Cosmocultural Evolution

The Coevolution of Culture and Cosmos and the
Creation of Cosmic Value

By: Mark L. Lupisella

Culture is something special. It has helped life on Earth, particularly Homo sapiens, survive and thrive in ways that sometimes defies belief. What human beings have created, what we are becoming, is utterly remarkable, inspiring, mind-blowing. But is it an illusion of sorts? Is culture merely an increasingly complex result of biologically driven self-interest, arising from the happen- stance of life? Is it merely a blind walk (or run?) of replicating memes—the cultural equivalent of natural selection?1 While it may be true that much, if not all, culture might ultimately be explained directly and indirectly by Darwinian explanations of one sort or another, it may also be true that cultural evolution is beginning to break free of our biological heritage. Natural selection has been working on the experiment of life for close to 4 billion years on Earth, and what we witness now with human culture is so rich, so complex, so uncertain, that we have to wonder how it will evolve, and how it may be evolving elsewhere in the universe.