For any evolution of living things, energy resources are needed to support the processes of life, and hence homeostasis. The plant world receives energy directly from the Sun, using the reaction of photosynthesis, biological objects for energy must be fed on organic food with energy stored in it. Cultural evolution is human evolution in the field of information processing and needs to be fed by an information resource.
All organic resources are limited, so biological objects are forced to fight for them in different ways. The struggle for coexistence leads to natural selection of individuals in populations, useful adaptations are preserved in populations in the process of inheritance.
The information resource of cultural evolution is essentially unlimited. Having learned how to extract, exchange and use it, a person gains almost unlimited power and significant ecological release. Human actions are no longer fully determined by environmental conditions, there is a certain "free will".
INFORMATION RESOURCE PROPERTIES.
In real life, when two subjects share resources (voluntarily or as a result of coercion), then the resource increases for one, and decreases for the other. This is a fundamental rule of life following from the laws of conservation of matter. Thanks to this property, competitive relations of living beings for resources arise, and history is the incessant wars of mankind for material resources.
If a person shares an apple with a friend, then he has only half of the apple left for consumption. There must be motivation to share.
Information is also a resource, a resource with special properties.
The donor's information resource, when shared with others, does not decrease, which radically distinguishes it from any material resource.
If people share an information resource, it makes both of them richer. The mind is a tool that allows information to be used. And it is beneficial to share information, because it makes everyone richer.
The one who received becomes richer because the resource received can be used to his advantage (it is assumed that this is some information and technological resource), and the other, acting as a donor, has a chance to receive a similar resource in the future from the recipient, if between the counterparties have established a relationship of trust.
This property of information resources makes the process of uniting people endowed with sufficient intelligence in large agglomerations (the process of socialization) beneficial and evolutionarily inevitable, where one can communicate and share experience (information), and where, as a result of communication, everyone's information security increases. Socialization allows the exchange of information between people, there is a possibility of division of labor, leading to a multiple increase in productivity, to an increase in the wealth (resources for development) of society.
Thus, the emergence of sufficient intelligence in the HS makes it possible to use an information resource that has such a remarkable property.
THE REASONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION.
Not upright posture of a person, i.e. the movement of a person on two limbs, and not work made Homo sapiens a person, as they write about it
evolutionists are philosophers. These are only accompanying factors of this metamorphosis.
Two factors made cultural evolution possible:
1. A developed mind and advanced communication languages created by it, which made it possible to work effectively with information.
2. The property of an information resource - when sharing it with others, it does not diminish in the original owner.
Man has managed, living in relatively small communities of hunter-gatherers, to create developed languages of communication, and his mind made it possible to extract useful information from everyday experience and systematize. For example, the mind suggested that it is possible not to roam, collecting prey and hunting, but to live in one place, raising what is possible, domesticating animals and raising livestock. The creation of relatively large settlements revealed the benefits of cooperative interaction, because in such settlements, the division of labor, the exchange of information is already possible, and the protection against possible aggressive actions of the neighboring population increases.
Languages of communication were the tool allowing to own, use, exchange information.
CORRECT DIVISION OF LABOR.
The variability of species discovered by Charles Darwin extends to the species Homo Sapiens. Only a small percentage of gifted people in societies are able to extract information and dissect it in the brain so that it turns out to be useful for the life of not only them, but a significant number of people. Therefore, large agglomerations are needed, in which there will be a certain number of such people.
The wealth of peoples is not in the accumulated gold, it is in the technologies mastered, in the ability to develop innovations, in the division of labor, in the correct use of the information resource.
A team of creative people is needed for innovation. It cannot be done alone.
The correct division of labor means that it is Archimedes (people of this kind) who thinks, invents, learns, Hercules performs feats, the Macedonian conquers India, Abram and Joseph as the most wise, compose religious texts that are supposedly dictated from above, and the common man works hard with their qualifications. And everything starts to develop rapidly due to the cooperation of efforts. But this is ideal. This is not exactly how it happens in life.
But it is still clear that in a large community there should be more smart, gifted people. And if one of them invents the wheel, the idea of the wheel becomes common property, and today the whole world is already on wheels. But there was someone first who came up with it.
In A. Tvardovsky's "Vasily Terkin" this idea about innovation in relation to the field kitchen in the war is formulated as follows.
Smart, to be sure,
There was the same old man
What did the soup come up with
On wheels straight.
To use the information resource and share it, they need some trust in large societies.
Homo sapiens had a significant obstacle on the way to socialization. This is intraspecific aggression. It is justified, is an adaptation, to the conditions of existence in ancient times, when every stranger on the territory of the tribe was considered an enemy and was subject to exile, since the territory provided the tribe with food, just like now it is happening in the animal world.
OVERCOMING INTRASPECIFIC AGGRESSION.
On the trajectory of biological evolution, HS was retained by those adaptations that had been developed in previous periods.
Genetic adaptations are always a modification of the genome to the previous environmental conditions and in this sense they are obsolete, since the environmental conditions themselves change over time.
So, for example, in Africa, the homeland of HS, lions still live in prides, marking their territory. Any lion who invades someone else's territory is considered by the leader of the pride as an enemy that must be expelled or destroyed. After all, the habitat is a matter of feeding the pride.
Likewise, the ancient hunter-gatherers considered the enemy of any HS located on their territory that did not belong to their family. This is where aggression is needed to destroy or expel a stranger.
We must understand that this behavior is genetically determined, we can even say that this is a genetic adaptation, which also sits in our genes in a somewhat softened form. This adaptation manifests itself as an instinct that creates a certain pattern of behavior.
Even in recent times, primitive people not only killed their enemies, but did it with special cruelty - they buried them alive, scalped them, and so on. They did it without any apparent need, by order of their primitive instinct. Such behavior is described by Charles Darwin, who observed how the natives on Tierra del Fuego were killed by the colonists simply because "they quickly multiply."
Consequently, in order to overcome (restrain the innate instinct) of aggression, it is required to create in the brain some moral prohibitions that block this instinct. It is necessary to change the mentality of a person by changing the functional state of individual brain nodes in the process of education. Religions have served this purpose.
Therefore, in the religious information about the "correct faith", in addition to information about the structure of the universe, there was also information of a certain moral ethical nature. The examples showed how to behave in a society of their own kind and described the punishments that, in the event of violation of these moral standards, will be imposed on the guilty person after his death on this Earth. Life was supposed to be eternal, and the soul was immortal, so punishment is a serious punishment. Among these moral prohibitions was, as a rule, the principle of "Thou shalt not kill." Religion has turned out to be an important institution of influencing the mentality of people in the sense of restraining aggression towards their own kind.
The introduction by the primitive religion of some moral norms and rules of human behavior in various situations, the creation of some general rules of prohibition, was very important for life in a social society.
Without these rules, as experience shows, the relationship turned out to be prohibitively cruel, and there could be no talk of any cooperation.
God or gods are present in all religions, but they are not the essence of religions. They should be viewed as a way of bringing religious knowledge from somewhere above, from a cult figure, so that believers do not even have a thought to challenge or modernize them. The fact is that the process of replicating information in the brain is not nearly as accurate as the process of DNA replication. Here, to make it more accurate, we need inaccessible gods in religions. They have no other functions. To confirm this thought, you can recall the game "Broken Phone", where after several replications, the information changes beyond recognition.
By introducing into the consciousness of religious rules of behavior that limited aggression, providing for punishment for violations of prescriptions, apparently, it was possible to curb this genetic adaptation to a significant extent (Aggression to a stranger). Note, not to destroy, but to curb, because we cannot rebuild the genome. And genes create innate instincts as a result of a cascade of sequential biochemical reactions that affect the nervous system and brain. There are no patterns of behavior directly in the genes; only the rules for constructing proteins from the 20 available amino acids are fixed in them.
Aggression is still bubbling inside us today, and the way out for it is blocked to one degree or another by moral prohibitions in the brain. It is costly to contain these emotions in terms of physical health. You have to pay for everything. But the payoff is greater. At this stage of the transition of the population from the existence of tribal tribes to the existence in the form of large agglomerations, where the individual's aggression must be somehow curbed, religion has played, apparently, a significant role.
The same position on the unification of people (socialization) is held by the philosopher and economist of the liberal trend, Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek in his work "The Fatal Conceit".
Quote.
“Often these rules (morality) forbade the individual to perform actions dictated by instinct. Forming actually new and different from the previous morality, they restrain and suppress "natural morality", that is, those instincts that rallied the small group and ensured cooperation within it, blocking and making it difficult to expand.
However, the decisive factor in the transformation of an animal into a human was precisely the curbing of innate reactions caused by the development of culture.
The norms and habits learned in infancy become as much a part of our personality as that which was already guiding our behavior when the assimilation was just beginning. "