Page 491 - Cultures and Organizations

456 IMPLICATIONS

tors for millions of years. Regardless, because we are so immensely numer-
ous and have created such a rich social life, innovations are happening in a
frenzy of change all around us.
The paradox is that practices and technologies can change so fast only
because, and as long as, societies function in stable ways. A society requires
cultural homogeneity at the level of implicit values in order to have capacity
for collective action, which is a condition for a group to be adaptive to its
environment. And cultural homogeneity does not allow for rapid change
in values, because values are acquired, for the most part, in infancy and
for life. Value system changes require generations. So, while groups with
common cultural values will be good at collectively responding to circum-
stances, they will be slow to shift their shared value system even if changes
in circumstances would give such value shifts survival advantages. Note
that a slow change in value systems is still very fast compared with a situ-
ation without culture, in which genetic change is the only mechanism.
People are in the thick of history, and a complex, interwoven web of
competition and collaboration between cohesive groups is the game. Some
elite groups in some societies would wish to expand the moral circle to
include every living thing, creating a brave new world in which all humans
and other inhabitants of that world live in peace. It is a beautiful ideal
worth striving for, but for now this is as realistic as biblical ideas of para-
dise on earth. Yet this tendency to expand the moral circle has brought us
to where we are today, and it will take us further. We are; therefore, we
evolve.

The Essence of Evolution

If the rapid changes that humans and their societies are undergoing are

really evolutionary, and the previous account has shown this clearly to be

so, then it follows that a firm understanding of evolution is important to
managing human affairs. Unfortunately, evolution is a word with an unde-
served bad reputation. Because poorly understood evolutionary ideas have
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been used in political ideologies, and because of antihistoric, absolutist
thinking in some religious doctrines, there is a lot of trepidation and taboo
around it. Evolution really is a simple and uncontroversial phenomenon.
It need not interfere with any ideology or religion. All you need is genera-
tions that produce surplus descendants that inherit from parent generations,
but with variation, and selection that weeds out less successful variants in