The Origins of Symbolic Culture
Knight, C. (2010a). The Origins of Symbolic Culture. In U. Frey, C. Stormer and K. P. Willfuhr (eds), Homo Novus – A human without illusions. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 193-211.
Symbolic culture is a realm of patently false signals. From a Darwinian standpoint, it is not easy to explain how strategies of reliance on such signals could have become evolutionarily stable. The archaeological record shows evolving modern humans investing heavily in cosmetics, with a particular emphasis on ochre pigments matching the colour of blood. This chapter discusses the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model of the origins of symbolic culture in the context of hypotheses sometimes considered to be alternative explanations. It is shown that these various hypotheses are not genuine alternatives. Many are not Darwinian, while others either fail to address the question of symbolism or address it but make no reference to details of the archaeological record. It is concluded that the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model offers the most testable and parsimonious way of integrating these different perspectives.
‘Symbolic culture....requires the invention of a whole new kind of things, things that have no existence in the ‘real’ world but exist entirely in the symbolic realm. Examples are concepts such as good and evil, mythical inventions such as gods and underworlds, and social constructs such as promises and football games’. (Philip Chase 1994, p. 628)
From a Darwinian standpoint, ‘symbolic culture’ is an unsettling notion. Modern science became established in opposition to the idea that culturally accepted fictions can be equated with facts. Yet the concept of symbolic culture requires us to grasp just that paradoxical possibility. Long before the late twentieth century invention of the Internet, evolution allowed humans to flit between two realms, reality on the one hand, virtual reality on the other. Symbolic culture is an environment of objective facts – whose existence depends entirely on subjective belief. In this chapter, I attempt to bridge the gap between Darwinism and the human sciences by providing a materialist account of our species’ puzzling reliance on moral, religious, and other cultural illusions.