Natural selection is considered by most scientists to be the key concept of evolution. In order to model the recorded events of the last few millennia of human history using evolutionary concepts, it is essential to examine this concept in more detail. What kind of selection can take place in the development of human communities? How can this process create what we call history? Answering these questions is necessary if biological parallels are to be not just poetic metaphors and if we aim to construct actually organic, evolutionary models.

Natural selection in wildlife

The theory of natural selection originated with Charles Darwin, as a counterpart to selection by humans or artificial selection. When breeding plant and animal species that live in symbiosis with humans, farmers have always bred individuals with favorable characteristics for them, such as plants that produced larger peas or goats that gave more milk. Since some of the favorable characteristics are hereditary, a significant number of traits that are disadvantageous to the farmer have been suppressed or even eliminated, because their transmission has become much more difficult over many generations. This is why, within a few thousand years, domesticated plant and animal varieties have emerged that are drastically different from their original, wild forms.

Darwin was the first to assume that the same process could work without human intervention. In this case, impersonal natural factors, such as climate, parasites, or available food sources would be the selectors, exerting pressure on heritable traits. Individuals with traits that are well-suited to their environment would be more likely to succeed in the day-to-day struggle for survival and reproduction, and their favorable traits would spread more and more to the detriment of less successful variants. The lion on the savannah kills the slowest antelope, and as a result, the next generation of the antelope herd will run somewhat faster than if the lion had not been present.

I hope that this brief description makes it clear that natural selection is a slow process on a human scale, accumulating many small changes to produce the big transformations seen in evolution. For example, when cetaceans returned to the aquatic lifestyle, their limbs transformed from legs to fins over many generations. The history of life is so long that it is difficult to imagine, and there was time for many such transformations.

This gradual nature of the process, however, raised serious questions even for Charles Darwin, because it leads to the assumption that the living world is full of transitional forms. However, for most of the animal kingdom, this assumption is wrong. Animals form species, and there is no transition between different species. Moreover, the remains dug up from under the ground show that this is not only the present case. This is the usual state of the animal world. When new species have developed, transitional forms must have existed, but we often do not find any trace of them, because the transition is still too rapid for that. It is true that we are talking about processes that are extremely slow for the human eye, taking place over many hundreds or thousands of generations, but the time taken is negligibly short compared to the time during which a successful species remains in an almost unchanged form.¹

The consequences of natural selection therefore only appear to us from time to time, in large steps. According to our current knowledge, this “piecemeal” nature of animal evolution is due to sexual reproduction. Animals preparing to reproduce try to choose a partner that matches the characteristics of the given species very closely. This preference is called koinophilia, and it ensures that these characteristics are firmly preserved.² It is also a fact that the multitude of living beings that reproduce asexually – for example, many plants – is very difficult to classify into clearly distinguishable species.

This stability is broken when there are so few individuals of a given species somewhere that there is no choice left when looking for a mate. This can happen, for example, in cases of geographical isolation or after a major extinction event. In such cases, individual deviations from the norm can no longer be filtered out during reproduction. They are subject to the pressure of natural selection instead, and sometimes some of the deviations may prove advantageous. New species are largely created this way. However, once the number of individuals of a new species begins to increase, the uniformizing effect of sexual reproduction comes into play again and stops the spectacular phase of evolution.

Natural selection in human society

Biologically, the human species is also part of the animal kingdom, and the above reasoning applies to it to the full extent. Our current biological characteristics have been filtered out by the process of natural selection, eliminating many disadvantageous variants, and we reinforce them again and again during mate selection.³

It does not seem like a far-fetched assumption to think that a process similar to natural selection takes place in human social life and in recorded history. The only question is whether we can find analogous phenomena to the components of the process. The following table attempts to do this.

biological evolution	societal evolution
the animal’s physiological and lifestyle characteristics	conscious social behavior of humans
inheritance	imitation
sexual reproduction	family bonds and child rearing
species	cultures

Instead of the physiological and lifestyle characteristics examined by biology, this model should capture the conscious social behavior of humans. The behavior of individuals in a community obviously influences the successes and failures they achieve in life, so the environment has a selective effect on this. However, instead of biological inheritance, we should think of some kind of “social inheritance”, i.e. imitation. Although imitation itself is not necessarily conscious, success and failure probably have a serious impact on how many people will imitate an individual. Among the basic elements of natural selection, characteristics taken over from other individuals and environmental pressure exerted on them are therefore both present.

What about species? Is there a counterpart to them in human social evolution? Of course,  humans also reproduce sexually, but as I have just explained, “social inheritance” – imitation – is no longer directly linked to biological reproduction. It is theoretically possible for someone to imitate someone else who is not biologically related at all, and we can indeed find such examples. One might think that this case corresponds more to asexual reproduction and that we would not find groupings in human society that correspond to species.

However, we cannot forget that imitation is not arbitrary. It is not random. Individuals typically imitate the behaviors they have seen during their upbringing. The role of the family therefore remains significant. Biologically, we do not inherit conscious social behavior, not even its basic patterns, but we nevertheless absorb them very quickly through our upbringing. It is no exaggeration to say that when choosing a mate, we most often make a decision about the future social behavior of our offspring in addition to the hereditary characteristics, because in doing so we usually choose both parents and role models.

One of the aspects of upbringing – or culture – is that we have to choose a partner that is appropriate to our own cultural background. The biological capacity to reproduce is not influenced by culture, but the conscious decision before choosing a partner is. Perhaps this is why the above assumption is wrong: in human society there are groupings that can be more or less compared to different animal species. It is no coincidence that we also call these cultures. In the model of “societal evolution”, cultures play the role that species play in biological evolution.

The role of historical events in the model

As mentioned above, we have relatively little direct knowledge about the exact course of animal speciation, because this process usually takes place in small, isolated areas and over a short period of time compared to periods of stability. We can observe biological evolution only in rare and less spectacular cases, and the vast majority of the events that interest us take place with the participation of animals belonging to stable species. If the situation were similar in the case of human cultures, we would only know precisely the initial and final states of their development. The model of social evolution cannot be applied to historical events that occur in the environment of unchanging and stable cultures, and thus our ultimate goal (the attempted prediction of the future) would be impossible.

I think the parallel as presented is valid, but there are important differences between biological and societal evolution. An important difference, for example, is that we have narrative sources about the historical past, and thus we can start from orders of magnitude more data when building the model than we are used to regarding the past of biological species.

There is a second and even more important reason why it is worth studying the development of cultures: cultures are much less stable than animal species. This is because the transmission of biological traits – inheritance – is always closely linked to mate selection, while the same is true for social behavioral traits only if, after mate selection, parents raise their children together. The analogy presented therefore assumes a traditional family model. If traditional families break up for some reason, then upbringing is much more contingent, and it is doubtful who will be the main object for the inevitable imitation. In this case, the role of koinophilia might not be fulfilled by upbringing. If there is a mass of people growing up this way, then the separation of their culture is in danger.

These differences indicate that the development of cultures is not as short in relation to the period of stability as we have seen in the case of species, and that transitional periods are expected to be easier to find and observe.

1. Even a transformation that takes a hundred thousand years seems sudden compared to, say, ten million years of stability. And if we look at how, for example, cauliflower and cabbage were domesticated by humans over a few thousand years from the same wild plant, we can get an idea of ​​what can happen in a hundred thousand years under the right pressure. ↩︎
2. Of course, animals do not consciously think this through, but act instinctively. The instinct of koinophilia was probably chosen and favored by natural selection itself, because the screening out of mutant individuals that deviate from the norm proved to be an advantageous strategy. In the vast majority of cases, conspicuous mutations have adverse consequences for the offspring. ↩︎
3. Koinophilia is easy to demonstrate in humans. It is a well-known fact, for example, that if we graphically “average” two facial images, we generally find the resulting new face more attractive than the originals. The experience of beauty is therefore often caused by the absence of unique, special, and strange features. ↩︎