Culture Is a Literal Form of Life, Scientist Argues — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Jonathan Loh, an honorary fellow at the University of Sussex, argues in a new essay that culture is literally alive, sharing with biology the critical property of encoding, processing and transmitting information across generations.
- The essay opens on Mount Athos in northern Greece, where monks have sung the same office in an unbroken chain stretching back to Athanasios the Athonite in AD963 — more than 1,000 years of transmission.
- Animal cultures exist beyond humans, per the source: some West African chimpanzees crack nuts with rocks while others in the same region don't, despite identical nuts and rocks being available in both areas.
- About 2.6 million years ago, with the onset of ice ages, culture began overtaking genes as the primary force shaping hominin evolution, Loh writes.
- Cultural innovations like stone tools and fire control shrank human jaws, teeth and guts while brains grew larger — a feedback loop Loh compares in significance to the origin of DNA in biological evolution.
- Language created a positive feedback loop with culture: as brains adapted to linguistic input, language itself grew more complex, enabling transmission of richer knowledge than visual copying alone allowed.
- Loh suggests machines capable of writing their own code may constitute a third form of life and mode of evolution — what he calls the most extraordinary moment in human history to witness.
Why it matters: Loh's framework recasts AI not as a human-built tool but as a potential third evolutionary system on par with genetic and cultural evolution — a classification that, if taken up by biologists and AI researchers, would force a rethink of how societies define and regulate autonomous, self-modifying code.
Ask SkimNews
