Three Rules for Understanding
How to properly understand social, cultural, and biological phenomena
There are a few handy rules to keep in mind when trying to understand a wide range of biological and sociological phenomena.
1. It’s Gradients Everywhere You Look
When you study just about any aspect of biological phenomena for long enough, you come to realize that there are no hard lines anywhere. That is, it's gradients everywhere you look.
Our mind naturally rebels against this idea. We instinctively want to draw hard boundaries around things. It's just the way our minds work—by categorization. Like other mental heuristics, this probably developed to facilitate our survival. It's probably related to both our nature as tribal creatures and our legacy as hunters and gatherers. We’re a tool-using species. We need to classify things in order to use them.
Friend versus enemy. My tribe versus your tribe. Edible mushrooms verses poisonous mushrooms. Dangerous animals versus harmless animals. Venomous snakes versus non-venomous snakes. Predators versus prey.
The West versus the East. Black versus white. Barbarian versus civilized. Chairs and not-chairs.
And so on.
But that's not how the world actually is.
When it comes to studying just about any kind of biological phenomena, any hard-and-fast boundary ultimately falls apart upon close enough inspection. Any boundary is only ever an approximation for the purposes of categorization. One person may draw it in one place, while another may draw it in another place, and both can be equally correct.
I know this is hard to conceptualize, but I came across a picture that should hopefully make it a bit clearer.
Trees, like humans and other living creatures, are biological organisms. That makes them perfect for illustrating certain features of biological phenomena.
The picture is below. Now the salient question about this tree picture is, where can you draw a line to separate the orange leaves from the yellow leaves, and the yellow ones from the green ones?
The answer, of course, is you can’t.
Yet when we look at the tree, we can clearly make out clusters. The orange/red leaves are at the top. The yellow leaves form a band in the middle. The green leaves are mostly towards the bottom.
But if you attempted to draw a hard boundary between them (say, in Photoshop), what you'll eventually find is that there really is no place you can draw a line where absolutely all colors group themselves on either one side of the line or the other. The only way to really accomplish that is to draw a line around each individual leaf, which makes the line so complex as to be meaningless.
Nevertheless, you can still draw lines in order to group the various colors but these lines are necessarily approximate and arbitrary (i.e. “fuzzy”). The fact that it’s a tree also highlights the fact that such lines are also temporary, as the leaves will continue to change color over time.
It's important to recognize that nearly all biological phenomena are like this. Take genes, for example. Our DNA is not as visible as leaves on a tree. Of course, there are obvious expressions of our underlying genetic code that are visible for everyone to see on the outside. The color of our eyes and hair. The shape of our eyes and noses. Our height and build. And the one that people really seem to be obsessed with (especially in the United States)—the color of our skin. Geneticists refer to these outward manifestations of our internal genetic code as phenotypes.
But, as the old saying goes, appearance is only skin-deep. The genotype is not the phenotype. What we see on the outside is only a partial and incomplete expression of the underlying genotype which is hidden away deep in our cells and doesn’t give us the whole story. This can be seen, for example, in this photograph of twins from the Gaza Strip:
Twins fron the Gaza Strip (TYWKIWDBI)
As an added side-benefit, getting used to thinking in this a way also happens to be a good prophylactic against racism. The fact is, all of us are multiracial.
Lumpers and Splitters
In a number of scientific disciplines, there is often a distinction between lumpers and splitters.
Lumpers like to group related things together into broad categories. Splitters, on the other hand, prefer to divide things into smaller categories based on a narrower set of criteria. Of course, the categories and groupings will depend on exactly which criteria we choose and what we think is particularly important. There is no right or wrong answer and no “correct” approach, because both approaches can be useful for understanding the subject in question.
This can be especially seen in the field of paleoanthropology. How ancestral fossils are grouped together is a matter of sometimes contentious debate. On some level, every fossil is unique. How, then, do we decide if a new find constitutes a separate species or whether it falls within the accepted range of variation in an existing species?
In our own species, for example, we can see a dazzling array of shapes, sizes, and traits (called morphology). Yet thee is no doubt that all humans are the same species. In fact, Homo sapiens are remarkably similar genetically when compared to most other animals due to various bottlenecks that happened in our remote past. Two bands of chimpanzees from different regions of Africa will have more genetic variation between them than all humans alive today. Any two random humans differ, on average, at about 1 in 1,000 DNA base pairs (0.1%) out of approximately three billion base pairs in a haploid cell. Ninety percent of genetic variation is within human populations, while only 10 percent is between different populations.
Several ancestral human species that were once categorized separately have subsequently been grouped together. For example, Homo ergaster, once categorized as its own species, is now considered to be an African variant of Homo erectus. Neanderthals are considered a separate human species, despite the fact that we mated with them and had fertile offspring. Sometimes paleoanthropologists will use the terms sensu lato (“in a wide sense”), and sensu stricto (“in a strict sense”) to distinguish between these two different approaches to categorizing early human ancestors.
As a way to illustrate the inherent difficulty of classification, imagine if you were to take a modern human and line up all their ancestors behind them going back to the dawn of humanity. They would form a line (queue) that would probably stretch across the continental United States from coast to coast. Yet no single individual in that line would mark a clear transition from one species and the next. They're all humans on some level. The only reason we can make such distinctions today is because the paucity of fossils that we have discovered so far are widely separated in space and time.
Another way to think about it is a film strip where the changes from one frame to the next are minimal but when played at full speed can create the illusion of motion. If every human ancestor were a single frame in a film, it would be thousands upon thousands of frames constituting an entire roll. If we were to load that film into a projector and play it, we would see gradual changes leading from a distant chimp-like ancestor to ourselves, but at no point would be able to pull out a single frame in the sequence and definitively say, “this is where we became human.”
This was recognized by the ancient Greek philosophers as the Sorites Paradox, from the Greek word for "heap". If you take a heap of sand, for example, and remove one grain at a time repeatedly, at some point it would no longer be a heap. Certainly it would no longer be a heap when consisting of just a single grain of sand. But at what point did it stop being a heap and become something else?
The complexity of gene flow between various ancestral species—including hybridization, interogression, horizontal gene transfer and gene duplication—has caused the branching tree analogy for human evolution to be largely abandoned, replaced by the metaphor of a braided stream, with numerous rivulets branching off and fusing over time.
Another place where lumpers and splitters go back and forth is regarding language. The difference between what constitutes a language and what constitutes a dialect has always been, to a large degree, a matter of semantics. Certainly Finnish and Italian are different. So, too, are English and Japanese.
But languages are evolving all the time. Exactly how different does a language have to become before we consider it to be its own separate language rather than a dialect of an existing language? And just how different do languages have to be to not be considered related at all? These questions turn out to be surprisingly complex.
For example, Catalan is often regarded as a dialect of Spanish. But why is it not its own language? It certainly could be. More broadly, it's part of the Occitan-Romance family of languages spoken in northern Spain and southern France, along with Gascon, which is usually considered to be a dialect of French. But are they really French, Spanish, or something else altogether? And why isn’t Portuguese considered to be a dialect of Spanish if Catalan is?
Italian is widely considered to be its own language. But could Spanish be considered to be a dialect of Italian? After all, they both derive from the vulgar Latin of the late Roman Empire. They both split off from the same origin.
Or, if we wanted to go the other way, many people consider the Italian spoken in Sardinia to be different enough to constitute its own unique language (which happens to be considered by some linguists to be closest to the Latin spoken by the ancient Romans). Even within Sardinia there are different dialects such as Gallurese, which can be quite different. Are Danish, Norwegian and Swedish really three separate languages, or are they all dialects of the same language ultimately derived from Old Norse? These languages are mutually intelligible to some degree.
A lot of times these distinctions are made based on cultural, political, and geographic factors as much as intrinsic features of the language itself. This led to the tongue-in-cheek observation that a language is merely “a dialect with an army.” Richard Rudgely explains this in Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age:
There are two basic approaches that have been taken by linguists. One approach is that of the so-called 'splitters', who are generally skeptical and cautious about proposing large-scale language groups consisting of more than one family (i.e. macro-families) based on what they see as slender evidence. A bolder approach is taken by the 'lumpers', who are, as the name suggests, more inclined to see wider linguistic connections and, in some cases, claim to be able to reconstruct language families and ther ancestral tongues way back into prehistoric times.
Those who have tried to place most or, in some cases, even all) of the world's languages into macro-families do not always agree just how many such groups there are. The highly influential and controversial American linguist Joseph Greenberg and some other linguists are of the opinion that most of the thousands of human languages can be shown to belong to only 17 major linguistic groups...pp. 35-36
Languages split and branch off from one another all the time just like biological groups. And just like biological groups, they accumulate small mutations over time. In both cases, grouping discrete phenomena together is useful for studying their development and spread, but such groupings are always to some degree arbitrary and subject to debate and revision. Even what constitutes a species in a biological sense turns out to be not entirely straightforward.
2. All Boundaries are Porous
The other thing to consider is that, when it comes to a lot of phenomena, all boundaries are porous.
This is especially true when it comes to human societies. A society is not a bounded, self-contained autarky. It is always interacting with other societies, except for rare instances like ones isolated on a remote island. Humans transmit cultural information between themselves. It's what we do. Any society, then, is not static but is constantly exchanging genes, tools, vocabulary, diseases, crops, ideas, concepts, technology—as well as other aspects of culture like music and art—with other societies around it.
I liken it to a biological cell. A cell does have a distinctive structure which makes all biological life possible, and there is a clear distinction between the inside of a cell and the outside, but the membrane of a cell is not impermeable otherwise it would die. The cell is constantly taking in nutrients and other hormonal signals from its surrounding environment, expelling waste, and exchanging information with its neighboring cells. This is what makes multicellular organisms possible.
But there is nonetheless a qualitative difference between interactions within the cell and between different cells, just like there is a qualitative difference in interactions between the members of a society and the people outside it. There clearly is an inside and an outside, just like with a cell, but the constant flow of material and information makes it difficult to establish a boundary such as a membrane around a particular society. Like cells, societies also divide and merge making them even harder to define as discrete entities. Language is one way to do it, but as we saw above, languages change over time.
This doesn’t mean that culture doesn’t exist or that it isn’t a useful concept, just that we need to understand its intrinsic nature or we’ll be led astray. What this means is that, for the most part, there is no such thing as a “pure” culture. The very concept is nonsensical.
This process of diffusion for both genes and culture is often illustrated by using food dyes in water.
3. All Processes are Gradual
And finally, it's important to keep in mind that all processes are gradual.
For example, there is no official “start date” for capitalism. No one flipped the calendar from one month to the next and saw “capitalism starts” penciled in on a particular day. No group officially got together and all agreed that capitalism is what they were going to be doing from that point forward.
Instead it was a gradual process that unfolded slowly, tentatively and unevenly over a long period of time supplanting other alternative social arrangements.
And even those earlier arrangements are hard to describe adequately. Capitalism is often said to have emerged out of feudalism. Medieval scholars hate the term “feudal system” because it implies that it was some kind of organized system that someone, somewhere, planned out and drew up in advance like a constitutional government; whereas in reality it was a series of ad hoc arrangements and mutual webs of obligation between different social classes that varied considerably in specifics from place to place throughout Western Europe. Many places were exempt from feudalism altogether like the Italian republics and other "free" cities and communes.
Even assigning a label like “capitalism” is fraught with pitfalls. Often we designate a system by contrasting it with alternatives, such as the distinction between capitalism and communism which unfolded during the twentieth century. But there is clearly a difference between the type of capitalism practiced in the United States and that of the Nordic countries; or between the capitalist system in Russia versus Japan or Singapore. And the country that has the most people and is growing the fastest in the world right now is managed by a party that still calls itself Communist.
Even when we affix specific dates to historical events like famous battles, treaties, and coronations, these are often more for reference than anything else. The Holy Roman Empire can be said to have began when when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope on Christmas Day in the year 800 CE, but its true existence was in the hearts and minds of the people who lived under it, which took considerably longer than a single day to establish and longer than a day to disappear.
Similarly, the abdication of the last Roman emperor in 476 CE is considered to be the end of the Roman empire, but the eastern half—which considered itself just as Roman—continued for another thousand years, at times even recapturing a large portion of its lost territory in Italy, Spain, and North Africa. And even after its capital finally fell in 1453 CE, there were hundreds of thousands of people in the former territories who considered themselves “Romans” until the rise of Phihellenism, the Modern Greek Enlightenment, and Greek nationalism in the early nineteenth century.
So in order to understand how history truly unfolds, then, you need to realize that every historical process is gradual and unevenly dispersed. The only constant is change.
So, in summary:
It's gradients everywhere you look.
All boundaries are porous.
All processes are gradual.
Getting use to thinking in these terms takes time and effort because it hews against our natural inclinations. But only by developing a habit of thinking in this way can you truly understand a lot of the core phenomena that occur in many biological and social sciences. Like learning a foreign language, eventually these habits become second-nature the more you practice.