How Shared Symbols Create Lives Worth Living

"Beyond genes, humans inherit culture: practices, technologies, institutions, and ideas. This creates what researchers call a "second inheritance system."[1] Culture isn't unique to humans. Many animals have traditions: specific foraging techniques, tool use, and migration routes passed across generations. But human culture differs in two crucial ways. First, meanings stabilize through shared conventions, making reliable communication possible. Second, meanings ratchet: Each generation builds on what came before. While other species have cultural traditions, these rarely accumulate. Human culture, by contrast, builds towers of accumulated knowledge.[2]"

"Unlike biological evolution, which requires generations for significant change, cultural evolution can be rapid. Ideas can spread globally in days. This speed creates new selection pressures: Successful ideas reproduce; unsuccessful ones die out. Gene-Culture Coevolution Language was crucial to this cultural ratcheting-enabling meanings to be externalized, preserved, and built upon across generations. But how did language itself emerge and evolve? Language evolution was driven by cultural evolution.[3] As early forms of language diversified and grew"

Humans inherit culture — practices, technologies, institutions, and ideas — forming a second inheritance system alongside genes. Cultural meanings stabilize through shared conventions, enabling reliable communication, and ratchet across generations so each generation builds on prior knowledge. Human culture accumulates complex, cumulative knowledge that other species rarely achieve. Cultural evolution can occur rapidly, with ideas spreading globally in days and creating selection pressures where successful ideas reproduce and unsuccessful ones disappear. Language enabled cultural ratcheting by externalizing, preserving, and transmitting meanings across generations. Cultural dynamics influenced genetic evolution by favoring variations that supported language capacity.

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