Matthew Spencer redefines "cultural Darwinism" as communities competing through shared traits—marriage, laws, and cooperation—like organisms, tracing humanity’s dominance to these advantages over primate infanticide-driven hierarchies. He links WWII and Cold War clashes to ideological cultural struggles, framing modern diplomacy (UN, NATO) as a fragile attempt to reconcile conflicting systems while warning against weaponizing competition for hatred, emphasizing culture’s role in survival without endorsing violence. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, here today again with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Pretty good.
Before we start, just a reminder: if we say anything that you want to make a comment on, or we, especially if we say anything that you feel is in error or you want to correct us, comment on what we say and make sure we're getting it right, the place to send that email is truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
So, need to get right into it today.
A lot to get through.
I have a concept in my head called cultural Darwinism.
Now, I want to be pleased to say that when I did a Google search for this, I only found one other reference to this, and it was in relation to, I don't know, some scientist that was trying to trash some other scientist about something or other.
Not really anything to do with my concept that I have in my brain at all.
So, I feel pretty confident that I can just take it.
Copyright 2022, truthunrestricted.com.
Right.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Jeff is also my lawyer in real life.
Yeah.
And I also want to say that if Charles Darwin were alive today, he would be appalled at all the many, many various ways we use his name.
But I think this one is fine.
This is exactly the way it was originally intended about his idea of survival of the strongest and the fittest.
So this is how this concept works.
So we're going to think of individual communities as though they are individuals.
We do this all the time anyway.
You know, you might talk about the police as if they're just one person.
Oh, the police did this or the police did that.
Or, you know, the government, the government's one person, really.
The government did this, the government did that.
Individual communities can be thought of as individuals, as if they're a hive mind.
And the characteristics of an individual, when you're looking at them this way, are really just the culture of that community.
Culture really being just what you might reasonably expect the individuals of that community to be doing or acting at any given time you might observe them.
That's pretty simple.
So.
But would include such things as like that culture's code of laws and you know, collective beliefs in overwatching otherworldly invisible beings in the sky that they worship.
Yep.
Any kind of religion, any kind of other belief about the world, all those things at any given time, if you were to go to them and ask them questions about what they believe or what they might be doing or acting or thinking, this is the collection of things that we would call the culture of any group.
But just to clarify and put a fine point on it.
Sure.
What we define as culture within the bounds of cultural Darwinism that we're exploring as a concept would include such things as that culture's code of laws, right?
Like the rules, the rules that we make as a people and all agree on that this is allowed and that is not allowed and there's punishments for this and rewards for that.
Right.
All of that is intrinsically part of what we would call culture.
Yeah, like the social contract that people live under, the unwritten social rules, all of those things are all part of the written rules.
And the written rules, of course.
They're all part of the culture is a very wide umbrella across any community.
And every community does sort of come to decisions on what rules it's going to live by.
How they come to those is also different varying on which community.
But they all tend to have rules, written or not, or usually some version of both.
And those rules, I mean, every community can come up with any set of rules that it wants to live by, any level of tolerance or strictness of any kind of behavior.
All sorts of communities come up with all sorts of different versions of this.
That's fine.
But when you have communities that have to directly compete with each other, you know, this is when we get interesting situations.
So in today's world, like, first of all, I want to put a new disclaimer in this in that a lot of people might look at what we're saying here and think that we're advocating for it.
And that's not what we're doing.
This isn't some kind of sideways social Darwinism or whatever.
This is a recognition that this is a thing that people have behaved like in the past, primarily.
So right around sometime around a million years ago, humans became the top of the food chain.
We learned how to make fire and everything changed after that point.
And from that point on, I mean, we did, we have changed physically slightly since then to some extent.
And we can tell that by fossil records and whatnot.
But the most important changes we've made since then were all in the decisions we've made and how we've lived.
That's been the primary driving force for developing all the things we've developed since that point is the decisions that we've made.
And that includes how we've lived and all of that.
And so this is what I'm talking about now: is that as we live in communities, we decide how we're going to live within each one.
And in our society, we pretty much have everything we can live anyway, and we're fine.
But when we were just starting to become out of reach of the predators of the world and gaining full access to the resources around us and exploiting all those resources with tools and all those things, how we decided to live was the most important decision that early humans could have made.
And so that's what I'm talking about here when I talk about cultural Darwinism: is that if one group decides to live one way and a neighboring group decides to live a different way, and one of those two ways makes one of those groups stronger and more fit, and probably most importantly, more numerous, like population-wise, then that group is going to out-compete the first group.
And in prehistory, this must have happened countless times because we all started in one region that was Africa, and we expanded from there.
And we actually expanded from there several times over.
But one thing to talk about while we're dragging the subject back to prehistory is like the early exercising of culture itself is what I think gave prehistoric man the edge that he required to maintain the top of the food chain.
Because individually, we're still far weaker than many predators out there, and especially the predators of the day, right?
Even armed with the tools and weapons that they could furnish themselves at the time.
One hunter or one individual alone in the wilderness against a host of other animals wouldn't survive the encounter.
It was our intelligence and language and the ability to communicate with each other and act cooperatively that gave us the edge that we needed to dominate the food chain.
And it's an economy of scale.
Like raw genetics and raw genetic advantage from conventional Darwinism can only get a species so far.
The fastest and most efficient means that we found to circumvent that is to scale up through cooperation.
And that's what culture is: cooperation.
The agreement between several members of the species or a group or a community to work together for the collective good rather than each of us going out on our own.
Yeah, that's an important point is that we only got this far.
And even back a million years ago, our ancestors only got as far as they did because they worked together.
That's a hugely important point is that no one got there on their own.
Some individual ideas were come up, were found by individuals along the way, but it was only in the sharing of those ideas and the perfection of them through many iterations that we got all the ideas we have now.
made this wonderful civilization, if we want to call it wonderful.
And only through cooperating is that possible.
But as much cooperation as we did, we also had an awful lot of competition.
So that's what I want to talk about right now is that individual communities competed with each other for the resources.
And this, once you're at the top of the food chain, your greatest competitor is other humans.
And if you can make decisions to allow your people in your community to live better than the people in the neighboring community, you are going to out-compete them.
You're going to use resources more efficiently.
You're going to use more of the resources.
There's going to be resources that that other community can't use.
And most importantly, if you can make more children and have those children live longer, then you are going to out-compete the other community.
That's just how that works.
So all the crazy ideas that early humans must have come up with for all the different ways to live, we can see among many different areas of the world even now.
We can see, we can look back at some places kept track of history, some people haven't, but they've just continued on with traditions.
And there's many various ways, but there's some things that are common among nearly all of them.
So the second half of this concept, I want to talk about one of those things.
So most and really probably all cultures that we know of have some form of a thing that we generally, in English anyway, call marriage.
Now, to some people, most people haven't really thought about this marriage thing that often.
It's ubiquitous.
It's one of those things that you don't really think about because it's just always sort of there.
But all of our closest cousins in the animal community, all the great apes, very few of them live in a way that's even close to monogamous.
In anthropological terms and primatological terms, they call this sort of monogamous or promiscuous on a, you know, I think they have a scale or something.
I don't really know what they do, but they generally have these two different ways and there's a gray area between them.
Some suffice it to say, for the sake of this debate, we could confine it to a binary choice of promiscuous or monogamous.
Right, because I think for humans, you know, some people like the idea that humans were just naturally monogamous and it was all nice and beautiful and they got together and married each other.
However, I think that's very unlikely.
Humans even now aren't really naturally monogamous.
You only have to remember your time in high school to know that that's true, I think.
One such idea that is present in pretty much every culture, certainly all the ones that have left Africa, is marriage, the idea that we are going to pair up and couple for life.
And some people like the idea that we were naturally doing this, that it's a natural part of life, that it's, for some people, it's even the goal of life somehow.
And that's, you know, I think that's nice and it's beautiful even, but I don't think that fits with what we know about the animal kingdom.
And humans, I don't believe humans are naturally monogamous.
We're not like wolves somehow that just mate for life.
Because in my experience with humans, that's not how it usually works.
We have to work at being monogamous, actually.
And we have to create social conditions that encourage it and keep people in that space.
And that's how humans have developed.
Right.
Worked our cultures in such a way that we create a social environment in which these things that these marriages, these monogamous couplings are not only accepted, but encouraged.
And anything other than that is discouraged in many places.
Maybe in the last 50 to 100 years-ish, it's been a little less strict in that regard, but it's still there in many places, in many families, in many, many areas.
And so I don't think this is a quote unquote natural thing that we were just going to do based on our genetics or our biology.
This is a thing we've decided to do socially, which makes it part of our culture.
It makes it a thing that we decided to do.
And here's my argument here, is that early humans, we know almost nothing about the history of marriage, where it began, because it began so early that it's in the range of history sometime around, you know, they think like sometime around where fire first began, when we first began producing fire on our own, sometime in that range.
And it's so old that no one really knows exactly where it started.
But at some point, humans began deciding to form coupled relationships, generally for life.
And I argue that that decision made a huge impact on the ability for a community to thrive.
So hear me out.
When you have a group of humans who are not deciding to behave this way, they would be a lot like we would see in the animal kingdom among our closest relatives, the other primates.
And the other primates aren't really that monogamous.
They aren't like full promiscuous like rabbits, but they aren't really monogamous.
They have a structure in which the dominant males get to breed and the ones that aren't dominant males don't.
And the non-dominant ones try to sneak around and, you know, make an opportunity happen, you know, outside of view of the dominant males.
But, you know, it's always, this is always something you read when you read these, when you read about this among papers about great apes is that the dominant males are always trying to make sure that the lesser males don't get an opportunity to breed.
Yeah.
And there's several species where if a dominant male gets his hands on the offspring of a non-dominant male, he'll kill it.
Yeah, I believe it's called infanticide.
It's much more common in the mammalian kingdom than we would like to acknowledge because it puts chills down my spine that as part of nature, other mammals are killing the babies of other mammals of their kind that aren't their own offspring.
Yeah, there's all kinds of horrifying things that happen in nature, man.
It happens among every mammal that eats meat for food.
And it might even happen among mammals that don't eat meat for food.
I don't know.
But all the big cats very famously do it.
They found killer whales that do it.
It's a dark chapter about nature.
And it's part of the reason why one of the rules to this podcast is that the things that happen in nature aren't necessarily things that we should aspire to.
Yeah.
Right.
So, with that, also, as a new disclaimer in this already fraught podcast episode, walking on thin ice as we were.
We would like to take this moment to explicitly state that we in no way promote infanticide.
That's right.
Yeah.
And in case it was not clear before, in case it was not 100% crystal clear before, stated explicitly: infanticide is bad.
But other animals do engage in this behavior.
We have to acknowledge this because we've seen it.
And we must imagine that humans weren't in any way special in this regard.
So, like, to thrust to the point of it, sexual competition within a community or group is a waste of resources because the dominant male or whoever could spend time and energy foraging, hunting, improving shelter, doing any number of things to improve the well-being of the group, but instead has to spend it defending his harem from sexual competition.
That's true.
In the true Darwinist perspective, in the what you might consider to be the true, what might be survival of the fittest or perhaps reproduction of the fittest, as it's probably more accurately accurately stated, this isn't an inefficiency.
This is the thing that keeps that group stronger.
Because if all you're going for is raw strength and the ability to push aside another gorilla makes that gorilla the strongest and literally the best one to create the children.
But if, and we know that early humans at some point decided to start pairing up in the way that marriages work, this must have greatly reduced the amount of sexual jealousy available in a community.
And it must have given a larger number of them the opportunity to reproduce.
And, you know, really, when you look at this idea, it goes directly against social Darwinism, which is more like if you're weak, you shouldn't have the opportunity to reproduce.
It's kind of generally the notion of social Darwinism.
But marriage and just the idea that everyone should just partner up really allows everyone, regardless of their relative properties, some opportunity to reproduce.
It's like we as a species recognized: okay, we've evolved to a really solid plateau.
We no longer need to juggle our genetics with every coupling to try and produce beneficial mutations that make us bigger, stronger, faster, tougher, whatever we need to physically mutate to adapt to our environment, because we've involved brains and opposable thumbs.
And now we can manipulate our environment with tools and intelligence and communication.
And that's something that anyone in our species can do.
So basically, on the physical Darwinism mutation scale, we have arrived.
Yes.
And the only place we have to go up from here is through economy of scale, winning through more of us.
So if you thought of two communities, if you had two communities side by side or near enough to each other that they would know of each other's existence, and one of them only decided this new radical idea of marriage,
pairing up everyone for life to create new of their kind, you would have a much greater opportunity to overpopulate the region and overwhelm the neighboring community.
And this doesn't just happen because there would be more children available.
Technically, there would be the same number available because even when you weren't doing it, all the females of the group generally got an opportunity to reproduce.
However, as soon as there's less sexual jealousy, well, when there's more sexual jealousy, some of the males who aren't getting an opportunity to reproduce are going to leave.
They're going to leave to try to find a different opportunity to reproduce somewhere else in the jungle.
Or they're going to pursue, they're going to pursue opportunities within the group that will create tension, strife, and violence and angst within the group, all of which impacts productivity and harmony.
Sexual jealousy generally does tend to limit the size of most mammalian groups.
There are some groups that travel in extremely large herds, but even those have a great amount of sexual jealousy going on among the males.
And they, you know, the number of males that get the opportunity to reproduce is limited compared to what it would be if they paired up.
And so this, this is always limiting the size of almost every group.
But as soon as you're removing that aspect, as soon as you're pairing up in this way, your excess males in your group don't have the drive to leave for other opportunities.
And also the females get more assistance from their partner for raising children.
These two things both occur.
One might see, is this really a thing that happened?
Although we know it did because every culture on every far reaches of the planet that we've gone to, including Hawaii, which was extremely remote, all had some form of pairing up in this way, of a marriage situation.
This is an idea that must have been very early in our development that I'm going to put forward as a notion that must have also greatly increased our competitive edge.
Because when they came in contact with other groups that weren't doing this, they must have either driven those groups out or overwhelmed them and made them also live in this way.
Yeah, or just subsumed them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or those other groups had to independently develop this idea in order to compete with them.
And that's a core piece of the history of humanity right here.
And we know it's true because everyone was doing it.
Every culture on earth has been doing it, except for maybe there might be a couple of small pockets of very small tribes.
But the reason why they're very small tribes and those ideas haven't made it to every corner of the planet is because the marriage idea worked better.
It out-competed all the other ideas.
Yeah, because like sexual jealousy is a very real thing.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
Just like sexual desire, just like the desire to reproduce and the endorphin jump you get dumped that you get as a reward for successfully doing the act.
Like we're physically wired to produce offspring.
And being in a culture that encourages constant competitiveness sexually, because that's really what a promiscuous culture is.
Yeah.
Is yes, you know, the someone with a more free love bent might argue, well, like jealousy is a choice and you could, you could exist in a promiscuous culture where everyone just agreed to couple with everybody else and nobody got jealous over it.
But I would argue that pretty much any cult I've ever heard of that tried to promote that sort of free love belief was usually just centered around like one or two cult leaders who enjoyed having as much sex with as many partners as they could.
And in any one of those groups, sexual jealousy always reared its head at some point because we're wired that way.
So yeah, like I think it was a huge competitive edge because as we've already said, like the concept of informed, organized, well-communicated, well-planned cooperation between individuals in the execution of a task pays back near exponential rewards.
Yeah.
Right.
And the chances of that cooperation working more often and to a greater degree goes way up when there's less sexual jealousy among the males of a community of early humans.
Well, and also when it's not just about less sexual jealousy, it's also about like more efficient reproduction.
Pair everyone off.
And it's a crass concept today, but pair everyone off.
And it's the female's job to produce a new child every nine months to one year.
And she gets one male dedicated to the task of being her mate and caring, helping to care for and raise the offspring and help support her when she is basically a baby machine.
A lot of ancient cultures and a lot of old school religions, sorry to beat that drum, but it's there.
A lot of their central tenets are based around like, you know, contraception is bad and it's the woman's job to produce as many offspring as she is physically capable of doing so.
And that goes hand in hand with the marriage and monogamy concept, right?
Yeah.
The successful population is the one that gets larger faster.
When I look at this concept, I also see most of our global conflicts in this light.
This has been, I mean, you could look at all of World War II in this light, that World War II was about two competing cultures looking to dominate and defend against that domination in that way.
And this, and one could even argue that it was more than two cultures, but look at the Cold War afterwards, communism versus capitalism.
Well, yeah, and then the Cold War could be seen the same way, that this is really about these two groups wouldn't be at each other's throats if they lived more like each other.
That's an interesting way to look at these things.
It's not something, you know, like I say, like we said at the beginning, I don't think that this is a thing we should encourage or promote, but it is definitely a way in which we have lived in the past.
Well, and it is pretty telling where like a lot of a lot of wars arguably are cultural wars, like one group trying to force, physically force itself or force its ideology upon another group.
Yeah.
It's going on right now in the Ukraine.
Like it's still happening today.
And I think a great deal of what we see as modern diplomacy between nation states, you know, the UN and NATO and whatnot.
Although we love to hector it for its lack of efficiency or perceived level of corruption or ineffectiveness.
It really is just our cultures or the more peacefully inclined in our cultures working to try and find like a cultural hegemony where we can bring that level of cooperation.
Like we went from, you know, family unit to community to township to city to province to city state to province.
And now we have nations and all these separate and distinct cultures in the world, and we're trying to find a way to sort of blend those together and peacefully coexist now.
Like we're it's almost like we're in a new phase because we're kind of hitting the ceiling of our real estate.
So the whole expand to succeed thing isn't a panacea anymore because we're kind of running out of room for that.
So I think what we see as modern diplomacy is really like sort of the next step of cultural Darwinism of trying to find a set of rules that everyone can live by.
Yeah, dilute the culture to a point where it's one that everyone can belong to.
Like the global community, I think is sort of our next evolutionary step in cultural Darwinism.
And I think we're struggling really hard to make it.
Yeah, because each culture still wants all the other cultures to bend to what they have.
Whereas what we probably should be looking more for is a way to find a general set of rules that everyone can live by without having to give up their individual ways of life.
If that's possible, I don't know.
If anyone from the UN is listening to this, give me a call.
Well, I mean, there's also the fact that like a lot of cultures in the world have at least some of their defining tenets or, you know, things that they identify themselves by as a thing or another group that they hate.
So like until all of that baggage gets shed by the individual cultures, I don't think we're going to make that next evolutionary step.
Having a culture be defined by who they oppose is a dark way to define a people.
Well, yeah, but it's done.
And I think it's done arguably premeditatedly because, you know, it taps into that whole jealousy and competitiveness thing.
Like it's really easy to prey on hate.
Yeah.
To convince people that the ills in their life is that group's fault over there.