Natural selection is now considered the most important mechanism of biological evolution but this was not always the case. When Charles Darwin first formulated the model, it was missing an essential part for practical application. At that time, only a very rudimentary understanding was available about biological inheritance. This was a disadvantage because the success of the mechanism’s predictions depends on whether and how a selected trait would be passed on to the next generation. Oswald Spengler’s work – which laid the foundation for the study of cultural morphology – came at a time when Darwin’s theory was largely considered a dead end by biologists.

Within a few decades, Darwin’s natural selection was married to Gregor Mendel’s genetics, and our current picture of biological evolution was born. Could the parallel model of societal evolution also be associated with a similar theory of imitation which plays the role of inheritance? I think the answer is yes, and this line of thought unexpectedly leads us back to Oswald Spengler.

Selfish replicators

According to the theory of genetics, biological inheritance is an extremely sophisticated and complex process. Fortunately, there is no need to give a comprehensive description of it herein. Firstly, it is enough to know that the observable properties of organisms (this is called the phenotype) are not directly inherited. It often happens that two parents have the same trait but the offspring will be different from them. For example, the child of a father with blood type A and a mother with also blood type A can have blood type 0.

Heredity has an intermediate step: the creation of the genetic material. The genetic material contains the information (the genotype) that, like a computer program code, determines and prescribes the observable properties of a given organism. The code consists of many small code fragments – so-called genes – which are inherited independently and directly. The individual genes of the child’s genetic material copy the genes of the father’s and mother’s genetic material, one half of the genes from here and the other half from there. Thus, the parents individually pass on only half of their own gene pool to their child during inheritance, and this includes none of the characteristics they acquired during their lifetime.

The relationship between observable traits and gene pools can sometimes be explained simply. The appearance of blood type 0 in the example just mentioned is not difficult to understand, because this trait is determined by two copies of a single gene: one from the father and one from the mother.¹ On the other hand, if we wanted to study how tall a child will grow, we would have to analyze the combined effects of many genes which would be a much more difficult task. Nonetheless, there are phenomena that pose an even greater challenge such as traits that have spread despite being disadvantageous to the individual. It regularly happens that individual ants sacrifice their own lives to protect their colony without receiving any reward in return. Why is this possible?

The most widely accepted answer to questions like this is that the main actors in evolution are not individual organisms but genes. The success or failure of genes is straightforward because we can determine the exact frequency of each variant in a given population of organisms. No example is known in natural selection that leads to the failure of an advantageous gene variant. The inhabitants of an anthill are closely related to each other, so their genes are largely identical. The self-sacrifice of an individual is ultimately for the sake of its own genes.

This gene-centric theory of evolution was introduced to the general public by Richard Dawkins in his book „The Selfish Gene”. Although the theory has its critics, it is undeniable that it allows for an almost mathematically precise description of the natural selection mechanism. The whole process can be traced back to the desire of genes to make as many copies of themselves as possible and to environmental conditions that limit this reproduction. In this situation, copying errors (mutations) can sometimes prove advantageous, and new gene variants can arise that over time – after many copies – displace older ones.

The clear formulation of the mechanism raises the question of whether it can be generalized. Is it possible that natural selection does not only occur with genes? Are there other self-replicating entities that strive for the same selfish expansion under environmental pressure and make similar copying errors? In “The Selfish Gene,” Dawkins assumed that such entities might exist and called them replicators. Moreover, he provided an example more or less speculatively: he believed that natural selection also occurs in human consciousness. The object of this selection is a replicator similar to the gene; he called it the meme.

We have all experienced the irritation of a catchy tune playing itself out in our heads over and over again, seemingly for no reason. To use Dawkins’s phrase, we have caught a meme, a meme that tries to get us to hum it and pass it on. He wrote about many other examples, including complex phenomena such as fixed phrases, fashion fads, and even religions.

The meme of culture

The idea that human consciousness is determined by memes proved to be effective. Many researchers were inspired to explore its possibilities and this gave rise to a scientific movement called memetics, named after genetics.

If we carry the analogy further, the evolution of human culture unfolds through the natural selection of memes. This is of course very interesting herein because we are looking for the organic model for human history – or at least one of the organic models – in a similar direction. However, the similarity of the words is misleading. Memeticists are trying to create a model for the whole of human consciousness, and they consider pretty much everything to be part of culture that is not determined by genetics. They have not really been able to cope with this huge subject yet, thus memetics has not yet become an embedded and accepted scientific theory or discipline.

However, this failure, whether temporary or permanent, does not preclude the possibility of using the basic idea of ​​the meme replicator for some smaller, unique problems. In order to model the written period of human history, it is not necessary to analyze every mental pattern and conscious activity. The word “culture” in this context means something else: a distinct group within human society that relates to other groups in the same way that one animal species relates to another. Accordingly, we want to use memetic analysis only to shed light on why and how these cultures differ from each other. What is common, what is generally human, is not interesting in this respect.

If we apply the concepts of evolution to human history, we inevitably come to Oswald Spengler’s cultural morphological model. As I mentioned in the introduction, in Spengler’s active years the connection between natural selection and genetics was still unknown. Spengler did not give the former much credit, and he did not even mention the latter in “The Decline of the West”. His biological parallel started from a third direction, from the method of comparative morphology. However, he also faced the question about the differences between the cultures under study. What exactly is this difference? Where does it come from? How does it change during the development of cultures?

Spengler came to the conclusion that this difference is rooted within, that is in the minds and souls of cultured people. Moreover, the roots lead to a specific motif, which Spengler called the “Ursymbol”. (In the English translation of Charles Francis Atkinson, it is called prime symbol.) This motif roughly captures how a given mind perceives its own external and internal world as well as space and time. However, it seems impossible to define the concept precisely because it is at most a partially conscious phenomenon that only manifests itself indirectly through the cultural style. From this motif, the special creations of culture – or rather the specialness of the creations – originate, from arts to religions to introduced technologies.

If we strip down Spengler’s poetic description, we can conclude that the “Ursymbol” is a meme. Spengler could not have known or used this concept five or six decades before the publication of “The Selfish Gene” but the main characteristics of the „Ursymbol” correspond to a Dawkinsian replicator. On the one hand, it continuously copies itself when the next generation of cultured people takes it over from its parents through unconscious imitation. On the other hand, the observable characteristics it encodes – the social behaviorial traits of the culture – are subject to the pressure of natural selection.

What are the variants of the meme? Of course, the answer is that every great culture has its own variant. If we look again at the ancient and Western examples analyzed in detail by Spengler, we find that the meme of Antiquity is the closed and bounded body and that of the West is infinite space. From the former can be derived the corporeal, human-like Greek gods, classical sculpture, and Stoic philosophy, from the latter the boundless, absolute European deity, the symphony orchestra, and modern ideologies that shape the world in their own image.

According to the analogy between written history and evolution explored here, Spengler’s model applies to the period of cultural genesis. During this period, the meme of the culture undergoes mutations – i.e. imitation errors – and thanks to this, it can adapt to the changing environment around the culture. But what happens outside the period of genesis? Members of mature, final cultures should also have the meme. Moreover, if we follow the pattern of genetics, then some variant of the meme should be present in the meme pool of every human person. In addition to the rapid changes of cultural genesis, the durability observed elsewhere also needs to be explained.

1. The gene has three variants: A, B and 0. Of these, variant 0 is recessive, which means that if there is another variant in the gene pair next to it, the other one determines the blood type. So it is possible for both the father and mother to have genotype A0, and to both pass on the 0 variant to their child. ↩︎