Culture and Transitions in Individuality

Several biologists and philosophers have been arguing, for a while now, that a Darwinian evolutionary dynamics might take place not only in the distribution of phenotypic traits in a particular kind of population, but also in the very dimensions that are used to track those, bringing about new kinds of populations, given certain special circumstances. These "major" evolutionary transitions have sometimes been described as transitions in individuality. In this depiction, natural selection (maybe combined with other causes) often brings about new kinds of individuals, whose evolutionary dynamics takes place in a novel way. This topic became a big concern since the groundbreaking works of Buss (1987), Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry (1997), and Michod (1999). Godfrey-Smith's 2009 book follows this trend by emphasizing that "evolutionary processes are themselves evolutionary products" (2009, 15). One of the chief thesis he puts forth, by pushing population thinking even further, is that a transition in individuality is fully accomplished when a new, "paradigmatic", Darwinian population emerges. In collective entities, where there are nested populations embodied in one individual, the higher and the lower level populations follow different evolutionary paths during a major transition: the latter ones usually change their Darwinian status from a "paradigmatic" to a "marginal" one. This process of "de-Darwinization" of the lower level populations as Godfrey-Smith describes the evolutionary transition taking place at that level (Ibid., 100) -, can be tracked by significant changes in the values of a set of parameters that describe their evolutionary dynamics or "evolvability" (Ibid., 41). The process of de-Darwinization of the populations of cells that make up multicellular organisms is a well-known case. In this paper, I want to investigate