Formal Parallels between Sociocultural Evolution
and Cognitive Ontogenesis
J¸rgen Kl¸ver, Christina
juergen.kluever@uni-essen.de, christina.stoica@uni-essen.de
The main factor for the evolutionary capability of sociocultural
systems on the one hand can be described as their degree of heterogeneity.
By this we mean the degree of autonomy or independency respectively of different
social roles. This hypothesis of heterogeneity explains the different
paths and degrees of sociocultural evolution of societies which started at
comparable degrees of evolution, e.g. early Europe, China and the Islamic
cultures.
Cognitive ontogenesis on the other hand depends on a
similar heterogeneity, i.e., the difference between cognitive structures
which combine sensual informations to particular concepts and unite these
concepts to semantical networks. The more different cognitive structures
a cognitive systems starts with its development the more advanced it will
become in regard to cognitive capabilities. It can be shown that both sociocultural
and cognitive systems organize their evolution by a particular kind of dynamics
which generates the evolution of the systems evolution.
These general considerations about sociocultural and
cognitive developments are formalized in a geometrical model of evolution.
It is important to understand that we do not claim the same evolutionary
mechanisms of cognitive and sociocultural evolution; that would be another
form of the infamous and refuted recapitulation of biological phylogenesis
by ontogenesis. We argue instead that there are common principles behind
the particular mechanisms which must be separately defined for each type
of evolution.
The geometrical model is implemented into different computer programs: sociocultural
evolution is analyzed by an actor centered (agent based) model of societies,
a generalized cellular automaton which is able to change its rules of transitions
and which is very well suited to capture the geometry of sociocultural systems.
Cognitive ontogenesis is studied by the combination of two kinds of neural
nets, i.e., Kohonen feature maps and bi-directional associative memory nets
(BAMs). It is possible to demonstrate that the same kind of evolutionary
principles regulates the evolutionary dynamics of both different kinds of
computational models.
Finally we argue that the formal parallels of these different
kinds of evolution are not by chance but an evolutionary result of the permanent
interdependency of both evolutionary processes. Sociocultural evolution,
understood as the achievements of social actors who are in turn dependent
on their social environment, depends on the successful cognitive ontogenesis
of social actors; cognitive ontogenesis on the other hand is dependent on
favorable social environments of the cognitive systems. Therefore both sociocultural
evolution and cognitive ontogenesis are most successful if both processes
are determined by the same evolutionary principles. Although the particular
evolutionary mechanisms are different for the two kinds of evolution it seems
that they are both particular forms of general evolutionary principles.