Episode 416: Joseph Rouse
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The Fusion of Culture and Evolution in Human Development
Where do the lines lie between nature and culture within humanity? How can our human social practices affect and shape our biology? The answer is within the concept of niche construction, showcasing how human activities, much like those of other organisms, actively shape our environment, which in turn influences our evolution.
Joseph Rouse is a professor of philosophy and also science and technology at Wesleyan University, and also the author of several books. His latest work is titled, Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction. It's a deep dive into the cultural and ethical practices that have co-evolved with our species.
Greg and Joseph discuss the idea of a world where cultural evolution and biological evolution are not two disparate processes but intricately connected facets of human life. Joseph illustrates how these have evolved to support a sophisticated network of social justice, individual freedom, and political democracy. Joseph also makes the case for human life as a complex network of practice-interdependent existence, contrasting the more simplistic view of human behavior as merely a quest for reproductive success. Enjoy this new angle on the ideas of evolutionary biology.
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Episode Quotes:
The interconnectedness of human biology and social culture
08:16 The anthropologist would happily tell you, culture includes material culture, right? And we live in built environments that have been massively transformed, niched constructively, and so seeing that part of what we think of as our social world, as on the one hand, always accommodating our biological capacities but then also recognizing that those needs and capacities have been transformed by this built environment that has been repeatedly transformed and complicated and diversified over millennia because, after all, one of the distinctive biological features of human beings compared to other organisms is that we don't live in the same way as other human beings.
Understanding what philosophers mean when they talk about practice
26:16 As we know from watching the role of the courts, once you have a rule or a law, what it actually means in each case is open to further interpretation and new issues that hadn't been initially considered and once you adapt the rule or the norm to those issues, it reverberates back on the earlier cases. And so you've got a constant dynamic of normative change in which what is normal enables one to make judgments about how to continue in the same way.
Defining biological normativity
11:35 In its basic form, biological normativity is the way in which an organism and a lineage are a process that's goal-directed. Organisms do all sorts of things and adjust to conditions in order to sustain the very process of their being alive.
The problem in talking about and measuring the complexity of social life
36:38 We tend to assume complexity is one thing and can be measured along one dimension. But in fact, there are many different kinds of complexity. I mean, someone living in what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have called a more primitive society, which we rightly no longer talk about, in fact, hasn't negotiated an extraordinary range of local knowledge and relationships, and so forth. Now, we have, in part, delegated more things to more practices, and that has allowed increasing specialization. It's also enhanced some limitations.