What is wrong with the Lewontin Campbell Heuristic?

In these 7 words there is a heuristic that requires no conception of any truth, but manages to unite Relativism with Objectivism, postmodernism with humanity, and reveals the mechanism for teaching, learning, social engineering, divide and conquer, fascism, democracy, monopoly, fashion, culture ,belief, meritocracy, the Overton window, the scientific method etc….When I first understood it, It instantly became the most useful idea that I have ever seen , and yet it seems to be totally obscure and undiscussed.

A lot of modern commentators are very dismissive of evolutionary Epistemology, asserting that either the entire line of any Darwinism is either eugenicist (Social Darwinism) in nature or that it is a founding strategy in transhumanism. While certainly there are associations - and derivations of it along those lines, I cant see why the idea itself is not valid and an essential insight into how Social engineering is deployed. Please prove me wrong…

The original idea (Richard Lewontin -1960 ?) related to the mechanism of biological evolution. Donald T Campbell and other behaviourists took the idea and extrapolated it to apply to all human knowledge and culture. It was known as ‘Universal Darwinism’ , ‘Universal Selection Theory’ and also as ‘Blind variation and selective retention’ (BVSR). It is true that it was instantly applied to cybernetics - I think partly because the idea was modelled and derived using ‘Change Engines’ but Campbell’s logic applies to all knowledge so it’s not surprising that it does underpin cybernetics as well as everything else. Has the baby been chucked out with the bathwater ?

Biological evolution is very very slow. In Steven Mithern’s ‘The Prehistory of the Mind’(1998), he advances a theory on how the human brain evolved over at least 5 million years since our ancestors became upright walking, how the walls between different functions of the brain like tool use and prediction skills were broken down until we arrived at the modern human brain about 10,000 years ago , and only then as a species began an 'ascent' in founding ‘civilisation’ (Cities) and rapid technological and cultural changes.

We can say confidently that the biological construct of the human mind would have changed very little in 10,000 years so the explanation for the species acceleration must be within cultural and not biological change.

The Evolutionary Epistemology of Campbell and subsequent evolutionary theorists, is derived from an understanding of how social behaviour in primate communities relates to human culture, but the gist is that through cultural evolution we could change the way we lived exponentially faster than through biological evolution, leading to significant adaptive advantages.

The ‘Selection’ is the important part - who is the selector?

Not natural selection, or ‘fitness’. The point at which selection by environmental constraints was relevant was before civilization, but once we were successful enough at adaptation, fitness and survival are irrelevant- where is the selection for fitness and survival relating to short sightedness , -when spectacles exist?

Once we had the modern mind, a more secure existence, and little ‘fitness and natural selection’, cultural evolution did not stop, it carried on at rapid pace in flux with its direction determined by whoever the selectors were .

The selector is whoever makes the selection. It could be an individual who adopts a belief or learns something, or an executive class who select and repeat what popular culture amounts to, or the democratic melting pot of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ in shifting belief or practices in different directions.

Whilst there is much expansion on evolutionary epistemology, I never saw further references to the heuristic itself (and its Occam’s razor-ish appeal) after its publication. I find that odd, due to the significance and usefulness I see in relation to all the supremely relevant cultural mechanisms to humanity I listed at the top of this page.

There is also a huge contextual consideration , if you consider that for all that 5 million years evolution of the modern human brain , from the fossil records it seems that in all that time human communities were exclusively within populations of about 150 people (The Dunbar number ) and coincidentally , also the average number of social interactions people maintain on Facebook…

With the modern brain came agriculture, civilisation, cities with huge populations, then more recently mass communications and I wonder if the fact that the mind evolved exclusively within smaller communities hasn’t left us open to esoteric manipulation which the mind had no precedent for in its evolution. In which case is this heuristic the exact mechanism by which cultural change (and lack of it) has been ‘short circuited’ through oligarchical control?