Here’s a thread to discuss Rufus’ talk on Cultural evolution today.
Cross–posted what I had previously said about this in WhatsApp:
”Read the draft. Here is my quick take:
- on the micro-level, I’m processing “culture” as the perspectival part of Vervaeke’s 4Ps model. Cultural change on a personal level then follows from Vervaekes’s 3R model. All of this feeds into the whole inner development work discussion.
- culture on the macrolevel makes sense to discuss because of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities. To connect with the 4P model, our “perspective” is linguistically mediated. Due to social development process (Turchin and DS Wilson cited in the draft), imagined communities have been growing in scale over time. So more people are crafting personal perspective using symbols sourced at civilizational scale.
- the current problem going forward can thus be framed as the need for an improved imagined community. Moreover, quite apart what whatever universalizing symbols are crafted at the global collective intelligence level, there will be a requirement for personal 3R practices to grow into and embody the newly articulated imaginal.
Here is some quick and dirty AI-assisted research into “cultural evolution”:
While exact numbers are impossible to determine, estimates suggest that at the end of the last Ice Age (~15,000 years ago), there were likely hundreds to possibly a few thousand distinct languages spoken globally. Research suggests that while “super-families” existed with shared vocabulary, high linguistic diversity prevailed as human populations began to expand and diverge.
At the end of the last ice age, roughly 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, the global human population is estimated to have been quite small, with figures often cited around 1 to 4 million individuals. This gives a rough estimate of 8,000 to 500 speakers per language.
There are approximately 7,100 to 7,170 known living human languages currently in use worldwide, according to data from early 2026. As of early 2026, the estimated human population is approximately 8.3 billion people. For a calculated estimate then, there are currently about 1,169,014 speakers per language.
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The secular trend is clear - in preliterate eras, the span of any given culture was quite a bit smaller. Cultural evolution models need to account for the growth and radiation of specific cultures (The 7000 language estimate for now is quite generous - over 40% of those are threatened with extinction. Also, the distribution skew towards civilizational languages like English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi is quite pronounced).
Without going all into many, many sources, it seems like the advent of the state, the expansion of the state through empire, and the advent of literate religions played a major role. Did culture cause all that, or did all that move culture in a direction? Chicken or egg I would venture to say. Complexity theory would suggest feedback loops are generally involved.
By way of mechanism, it’s hard to argue with Interlocking Behavioral Contingencies (IBCs). Again, feedback loops. Apart from social feedback, people also get practical feedback from environmental interactions. Culture is both sticky (from dense social feedback, especially ritual and myth) and tends to drift (because things change - rain dances sometimes fail to produce the rain). Habermas makes quite a bit out of “cognitive dissonance” due to the expansion of pragmatic knowledge in the Axial Age transformations of global culture. That strikes me as consistent with the model I am sketching above.
So …. now what? It seems quite fair to surmise that many of our traditional rain dances may fail to produce future rain. Pragmatic knowledge marches on. “Cognitive dissonance” feels like a rather mild analysis of the current global state of mind. Cultural adaptation or emergence thus seems very much in prospect.