The Limits of Cultural Adaptation

• The Adaptive Gap and the Future of Civilization by Mike Hall, 7/3/98
  • Cultural Adaptations by Mary Beth Coggins, 7/5/98
    
    

Mary Beth, thanks for reading my jeremiad and thanks also for calling attention to the structure of the family unit as an example of where dramatic cultural change is evident. I agree that the rise in female-headed households is quite dramatic, and that families are attempting to adapt. I would only add that, from an evolutionary viewpoint, the nuclear family with which we are all so familiar is itself an adaptation to changes in the human lifestyle. The real family structure, the structure that nurtured young Homo Sapiens for tens of thousands of years, was the extended family of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and tribe. Each child had multiple care-givers, role models, sources of support and knowledge, a common fable of their place in the universe and a stable consensus of right and wrong. Technology first made it possible, then to some extent obligatory, for individual family members to move to new locations to exploit opportunities that led to economic advantage, but at the loss of the extended family. Most of us living today grew up in a nuclear family, thinking it the model of human family structure, not realizing that this structure is just a bare-bones remnant of the primordial extended family. Only recently have people come to recognize what was lost in the transition.

One wonders just how much further the family structure can be reduced before we have no family at all (test tube babies?). Given all this change, we will, as you say, need to adapt. My point is that our human evolved brain is not infinitely adaptable - in fact I think it is far less adaptable than most people think. I have tried to adapt to the fact that spending my days in front of a computer requires that I reduce my caloric intake, yet offer me a tasty desert and my evolved sweet tooth usurps my will power. Maybe it's only me who has this problem, but since Americans spend about $20 billion a year on weight loss programs (that don't even work), I doubt that I am alone in this.

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