Page 50 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

RETHINKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE

a cumulative progress (Williams 1966: 34). Individual organisms could not care
less for the betterment of the species. They just want to survive. The quality of
adaptative mutations is measured simply in terms of how long the organism
survives. Survival in life is the only objective: ‘Animals make a living by eating,
avoiding being eaten, and reproducing’ (Dawkins 1996: 94).
As life is marked by relentless destruction, the species procreates as much as
possible. Under ideal natural conditions, with abundant food and without
spatial restriction for multiplication, all species, whether plants or animals, can
increase their numbers with each generation (Maynard Smith 1995: 43). But
this is not what happens. Why are species limited in the number of their surviv-
ing individuals? Certainly because death before full development is the cus-
tomary fate of many living organisms. Everywhere there is restriction of food
sources as well as predation. Another species is just a likely food source. For
Darwin (1979: 172), the tree of life covers the surface of Earth with dead bodies
and broken twigs. To counter death, though, each new generation of organisms
brings with it a new starting point in the gradual process of evolution.
Two distinct individual organisms mate and the offspring are altogether new
organisms; diversity and variations are cardinal manifestations of life. The evo-
lutionary plasticity that sexual reproduction allows will increase the chances
of survival of a species in a mutant environment, owing to a greater genetic
variation of its individual members.
The Darwinian conception of life had to reserve a great role for the indi-
vidual. Individuals carry both the evolution and the adaptative improvement of
the species. There are no essences, just individual organisms. Darwinism shows
that the arrow of mutation and evolution starts in individual variability and that
the most precious trait of life is the variation of their populations. Apparently,
with this notion, we find a real alternative to the prevalence of culture as a
collective set of representations that precede and conduct the living individuals.

Predatory interaction and the semiotic theater
The chain of living organisms is under the tension of mutual dependence,
whose outcome is either survival or extinction. Of course destruction in nature
occurs in many forms. It can spring from climate change, causing shortage of
food in specific areas due to floods and droughts, or it can result from direct
predatory interaction. Community in biological niches is either foraging or
outright conflict. The natural world is always under steady competition. Open
and generalized predatory pursuit predates any kind of compassion.
Not even the mother and the fetus live in sublime co-operation or lofty
compassion, sharing common interests. After Haig’s (1993) perceptive paper on
genetic conflicts in human pregnancy, the picture is quite di fferent. Harmony
between mother and fetus is only occasional, and what defines their relation-
ship is a conflict of non-harmonious interests. Mother and fetus compete for
nutritional resources. Fetus cells invade the inner lining of the uterus, through

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