One helpful way to think about the relationship between culture and genetics is to instead think about the relationship between art and culture. Ask yourself, “does art shape culture or does culture shape art?”
Because art is more tangible than the gene, it becomes a bit easier to recognize what I mean when I suggest that there’s no strict delineation between the two. Art is obviously an expression of culture, but cyclically, it then goes on to influence the very culture that first expressed it.
Like art and culture, genes and culture aren’t simply categories that can be flippantly distinguished. They inform and mold each other in both complementary and reactionary ways, but are ultimately inseparable and essential to one another.
The mildly amusing fact that Richard Dawkins’ coined the term “meme” tends to overshadow the more profound implications surrounding its denotation, all of which can be found in The Selfish Gene (-classic) and the The Extended Phenotype (-a lesser known and underrated follow-up). But essential Bio-recommendations aside, Meme is used as a technical term describing a unit of cultural transmission.
To elaborate, a meme refers to ideas that replicate, mutate, and compete for survival in a manner structurally analogous to genes. They are units of cultural information, and crucially, they reproduce (via spreading to other minds) and undergo a selection process in doing so. I will emphasize, that a meme’s success does not necessitate that “the best idea won out” or anything like that: a meme can be “true,” but persists not because it is “true;” it persists because it is fit. And fitness in the memetic sense means being memorable, transmissible, resonant and contagious.
A meme’s survival essentially refers to its capacity to “go viral” and persist throughout time within cultural consciousness. Two Examples: uhm, remember dabbing? Yeah. That’s a comparatively short-lived one, but what’s less obvious is that rights are also a meme; they are believed in, and as a notion they have spread really-really well, like, they’ve even gone viral to the point of being institutionalized. Of course, rights have a genuine affect on the world due to their widespread belief - that much is real.
But no, they are not “self evident” in anything resembling an empirical sense. If you go out and look for rights you will come back empty handed. Simply, things like rights are a meme because, like other memes, they are conceptual, they live in your mind, but were not there to begin with, but rather invented and then popularized; memes are learned through sociality. All of that is to say, dabbing and rights are cultural units of information that affect behavior, and they are imitated across time for variate durations based on their perceived utility.
So, with our Dawkinsian lens, we can go back a bit and start seeing art as not merely an ornament of culture, but a replicating organism within it, and culture itself can be viewed as a kind of evolutionary arena in which these symbolic units struggle, hybridize, and entrench themselves with varying degrees of success. The gene shapes the meme by giving human minds certain cognitive proclivities, while the meme shapes the gene by altering the environment in which biological selection occurs.
Final example: religion is a meme. Whether or not it is the one true religion, doesn’t matter here. It’s a meme either way, and I will now use a religion to illustrate how memes can drive evolution by altering selection pressure:
A devout Christian will likely opt to marry (i.e., reproduce with) another Christian. If a high enough percentage of the population does this with regularity, and if we assume there is a combination of genes that predispose someone to become Christian, then those Christian-oriented genes will be rewarded by selection. If this recurs with greater frequency than it does for, say, atheistically-inclined individuals (who carry atheistically-inclined genes), then over generational time we may see an ever increasing percentage of the population contain Christian-oriented genes as it overshadows any competing meme that’s replicating at a lower rate. Over evolutionary time, even if the religion changes or secularizes, we may find remnants of the moral principles, which were disproportionately selected for, remain embedded in the psyche. Certain meme’s will surely cling to certain neuroanatomies and cognitive capacity’s at differing rates, and even small differences of that nature compound over something like, say, two millennia. On a long enough time scale, memetic differences could then express themselves as phenotypic expressions of the gene; ergo, the meme arose from collections of genes, but the meme then affected the very genes that it gave rise to it.
And of course this is the case, because memes are apart of our environment and affect the way we behave. Any Darwinian worth his salt understands that environmental factors - an organisms geography, climate and so on- are ultimately inseparable from its evolution. In other words, the environment shapes the direction toward which a species evolves. As much as a given species affects its environment, so too has its environment affected the species. As ecologists have established, a species that arises from, and remains in a given environment will inevitably become ‘fit’ for that environment over evolutionary time. The species’ very anatomy will conform to this environment, as will its behavior, and in the meantime, the species will shape its environment (e.g., a beaver making a dam, a bird making a nest, a human making a bridge, a human making a religion, a human making laws, etc. etc. etc).
Morals themselves, if their replicability persists across evolutionary time and is selected for, then they will inevitably alter the mind and develop a degree of permanence. Provoking a question: is something truly “good” or is that just what the past environment demanded? I digress. Let’s conclude.
Art, the environment, culture and biology are not only correlative, but function as a unity when properly seen as a complex, multifactorial feedback loop of reinforcing influence. Each component acts on the other, which is why describing culture and genetics as merely convergent subjects remains inadequate. The more you untangle the knot, the more you will find the same rope.