Culture, humanities, evolution: the complexity of meaning-making over time

This article outlines how the historical human sciences see 'culture' and its dynamic developments over time and over generations. The operations of human culture are systemically self-reflexive and, as a result, exhibit a complexity that sets them apart, as a semiotic system, from mere communicative information transfer. Peculiar to this complexity is the two-way interaction between the 'etic' substance of the cultural exchanges and their 'emic' function. Cultural signals require parallel etic/emic processing at stacked levels of complexity. As a result of this complexity, the homeostasis and autopoiesis of human culture, including its dynamics and development over time, cannot be explained fully in terms of responses to the physical environment. How, this article ponders by way of conclusion, can an evolutionary approach be reconciled with these characteristics of human culture, or the notion of culture be applied to evolutionary modelling? This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.

Automated summary

This article discusses how human culture evolves over time and generations, showcasing the complexity of cultural operations and the two-way interaction between the 'etic' substance and 'emic' function in cultural exchanges. Furthermore, the article explores the reconciliation of evolutionary approaches with the characteristics of human culture, as well as the application of the concept of culture to evolutionary modeling.