Page 498 - Cultures and Organizations

The Evolution of Cultures 463

pollute the environment and destroy their sources of food or water. They

may find new ways to extract nutrients or energy from plants and thereby
extend the carrying capacity of their habitats. The range of human behav-
iors is endless, but it is not unbounded.

Symbolic Selection
During World War II, looking remotely as if one might be Jewish and not
possessing a non-Jew declaration while being in a European country was
tantamount to a condemnation. In other recent wars and acts of terrorism,
a typical trend has been for fighters to kill one another off for symbolic

reasons. Being of the wrong religion is probably the most important of
these reasons, although ethnic appearance also scores high, and being a
supporter of the wrong soccer team has proved lethal in occasional cases
as well. These are extreme examples of symbolic selection: selection based
not on what one does but on what symbolic identity is attributed to one.
Such selection is, beyond doubt, an evolutionary force.
Groups that are being persecuted for symbolic reasons usually create
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strong responses, as argued by biologist-historian Peter Turchin. Basing
his work on extensive analyses of historical data, and citing many examples
of historical empires, Turchin demonstrates that the life history of empires
shows three nested cyclic patterns. The largest of these, one that operates
on a time scale of several centuries, involves the decay of the capacity for
concerted collective action among the people at the center of an empire, while
at the same time, some of the oppressed groups at its periphery gain in
this capacity. For his explanation, Turchin borrows the term asabiya from
Ibn Khaldun, the great fourteenth-century Tunisian thinker. Ibn Khaldun

discussed the conflicts between city dwellers and nomads, and his analysis
was that the capacity for collective action, which he called asabiya, was the

decisive factor. Asabiya, then, is a variable that directly captures the degree
to which a people can act cohesively like a superorganism, instead of being
plagued by intragroup competition. From an evolutionary point of view,
this means that a people with high asabiya will best be able to replicate its
values and its practices, and probably its genes as well.

All Levels Interact
Whereas genetic and epigenetic selection operate at the replicator level
of individuals, behavioral and symbolic selection are group-level forces.

Sexual selection can operate at both levels, because it is modified by sym-
bolic clues at the group level. So, competition between individuals and