The Cultural Struggle of Genes

Abstract

Against all the one-sided biologistic and culturally determined explanatory accounts of human behavior, we can now set a comprehensive biological, i.e., consistent evolutionary concept that regards real cognitive gain and successful genetic adaptation by mutational changes as being identical and therefore only then becomes a uniform theory of evolution of humans. The essential difference to earlier concepts consists of, above all, recognizing the cognitive nature of all living processes and simultaneously taking note of how that quality which up to now appears to us to be special to our species relates to and at last, completely merges with biological evolution. In this somewhat more consistent kind of perspective, the apparent unlimited creativity of mankind is considered as being no different to the apparently very limited creeping ability of a snail which gives reason for justifiable doubt about the privileged position of Homo sapiens. The most unexpected but at the same time most important result with regard to our topic states that individual human cognition, whether primitive as in the Stone Age or highly cultured as in modern times, has nothing to do with real cognitive gain since the latter, to repeat it again, can only be achieved by the roundabout route of purely random genetic changes in the course of the Weismannian germ line.

While culture has prompted many degrading variations in the germ, it is, on the other hand, also the source of many inheritable improvements, upgrading variations. This is a new field, ..., but how in fact did the specific talents for music, painting, mathematics, etc. originate?

August Weismann