a middle way between Larmarkian and Darwinian accounts. Baldwin provided an explanation of selection, the organic selection, that could produce similar effects of learning to what the Lamarkian view wanted to explain, while based on a process of selection only. More precisely, adaptation made during the course of life, we might like to call it learning, are considered by Baldwin as amplifying variations in the inherited genetic material, in a way that leads to a increased selection of best-equipped individuals. This was to give organisms a more active role, notably through a reorganization of themselves after any evolutionary change.

What relates Darwin, Baldwin, and Piaget, as Howard E Gruber explains in the foreword of a remarkable book about Baldwin's psychology (Broughton & Freeman, 1982), is precisely this idea of organism, such as Darwin defined it: “Organized being.” The Baldwin effect, indeed, “provided a very good point of attack for those biologists who were dissatisfied with neo-Darwinism” such as Jean Piaget, who replaced the neo-Darwinian idea of random mutations and individuals passively suffering the natural selection process by the “assimilation of fortuitous events into strong structures” (Broughton & Freeman, 1982, p. 49). Before the synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelism, the natural selection was not thought of as a capacity of the organism to vary in fragmentary way and each separate characteristics be selected independently of each other. Darwin kept in mind to explain how organized being came to exist, and how a small change could permit the whole organism to reorganize and evolve. He gave much attention to the way an organism would remain an organized whole after any evolutionary change. For Gruber, it is a later reading of Darwin evolution theory that turned it into an atomistic paradigm, ⁹ a mechanism articulating a “random variation followed by a separate process of selection” (pp. xvii–xviii).

The distinction between an atomistic and organic view seems to actually overlap with the two options presented by Cousins in the phylogenetic hypothesis about language, the first being a discontinuity approach – as he shows it would be the framework for a model based on information – and the second being a continuity approach to the development of language, this one forming relevant framework for a semiotic approach. First, the concept of organic selection proposed by Baldwin fits well with a semiotic account of language and provides a possible explanation about how culture and brain evolution mutually shape each other. ¹⁰ What is first an accidental change is integrated into a structure, through the repetition of the same with variation, the organism secures his ways (habits) and occasionally produces variations that are successful. With this process, Baldwin provides an account of how ontogenetic and phylogenetic development tend to a more adequate apprehension of the world. Second, the flaws of the information processing approach to language shown by Cousins in his article are all related to an atomistic vision. For instance, from the fact information processing do not take into account individual interpretation in the approach of language, there is no possible structuring of the whole organism after even the smallest evolutionary change as in the organic selection of Baldwin. Moreover, the information approach denies the possibility of emergence, as Cousins points out when discussing Chomsky's and Pinker's theories, and more particularly, the “massive modularity thesis” of evolutionary psychology. Emergence is a crucial example, as it cannot exist in an atomistic view. To the contrary, in structural-functionalism such as Baldwin's, Piaget's and Darwin's theories, superior mental functions are represented as emergent properties of the psychological and physiological whole. This point directly contradicts any simplistic modularity thesis such as the one of evolutionary psychology, because “generally speaking, properties emerging from a whole cannot be deduced from the functioning of all parts of the same whole (for instance the emerging properties of DNA duplication cannot be deduced from the biochemical components of the molecule), but they nevertheless remain in an interdependent relation with the whole” (Richelle & Seron, 1980, p. 201, translated by the author).

In my opinion, Cousins's proposal of semiotic coevolution would benefit from endorsing an organic paradigm (Kohler, 2010) like structural-functionalism does and might find more interesting detailed processes in Baldwin's organic selection to explain the key processes of semiotic coevolution and, in particular, the way meaning and organism interact in a phylogenetic development.

Finally, the question is about how much emphasis should be given to this social and cultural selection pressures introduced by Cousins. To stress the novel idea that selection pressures can come from a self-constructed niche, I am in favor of a strong emphasis, such as a new concept of sociocultural selection, to contrast with the old and somehow obsolete notion of Nature in natural selection.