Haekelian bridge of isomorphism: the basic principle of subtractive synthesis
In positing that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, we can consider culture as possessing life-like dynamics, and further consider that a life-like cultural theory would, self-reflective, apply life-like dynamics onto itself. The ontogeny of such a cultural theory, emerging, inspired & inheriting from biology, would likely recapitulate its phylogeny and bear a resemblance in terms of its ancestral methods and principles. That is, a life-science approach to culture would likely take on the traits of biology, such as evolutionary thinking, along with similar patterns of developmental stages of its ancestral biological field. We can envisage mechanisms of variation, selection, reproduction, replicators, differential fitness, population cycles and so on, inherent in cultural objects and processes, and examine them from this scientifically reductive view. More generally, we can take this view of life: whole tracts of biological theory, and attempt to see how they confer grandeur to this view of culture.
We can propose a hypothetical isomorphism, an initial strict parallel between science and culture, then apply rigorous scientific methodology to spot and eliminate misfits. Our theory evolves and becomes more refined based on evidence in a sort of subtractive synthesis. This initial proposal of isomorphism that facilitates methodology, we might call the Haekalian bridge – the isthmus of consilience between the humanities and culture that promises, or threatens, a great exchange of ideas.
Clionomy offers to fill that gap
Leonardo da Vinci told us to understand the “art of science” and the “science of art“. A great exchange of memes would impart both. For an art of science would pave the way for forging creativity and novelty seeking in the sciences, particularly trying out inspiring ideas and methodologies that do not adhere to academic territorial dogma and locked in traditions. Interdisciplinary materials have always been an exception, stepping out of a norm where the rule is to “play it safe”, and plod on with the status quo. But a play it safe culture inhibits intellectual exploration and impedes scientific discovery. OK, very established fields may have strict research protocols: human medical trials demand such, but the process of science necessitates stepping into the uncertain and the unknown. We need to envisage this unknown, through hunches, intuition, invention, hypothesis, imagination, dreams, and wild guesses to provide the impetus for proper discovery.
On the other hand, the “science of art” is about applying rigour to the softer fields of human interest that the harder methodologies have traditionally neglected. Cultural study is essentially descriptive, or commentative. It does not seek mechanistic laws of how culture develops, considering such to be reductionistic. Teasing out such patterns is hard work in such an abstract shape-shifting area. For physics, the world is much more tangible. However, just because it is hard work and not in keeping with tradition, that does not mean to say natural patterns don’t exist. Humans evolved; human culture is a spin-off of that. That the humanities are an extension of biological development suggests that some aspects are amenable to empiricism. And as curious humans, we are invited to probe the underlying mechanisms that drive our extended, or maybe distended, phenotype.
In between science and art is a “no man’s land” still. A few intrepid souls have ventured into here, but there is a lack of safety and chance of attack from both sides of orthodoxy. It remains largely unexplored both in content and method, caused largely by a lack of established method. Each side is comparatively well mapped out, while the in-between is devoid of exploration. There is a significant gap in the map making its traversal difficult and precarious.
The point of clionomy is set-up an expedition into that zone. To take our surveying methods and chart out what is there, and form a bridge between the two great endeavours of inquiry. To inspire consilience using a combination of both creative expression and rigorous method. This will provide a Haekalian bridge, an isthmus for which the great exchange of ideas to take place. In the first instance, a mapping method is required that considers cultural objects from an evolutionary angle. Reappropriating the mood that ‘ontology recapitulates phylogeny‘ to the development of mapping such fields, then the ontology of cultural science may recapitulate the phylogeny of life-science. There is no more a fine-grained, and mature, and relevant mapping tool than that inspired by biological evolution: systematics. Systematics emerged in biology but is not limited to such. It has more general application. Systematics then would give us the rigour to identify and arrange the objects of culture and provide us with a basis for a scientific inquiry into what has previously been off limits. An analogue, or reapplication of domain, of Linnaean systematics, then would be the foundation of clionomy.
A bridge is an apt metaphor here: bridges allow us to cross obstacles, such as water bodies, in order to get to other lands. They are important to trade as they allow what are surpluses on each side, to be exchanged for scarcities on the other side. The memepools of the sciences and the memepools of the humanities have emerged with a scarcity of creative freedom and methodological rigour respectively, and there is a gulf that inhibits their transfer. Thinking memetically, protectivist and isolationist memes resist invasion, having an almost allergic defensive reaction to non-native memes. A kind of “not invented here” syndrome maintains the status quo and the gulf serves such attitudes by preserving tribalism between the arts and sciences. Such selfish memes have a vested interest in ensuring the gulf protects them. To mix the metaphor a bit, this gulf is a “no man’s land”; an uncharted gap in knowledge. It presents holes in the taxonomy, funding, tradition, reputation, safety, careers, sectarianism. Self-preservation inhibits enrichment, which is the antithesis of inquiry. A bridge across the gulf, or a clear path through this no man’s land, that overcomes this intellectual obstacle, might threaten those tardy ideas that cling on for survival in the face of fitter memes but would permit the migration of fresh ideas, thereby enriching the memepools of each side. So, we need to chart that area, and build that bridge.
Haeckel and what he did in relation to Linnaus
Wikipedia says of Haeckel:
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (German: [ˈhɛkəl]; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919[1]) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin‘s work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
Clearly, Haeckel continued Linnaeus’ classification work, but it was his inferences, using Darwin’s theory, upon biological development and evolution are important here. Darwin had sketched a tentative spidery tree entitled “I think” in his notebook in 1837, and an expanded abstraction of the principle appeared as the only illustration in the Origin. Haeckel used his artistic talents to elaborate in his 1860, 1866 trees, but his 1879, his “tree-of-life”, was clearly drawn to resemble a real tree, with branches labelled as organism types. It is admittedly homeo-centric, but it does clearly promote the idea that species do have some branching evolutionary relationship between them. Nowadays, with genetic analysis and powerful computers for crunching clustering algorithms, phylogenies are calculated using phenetic or cladistic methods, and data visualisation techniques allow us to envisage the modern equivalents of the tree-of-life in such formats as a Hillis plot.
Haeckel is also infamous for his recapitulation theory. While somewhat discredited among biologists, recapitulation is resurrected here for its analogical benefits; as a way of seeing the development in cultural theory coming out of biological theory.
Recapitulation theory
A somewhat oversimplified view of evolution, phylogenetically, is that single-celled organisms evolved into multi-celled colonies, then worm-like things, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, monkeys, then apes (including humans). Looking at Haeckel’s embryological diagrams, we might consider that an organism develops from a single cell, through worm-like, fish-like, amphibian-like, reptile-like (and so on) growth stages: this is called recapitulation, or embryological parallelism. It is tempting to infer some kind of link. For example that mammalian traits adapted as extensions to reptilian ones; mammal embrios looks like little reptiles before they display their mammalian characteristics. Recapitulation is raised herein as a metaphorical vehicle; the actual biological theory, whether there is any merit in it, is more of a historical sidenote. Disanalogies are easy to find; recapitulation is not meant as a theory here. Rather than proposing a universal law, the idea of recapitulation is being borrowed to illustrate a more general principle that may cautiously be re-moulded to fit the field of culture, which has many parallels to biology.
George Polya’s How To Solve It presents a heuristic approach to predominantly mathematical conundrums. Taking the advice of ‘do you know a related problem ?’ a casual observation that ‘culture parallels biology’ hints that recapitulation may present (or misrepresent) a viable clue for formulating a cultural science. Even if biologists have rejected that theory in their field, the liberating spirit of the art of science can creatively inspire our initial thought experiments, providing a variation phase in our evolutionary epistemology.
Recapitulating recapitulation: A methodology of Consilience
We might consider recapitulation in embryonic parallelism, or recapitulation in some artefact, or even recapitulation of a field of inquiry. To invent a technological parallelism (or whatever) as a cultural parallel to embryonic parallelism, would demand some mental acrobatics: recapitulating recapitulation itself, or perhaps “meta-recapitulation”. What we would be doing is to view the developmental stages of the mature science of biology, and try casting them onto the nascent conjecture of a cultural science. The tendency of cosmogenesis has, through observation, reason, and discov
ery of molecular mechanisms, motioned towards an evolutionary view of life. Commentary still
predominates in the humanities, as the gulf of tradition does not encourage a scientific worldview of culture. Contemporary moves are putting dogma under pressure from the scientific camp, and culture is looking ever more likely to have some evolutionary basis. If biology and culture were instances of a more general evolutionary pattern, and it seems that cultural science is inheriting much from its senior, then it could be that our embryonic cultural science holds some parallelism to the more established field. So, how might we compare the stages? What would dissimilarities mean? How can we foresee, and maybe direct, the development of cultural investigation?
The isthmus and the great exchange
Traditionally, cultural study has been descriptive and commentative rather than scientific. Ways of thinking and talking about culture have somehow become locked into that tradition, new scholars entering the field adopting existing attitudes and preferences for established methodologies in order to gain acceptance and recognition. Radical out-group thinking being misunderstood by those with a background in the mainstream, and having little penetration. Additionally, scientists and engineers tend to stick to STEM subjects and careers, rather than venture into realms where there is little foundation for their preference for tangibility. Intangibility, establishment, and the lure of hard science disuades scientists from tackling the phenomenon of culture. Some do of course, but they are exceptional. This does not mean to say that scientific approaches are not legitimate, just that they are not commonplace, as scholars of each tend to stick to what they know. How we approach culture is not an intrinsic property of the phenomenon on culture itself, and we can adopt at least scientific attitudes and therefore should attempt to apply them, however mercurial, maddening, or underdeveloped the topic, and regardless of the epithet of “pseudo-science”. Really, we should give our best efforts in creating a proto-science.
The biota of the north and south American continents evolved separately. When the tectonic plates collided to form a landbridge, the isthmus of Panama, then species got the opportunity to colonise new lands and new niches and migrated both ways: the great exchange. This was both an opportunity for the insurgents, and a threat to the incumbents as fitter competitors were invading their cosy niches. If there were to be a Haeckalian bridge between the intellectual domains, would that entice a similar great exchange of ideas, methods and memes? There are opportunities and threats on both sides.
Hypothesis pumps: additive and subtractive synthesis
The formation of hypotheses is a vital step in the process of scientific investigation as hypotheses provide unverified propositions which beg the question: is this true? To satisfy that question with an answer requires research effort. Hypotheses give us speculative answers, solutions to other problems, or inspired guesses, even hunches inferred from previous experience. They are a creative aspect of science, verging on an art perhaps, where the investigator conjures up a conjecture as to what might be happening in the production of some phenomenon. Established fields have many unanswered threads neatly lined-up, possibly to the extent of having a research proposal just awaiting its funding award. Other virgin territory does not even know what is unknown and require an unfulfilled mind to spot the questions in the first place.
If we have two parallel fields, where one is established an the other unexplored, then we have a wellspring of ideas that can be drawn from. These ideas, well known in the source field, readily form the hypotheses to irrigate the new field, but we need a way of drawing them over before we can assess them: a hypothesis pump.
Theory building is a common metaphor: one of construction. We tend to make things, like buildings, from the ground up by sticking new bits on top: this is an additive synthesis mode. Starting from fundaments is not the only way of making things, however; we can take a whole and remove the bits we do not want. Sculpture is an example where we take a block of material and hack off lumps that stop our artwork from looking how it should: this is a subtractive synthesis mode. In generating a body of theory, we can apply such a subtractive synthesis where we have an existing block of seemingly parallel properties, adheriting wholesale hypotheses and methods, then empirically testing them to find disanalogy as a criterion for rejection. We propose isomorphism between two domains then de-select misfits, according to data; this also constitutes a form of evolution. However at all time being mindful of where novel features may exist that did not exist in the original. Sculpting out a theory is a shortcut, a heuristic that gives us clues and leads and a useful starting point for developing a field.
The isomorphic proposition
Our entre here, in developing our theory, is the seeming parallels between biological evolution and cultural evolution, which has been suggesting meta-recapitulation. We can initially propose that culture is a strict reflection of biology; that both are life-sciences and that all aspects, laws, mechanism and so on of biology have some analogue in culture. We can make this initial isomorphic proposal as a thought experiment, even though we strongly suspect it not to be true, because now it gives us something to find flaws with, to challenge, and to test properly. From that large starting block, we will whittle down our theory to parts that are the same, bits that are in some way similar, and bits that are not the same at all.
By way of a prime example, Dawkins has pointed to one such candidate trait: the meme. This notion is a specific form of the more general idea of a replicator, which is best understood informatically; the gene is another example species. Conflating the meme with the gene has proven contentious. They are different in many specific ways, but similar in that they are both informatic abstractions. Here we can apply the subtractive mode: “memes are identical to genes!” “No, they have some similar properties, but memes are cultural and do not rely on a molecular substrate.” From there we can begin to consider the gene-biology and meme-culture inter-relationships. This informatics generalisation is the keystone of the Haeckalian Bridge.
There are dangers in doing this, and the biggest one being to forget that this is only a heuristic for generating and testing hypotheses; in doing so mistaking the isomorphic proposition as being the isomorphic gospel, which it most certainly is not. Conversely, savagely attacking and rejecting the whole proposition based on mistaken sweeping conflations detracts from the purpose.
Talent borrows; genius steals (shit copies!)
Given the isomorphic proposition then what would be recapitulated and in what order? The order of development in biological theory provides hints. The meta-methodology of hauling the prominent events in the history of biology over the bridge offers a sketch, a roadmap. Cultural reinterpretations as adaptation of the historical narrative, can be tested, and possibly rejected or refined. Again this is a candidate, a starting point, rather than blindly enforcing structure.
Linnaeanism appeared earlier in the history of biology than did Darwinism, and as will be argued, was one of the key influences in unravelling the mysteries of evolution. As Linneanism is the groundplan for biology, but abstracts to informatics and back to culture, then it recapitulates as the ground plan for culture and cliology. With a firm and self-correcting way of identifying and arranging our cultural specimens then it is meaningful to propose an isomorphism for such a taxonomy, the seeds of which might germinate into a more solid platform for a science of Cultural Evolution. As with biology, we would have an unambiguous identification and positioning of cultural specimens, be able to spot, name and position new species, and recognise the patterns of relationships between cultural objects.
Cultural evolution, by definition, posits variation and selection, whether Darwinian, Lamarckian, or some other means. As Darwin’s theory made sense of Linnaeus’ taxonomy, then likewise, a Linnean like taxonomy of culture would require an evolutionary explanation (possibly Darwinian) for its structure. Theorists are pondering on cultural evolution, but unfortunately lack a solid, consistent or extensive data set to work on. With such a data set then it would be much clearer to test theories.
For cliology (and cliotechnology), as a projection into pragmatic futurology, the Heackalian Bridge, isomorphic proposition, and recapitulation implement the thought experiment as a technological road-map. We have seen how description and explanation in biology have paved the way for genetic engineering, vectorology and medical intervention. Genetic modification is a huge step in the ongoing process of biological evolution, and the ideal of human “progress”. Paralleling these developments towards “life-engineering”, a technological roadmap would indicate the possibility of a cultural analogue. Memetic engineering has been (Leveious Rolando, John Sokol, and Gibron Burchett), but systematic techniques, as opposed to “rainbows and unicorns”, are in their infancy. It could be though, that the roadmaps and methodologies employed by the biotech sector could bridge over into the cultural domain, providing inspiration for tools, techniques, and applications for cultural direction.