Cultural, Yes. But All Too Cultural?
In his classic work, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga (1955) points out the remarkable similarities between human game playing and animal courtship rituals. Huizinga’s comparison trades on the notion that human players do not seem to care about ordinary needs. Though his comparison is inspiring, its value is limited because human sports clearly lack the fixed character of animal mating games. Humans play an enormous variety of sports and games, and different sports are played in different parts of the world. Moreover, the same sport may serve different functions and have different meanings, depending on the geographical, religious, and socioeconomic context in which it is played (Guttman 1978;Maguire 1999). Baseball, bridge, chess, curling, and soccer are certainly not the products of the blind natural forces of random mutation and selective retention. Human sports are cultural and, like all things cultural, they have to be learned. We now briefly review three types of evolutionary culture theories and discuss how each of these might deal with a cultural phenomenon like sports.
The first type of evolutionary culture theory argues that cultural evolution is analogous to biological evolution, and that it can be studied with the help of Darwinian theories such as memetics or cultural virus theory (Blackmore 1999;Cullen 2000; Dawkins 1976). Although these thinkers recognize that cultural replicators and selection processes differ significantly from biological replicators and processes, they argue that the analogies between biological evolution and cultural evolution justify the use of Darwinian methods and concepts in the study of human culture.1 Indeed, it is not so difficult to apply memetics to sports. For example, the strategic choice of an American football coach can be seen as an example of variation (all the available strategies), selective forces (experience, the coach’s idiosyncratic preferences, the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent, [End Page 2] etc.), and selective retention (the eventual choice). Memetic approaches to cultural activities like sports may sometimes offer a fresh perspective on a cultural phenomenon, but such new perspectives rarely lead to much more than a fancy reformulation of common sense. Nowadays, even famous meme-enthusiasts like Dawkins and Dennett admit that the popularity of memetics among the general public contrasts glaringly with its apparent theoretical sterility (Mameli 2004).
A second group of evolutionists focus on the biological underpinnings of human culture. In this approach, the emphasis tends to fall on how biologically evolved mental mechanisms determine, or at least set the boundaries for, cultural processes and cultural evolution (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). In general, these evolutionary psychologists stress that biologically evolved adaptations serve as preconditions for cultural activities, and they call these species-level biological adaptations “universal metaculture.” As some of the critics of evolutionary psychology have argued, however, this kind of evolutionary approach is not always fruitful for the study of culture (Rose 2001). Standing upright, which freed human hands for carrying, was an important step in human evolution (Stanford 2003), and is thus an undeniable biological precondition for playing the piano or playing basketball, but Coyne and Berry (2000) point out that this connection tells us essentially nothing of any interest about piano and basketball playing. Even though we think this criticism is too harsh—evolutionary psychology is successful in providing insights into individual behavior—we agree with Coyne and Berry that many of the findings of evolutionary psychology about human culture are often either far from accurate or far from new.
A third type of evolutionary culture theory is the dual inheritance theory, developed by Boyd and Richerson, which is a creative mixture of evolutionary psychology and anti-nativist cultural theories (Boyd and Richerson 1985;Richerson and Boyd 2005). Dual inheritance theory holds that humans, unlike other animals, inherit behavior through two routes: genes and culture. Boyd and Richerson have explored the ways in which these two routes interact, and why people adopt certain cultural variants rather than others. They agree with evolutionary psychologists that our minds are not blank slates: biological evolution has shaped innate learning mechanisms, hard-wired (mating) goals, and the biases that guide cultural transmission. Culture, in other words, is to a certain extent an adaptation. In contrast to most evolutionary psychologists, however, Boyd and Richerson contend (1) that culture is not the expression of naturally selected adaptive genes, but should be seen as the behaviors and mental states that are acquired or modified by social learning, and (2) that culture and social learning often results in the spread of behaviors that reduce genetic fitness.