[...] Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word" 'culture'. [...]xoxos wrote:you can estimate the decline of a civilisation by the amount of people stationed as "memetic production"
Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution. Geoffrey Chaucer could not hold a conversation with a modem Englishman, even though they are linked to each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty generations of Englishmen, each of whom could speak to his immediate neighbours in the chain as a son speaks to his father. Language seems to 'evolve' by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.
Cultural transmission is not unique to man. The best non-human example that I know has recently been
described by P. F. Jenkins in the song of a bird called the saddleback which lives on islands off New
Zealand. On the island where he worked there was a total repertoire of about nine distinct songs. Any
given male sang only one or a few of these songs. The males could be classified into dialect groups. For
example, one group of eight males with neighbouring territories sang a particular song called the CC
song. Other dialect groups sang different songs. Sometimes the members of a dialect group shared more
than one distinct song. By comparing the songs of fathers and sons, Jenkins showed that song patterns
were not inherited genetically. Each young male was likely to adopt songs from his territorial neighbours
by imitation, []. During most of the time Jenkins was there, there
was a fixed number of songs on the island, a kind of 'song pool' from which each young male drew his
own small repertoire. But occasionally Jenkins was privileged to witness the 'invention' of a new song,
which occurred by a mistake in the imitation of an old one. He writes:
'New song forms have been shown to arise variously by change of pitch of a note, repetition of a note,
the elision of notes and the combination of parts of other existing songs ... The appearance of the new
form was an abrupt event and the product was quite stable over a period of years. Further, in a number of
cases the variant was transmitted accurately in its new form to younger recruits so that a recognizably
coherent group of like singers developed.' Jenkins refers to the origins of new songs as 'cultural
mutations'.
http://staff.washington.edu/lynnhank/Memes.pdf
At ~17, I began to consider that some people may be limited in this sense. Or "stationed''; nothing new will be forthcoming any time soon.
Disturbing thought, I hope that I'm wrong in any case, but I found interrogating this frustrating. I was still considering this when I encountered classical musicians 'at school' who could improvise not at all...
