Kultura - geny - memy : statyczny i dynamiczny model zależności

Abstract

The article presents the static and the dynamic models of relations between genes, memes and culture. The static model reflects three phases of pre-scientific and scientific thinking about relations between the components, showing that in Phase I (between 5th century BC and the beginning of the 20th century) the influence was thought to be only in one direction, from genes to culture. An extreme case of such thinking was the idea of eugenics. Phase II was a period of dominance of the Standard Social Science Model which treats culture independently from biology. In this phase genes and culture are disjoint sets. Development of Neo-Darwinism and the so-called New Synthesis brought these two components together, outlining the third phase of their relations. Phase III brings the discovery of meme and of another sphere of life evolving on Earth - infosphere. The author distinguishes two kinds of information: genetic and non-genetic (protocultures, cultures and cybercultures). The dynamic relations between them are presented through the analyses of Darwinian and non-Darwinian theories of evolution (including Lamarckism, Epigenetics and the idea of the Morphic Resonance developed by Rupert Sheldrake). The main thesis of the article is that understanding of the relations between the components of the model requires chaos theory, emergence and phase plane. It advocates a search for attractors of cultural and non-cultural information as recognizable basins of attraction, generating the dynamics of the forces of evolution.