Coevolutionary Dynamism of Man-Environment-Organism

Abstract

In our co-evolutionary concept, we reconsider the human-environment unity framed in the M-E-O (Man-Environment-Organism) model, adapting Latour’s ANT theory, where the subject of human evolution is seen in unity with its (his/her/their) “Umwelt,” creating particular social, memetic, and technospherial environmental extensions and hybrids exposed to mutual selective forces. We analyze this issue in the context of coevolutionary mechanisms influencing genetic and memetic selection. Linguistic samples, the sociocultural aspects of reproduction, or sociocultural answers to the challenge of pandemics, prove the coevolutionary significance of the human ecological approach. The competitive M-E-O complexes are actors and subjects of the selective dynamism of human evolution. The M-E-O model offers a hermeneutic framework to understand the selective evolutionary dynamism of today’s techno-civilizational changes, as an accelerated evolutionary process.

1. Introduction

The M-E-O (Man-Environment-Organism) concept [1] as a human ecological model is made up of nests and niches of natural, social, technological, and infospheric environments that are connected and surround the human actor and its communities. The M-E-O model in the present coevolutionary context implies Kenneth Boulding’s theory of ecodynamics [2], the General Theory of Evolution by Vilmos Csányi [3], Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and his hybrid concept [4], and coevolutionary processes based on the concept of niche construction [5] in which interacting natural, social, technological, and infospheric niches influence each other in an ecodynamic (competitive, predating, symbiotic, neutral, or saprophytic) manner through human agency. This transactive network of four (natural, social, technological, and infospheric) poles generates the event space to visualize the dynamics of coexistence, and offers a schematic “co-ontology.” (Figure 1) [7].

Figure 1.

Mutual niche construction and selection of artifacts, ideas, and social forms through human agency [6].

The niche construction-based neo-evolutionary framework might help to bridge these different frames of understanding based on the coevolutionary reciprocity of sociocultural changes and evolution. According to Dawkins, organisms can directly transmit environmental artifacts to the next generation with niche constructive potential, like the built environment, technological know-how transferred by imitative learning or other ways, and social structures (e.g., mating and hunting practices). Niche construction influences epigenetic transmission, including gene-meme interactions and gene–environment coevolution.

The four-dimensional concept of evolution is based on the interrelationships of genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic inheritance systems [7]. It implies the tetrahedron M-E-O model with its natural (genetic and epigenetic), behavioral, social and cultural (symbolic inheritance), and technological (influencing all inheritance systems) dimensions.

The M-E-O model (Lázár, 1997) [1, 6] and the ANT (Actor Network Theory) in the 1980s, created by Callon [8], Latour [9], Law [10], and Latour’s “hybrid” concept [4], show converging elements, with a common conclusion that modernist nature/culture dualism is no longer an appropriate framework to describe our reality. The growth and structure of knowledge could be analyzed and interpreted through the interactions of actors and networks. Actants denote human and nonhuman actors in a network of relations based on their functional relevance. One might map the relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and infospherical (as concepts in semiotic terms). ANT assumes that many relationships are both material and semiotic. According to Latour, elements of the actor-network also have at least three attributes: “The first one is to attribute to them naturality, and to link them with nature. The second one is to grant them sociality, and to tie them to the social fabric. The third one is to consider them as a semiotic construction, and to relate agency with building of meaning.” [10]. The clusters of actors involved in creating meaning are both material and semiotic and usually embedded in the technospherical context of human practice.

2. Methodology

The review of coevolutionary concepts helps to integrate the human ecological approach, the neoevolutionary school of social and cultural anthropology, and the Actor-Network theory in the so-called M-E-O framework. The efforts to integrate archaeogenetic information about the population and memetic aspects of language history; analysis of sociocultural aspects of reproduction with special regard to culture of attachment, and finally a genetic/memetic system’s response to catastrophes like COVID-19 in a coevolutionary framework help to draw a common basis for human ecological understanding of biocultural adaptation and selection.

3. Coevolution in biology

The term “coevolution” refers to the mutually reinforcing evolutionary changes brought about by encounters between different species, and can apply to both genetic and memetic replication. The strength of natural selection is proportional to the strength of the relationship between fitness and the value of the trait.

It is possible to keep the discussion of coevolution at the level of biological species and even expand it to include social areas. Coevolutionary insights have a hundred-year history. Kropotkin’s theory of evolution [11], based on interspecies cooperation, provides a solid paradigmatic foundation for coevolutionary studies. To investigate coevolution in mutualistic networks, Guimarães et al. [12] integrated data from 20 plant-animal assemblages with a trait evolution model. According to his findings, species-rich mutualisms show three basic characteristics of coevolutionary significance. First, the coevolution of species within mutualistic networks accelerates the rate of evolution, which has an impact on the changing characteristics of these species. Second, coevolution causes traits of species within the same trophic level to converge and interact with one another more often. Thirdly, the presence of super-generalist species, or species that interact with multiple groups of species, is correlated with greater levels of convergence. These conclusions are similar to the conclusions of General Evolution Theory proposed by Csányi and Kampis [13], whose Dynamical Replicative Network Theory identifies a transition from the predominance of parametric information to the expansion of functional information of constituent parts of the interacting coevolutionary compartments.

Paleobiologists use phylogenetic analyses of extant species to probe long-term, macroevolutionary processes of coevolution. Population genetics, quantitative genetics, and optimality theory are all used in computational and mathematical models of coevolutionary processes within populations and species.

Eco-evolutionary research also focuses on more distant forms of coevolution, such as gene-for-gene and diffuse coevolution, in addition to more direct forms of coevolution, such as paired coevolution (or specific coevolution). Diffuse coevolution (sometimes called “guild” coevolution) refers to evolutionary reactions among groups of organisms that are mutually advantageous. This type of coevolution highlights how many species exert complex sets of selective pressures on most species, and how the evolutionary responses of certain species change the conditions under which other species evolve.

Correspondence between genes in different species is an example of gene-for-gene coevolution, sometimes known as “matching gene” coevolution. In his detailed paper, Domingo [14] talks about the ways that organisms and their pathogens change each other and adapt as a result of their interactions as biological systems that have shared space for a long time. At the macroecological level, we also find coevolutionary rules guiding complex ecosystems, whereas host-parasitic, microbial, or viral interactions open the coevolutionary theater of the microworld.

Thompson and Cunningham [15] say that coevolution, which they define as the mutual adaptation of organisms that interact with each other, shows important processes that link the genomes of interacting species to organize biodiversity and make more diversity through coevolutionary selection, which makes memes and genes coevolve.

A single extended genetic/memetic coevolutionary framework could be used to explain both biological and cultural evolution if we apply these ideas from biological ecosystems to human ecological phenomena. We can employ Dawkins’ [16] terminology to discuss memetic evolution. He stated that we “need a word for the new replicator, a noun that expresses the idea of a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation. Memes can be songs, phrases, catchphrases, trends in clothing, or even techniques for producing pots or constructing arches.” Memes, according to Blackmore [17], are “anything that is repeated with variation from one person to another, including behaviors, talents, songs, stories, and other types of information.” Roland Barthes used the similar term “narreme” to describe the narrative of a memetic bundle.

Additionally, this replication process raises the possibility of variation, distortion, and other memetic “mutations.” Theories, dogmas, and canonized conceptions may represent a form of climax state for meme complex constituents. Velikovsky [18], similarly to Kuhn’s scientific paradigm model, thinks of the periods of consolidation and elaboration as part of the ongoing knowl¬edge evolution, where, according to DiCarlo, the consolidation of memetic patterns, a memetic equilibrium mirroring adapational success, emerges as a result of solving environmental problems, which might lead to rigidity and canonized orthodoxy sometimes [19].

Cultural change, the progress of discourses, and technological inventions are results of mutations of memetic evolution, emerging from repetitions and replications, memetic transfers. Nevertheless, the diverse memetic patterns at the level of personal memetic interactions generate a convergent order in the given culture [20]. Memes (embodied in the technological sector, social discourses and institutions, and art, science, and religion, among other things) emerge as a result of the interaction of three types: copies, variation, and competition for survival. Languages, scientific theories, technological know-hows, laws, religions, books, movies, songs, and other cultural artifacts might be seen as memeplexes, or co-adapted meme complexes, which are replicated and transferred together. According to the information provided, isolated, interbreeding, and local social subpopulations may carry spherical cultural meme patterns. If we borrow a phrase from biology, the so-called “deme,” they are selected as a group-level unit rather than at the level of an individual. Under intense pressure from the economy, technology, or politics, the memetic patterns (clothing, customs, belief systems, rituals, and religion) of such a local population unit (“deme” signifying the population of a village or a tribe) may change quickly.

Genetic and epigenetic transfers are also responsible for creating information interfaces between genes and memes. Issues of evolutionary psychology, like cognitive, affective, and moral abilities, might also be seen as consequences of the coevolutionary dynamics of genes and memes, where culture influences selection for genetic patterns and diverse pools of human genomes enable successful biological and cultural adaptation [20]. The evolution of speech physiology and face communication is a striking illustration of how genes and culture can coevolve in a natural and infospherical way. Genetic modifications that make speech easier to produce have been rewarded by the growing social significance of communication in human society. Early humans developed new areas of the motor cortex to help with speech production. The development of speech reflects a coevolution with the technosphere and sociosphere, and forming speech communities as demes, influences the evolution of different socio-biological communities, as well. This way, coevolution shapes the features of the particular M-E-Os.

In the era of genomics, Richerson and Boyd [21] provided a fresh perspective on the coevolution of genes and cultures. Various memetic areas, including the scientific infosphere, the technosphere, the sociosphere, and the environment itself, are all included in this framework. Their paradigm encourages us to update our interpretative framework and provides flexibility for the M-E-O notion to be adapted to coevolutionary discourse. Genes typically change more slowly than culture does, resulting in unique contexts that subject genes to fresh forms of selection pressure. As a result of the altered contexts that cultural innovations have generated, many human genes that have been demonstrated to be under recent or current selection are changing. One change caused by the rise of agricultural subsistence is the spread of sickle cell and G6PD deficiency genes that protect against malaria in local farmers who live in endemic zones of wetland areas full of insects that spread malaria. It is also conceivable that genetic change is happening in reaction to the unique social context of modern societies. In a similar way, some mother-child rearing practices might cause early traumatic experiences that influence adult attachment styles to significant others, including persons, organizations, or cultural patterns, leading to diverse social epigenetic consequences such as mothering style and stress-biological resilience [22].

4. Coevolution in the context of M-E-O and ANT models

4.1 Contributions of neoevolutionary anthropology

At the heart of the model lies niche construction, whereby organisms not only adapt and evolve to their environment but also actively shape and modify it to suit their needs. This modification of the environment feeds back into evolutionary processes, leading to coevolution between the organisms and their natural, social, technological, and infospherical environments. The M-E-O model, which stands for the combination of material, energy, and information flows that shape the interactions between living systems and their environment, represents the coevolutionary processes between organisms and their environment. Actor-Network Theory also provides a lens through which to view the material, energy, and information flows and understand how they interact to shape the co-evolutionary processes between organisms and their environment. Latour waves a mutual net between the actor and the natural, social, and infospherical environment giving meaning to agency, in a way he describes: “Three resources have been developed over the ages to deal with agency. The first one is to attribute to them naturality, and to link them with nature. The second one is to grant them sociality, and to tie them to the social fabric. The third one is to consider them as a semiotic construction, and to relate agency with building of meaning.” [9].

Extending the ANT model, in the M-E-O system anything can be an actor, from individual organisms to physical structures, cultural practices, or social forms. If we consider different M-E-O network patterns as actors and subjects of competitive evolutionary dynamics, it is worth applying historical insights offered by neoevolutionary schools of social and cultural anthropology.

Archeologist V. Gordon Child defined the great turning points of cultures, the Neolithic, Urban, and Industrial Revolutions, and lent primacy to technological inventions, arguing that the “so-called spiritual results of man‘s historical activity are in the long run determined by the material forces.” His stages of social evolution might support our model as shifting from nature-dominated M-E-O through Sociocracy to Technocracy, where technological memetic inventions/mutations are shaping the memetic world of ideas and social forms. In his 1951 work, Social Evolution, he recognized “correlations” between sociopolitical institutions and techno-economic stages, but emphasized the significance of cultural divergence and convergence, showing how diffusion and assimilation of innovations take place as societies adapt cultural complexes to the requirements of the local environments. It was the neo-evolutionist turn in cultural anthropology by Leslie White and Julian Steward that shed more light on technological adaptation to environmental challenges and the natural environmental pressures humans had to face. Their new foci, natural determinism and technological possibilism, generated a modified view of culture as adaptive environmental gameplay. They uncovered how the localized social and ecological adjustments of cultures to their own unique environments lead to cultural diversity. Leslie White, the neo-evolutionist anthropologist, clearly articulated the multidimensional character of the culture, differentiating the technological, social, and ideological spheres from each other. White emphasized the determining role of technology, which depends on the effectiveness and volume of “harnessing” and transformation of energy, which he formulated as P (cultural product) = E (energy consumption) x T (Energy utilization). This formula may explain the inequality and selection disadvantage of competing M-E-Os, like in the case of autark solar-based, draught farming agriculture and its industrialized, and chemized fossil-energy-based counterpart. (On the other hand, the issue of sustainability, environmental risks, and benefits might get us to think that, in the long term, at different demographical scales, a solar energy-based agricultural M-E-O is more viable.)

White’s three components of culture: technological, sociological, and ideological in a human ecological, and environmental sense, create the three spherical poles of M-E-O. This general theory was particularized by the cultural ecological considerations of Julian Steward. Shifting from the technosphere to the natural environment, we slightly move from possibilism to determinism. The natural environment, including climatic, biomic, and geographical factors, exerts a deep impact on the subsistence system of a given culture. Julian Stewart’s cultural ecology offers a proper framework to understand the adaptive efforts of enabling sustainance and identic replication of the given culture in particular environmental conditions. In the context of our M-E-O model, these diverse and particular patterns of adaptation include technospherial, infosperial, memetic, and sociostructural elements in the given determining natural environment. The diverse environmental challenges let Steward draw a picture of “multilinear” cultural evolution based on the various ways of adapting to different environments. Steward considered technology and economics as decisive factors determining the development of a given culture, and political systems, ideologies, and religions were understood as secondary products in an evolutionary frame.

These different neoevolutionary schools can be brought together in a four-dimensional M-E-O framework of interacting natural, technospherical, infospherical, and sociospherial niches, or hybridized coevolutionary agents. In this way, competing M-E-O patterns of different technocultural human-ecological systems, like slash-and-burn horticulturists, agricultural cultivation systems based on hydro elevation technology, and autopoietic systems of solar energy-based cultivation versus allopoietic fossil energy-based industrialized agriculture, show how important the dynamics of energy transformation are in the struggle for survival of different M-E-O formations.

4.2 M-E-Os are subjects of evolutionary competition in the framework of General Theory of Evolution

The human ecological sphere of competing M-E-Os may be seen as the theater of coevolutionary drama. This might be understood as a historical process of economic and social evolution. Following the logic of the general evolutionary theory of Csányi and Kampis, the evolution of M-E-Os as more or less synchronized replicative systems needs a framework, where natural, technological, social, and infospherical elements are the sum of interacting components, that are assembled and disassembled permanently by component-producing processes. There is an energy flow through the M-E-O system capable of exciting some of its building elements. All M-E-Os may be seen as component systems, using the terminology of Csányi and Kampis, where the number and type of building parts of the M-E-O and the energy flux constitute the parameters of the system. Adaptability and sustainability of a given M-E-O rest on the ability of the techno-, info-, and socio-structural compartments to enhance their common replication and survival in changing environmental challenges. The zero system level of M-E-O is an early phase where there are no developed functions compared to later developed, structured complex systems (local, isolated tribes or farms versus nation-states, imperiums, or federations; hallucinations, baloney, and primitive belief systems versus canonized, dogmatic systems of ideas).

We can distinguish two kinds of arrangements of building blocks, which describe the status of components. The parametric information describes the structural information of the given M-E-O manifesting merely the systems’ parameters, while the functional information expresses the information related to the arrangement and functions of the building blocks of M-E-O in cooperation, support, defense, memory, anabolic and katabolic processes, cultivation and harnessing of resources, etc.

The components’ functional information is also structural information for the M-E-O system. M-E-O systems can last for a long time if they can reproduce, which happens when information is passed down from one generation to the next through genetic and memetic means. Replicative function, as special structural information in M-E-O, denotes the probability of the identical genesis of the same set of components. The rules of relationships serving genetic replication in the socio-sphere are incest taboo, endogamy, and exogamy. The archivation processes in the infosphere by symbolic agency—oral traditions, rituals, writing, canonization, protocols, and technological know-how—also reflect the importance of replicative function as structural information of the M-E-O. We can distinguish between temporal and spatial replication. Temporal replication provides continuous renewal of a system with subsystems over time, conserving the unity and identity of the system. Ritual communication in organizations is a good example of their sustainability over time. Spatial replication generates the replica, which becomes separated in space. Cultural diffusion, fissioning, colonialization, and globalization are examples of the latter. The M-E-O model might be replicated through mass migration, missionary agency, soft power, global media, or other cultural transfers. This replication process may be identical or non-identical, depending on the degree of fidelity.

The autogenesis of the M-E-O system, similar to molecular, or biological genetic replicative systems, is emerging from autogenetic system-precursors, which might be genetically and/or memetically reproduced sets of natural, technospherical, memetic, and social components. According to the evolutionary theory of Csányi and Kampis, it must contain “at least one cyclic component-producing process, and at least one of the components participates in the cycle, which can be excited by the energy flux flowing through the system” [13]. The given M-E-O implies human biological, social, and technocultural precursors. For instance, a hunter-gatherer group has simple social rituals, low-level technospherical “extensions” of human capabilities, and a low level of energy transformation compared with agricultural cultivators, industrial, or post-industrial societies. Herbert Spencer, the pioneer of the unilinear evolutionist view of societies, focuses on the growth or progress of complexity. During the process of autogenesis, the M-E-O’s functional information builds up, and its replicative information grows as more supercycles branch out and connect to the M-E-O’s core formations. The growing circles of differentiation and cooperation (e.g., division of labor) lead to the formation of communities of simultaneously replicating compartments. When the identical replication stage of M-E-O is stabilized, its replication continues as long as the natural, social, technological, or ideological environment does not change. In such a catastrophe-free climax state, M-E-O becomes an autonomous self-maintaining unit, a network of component-producing processes (in the sense of Actor-Network Theory also), which, through the functional interaction of components, produces the same M-E-O pattern that originally produced it. As Csányi and Kampis write, this autogenesis is the evolution of active self-construction, and let us paraphrase, active self-construction of the given M-E-O.

M-E-O has four evolving frontiers, all of which are open to environmental shifts and catastrophes. These natural, technospherical, infospherical, and social metacomponents themselves have different immanent replicative networks that show genetic, memetic coevolutive relationships. Mating strategies, choices, preferences, and reproductive habitus determine genetic reproductive dynamism in a given population under the influence of memetic patterns like socioeconomic conditions, career strategies, cultural capital and habitus, gender ideology, culture, etc. On the other hand, there is a demographic competition between different sociocultural M-E-Os with different religious commitments and identifications, monogamic or polygamist family structures, and socioeconomic and educational standards, even in the same human geographic locality.

The M-E-O system’s memetic parts are made up of learned, functionally related patterns of behavior and the physical, technological, and informational things that arise from them. The natural basis of these processes is rooted in the brain, as the behavioral patterns are generated by a population of acquired neural codes in the brain, as a result of gene-culture coevolution [21].

The memetic parts of M-E-O share the general characteristics of evolving, replicative structures in which ideas are representations of learned codes that lead to thoughts, actions, and artifacts that can be shared and copied. This population of memes or ideas contains structural information that might influence the probability of the genesis of other ideas. This memetic system might transform into a (canonized) identical replicative pattern, a system of dogmas, or, under the influence of other memetic impulses, innovations such as memetic mutations, heresies, or a scientific revolution might destroy the claims for the former identical replication of former memeplexes. Natural catastrophes might change cosmology, basic assumptions, ideologies, and values. This happened after the Great Plague changed the European cultural, religious, and ethical “memetic climate” in the XIVth Century. Similar changes are transforming our postindustrial consumerist society, facing the threats of climate change, the “hot world” of the greenhouse climate crisis, or the COVID-19 pandemic. The offer of the so-called Great Reset is a kind of elitarian sociomemetic response based on high-tech infospherical innovations and efforts to change the industrial-post-industrial M-E-O. As memetic parts of an evolving, interactive network of M-E-Os, the ideas could affect the sociosphere, the technosphere, and the infosphere, which could have a big effect on the fourth part, the natural spheres, both outside and inside. Transhumanism is such a radical, transformative ideology to humanize machines and technologize the human being.

Info-technosphere interfaces generate a transfer from brain codes, and memetic patterns to make artifacts, machines, buildings, art, and other material objects. Memetic interfaces transfer replicative structural information into the sociosphere, as social systems are also influenced by systems of ideas. Neural networks direct social perceptions and behaviors, which are molded by imitation and learning. The internal and external populations of ideas as memetic codes regulate social transactions, structuring roles and social groups, too. Social institutions are maintained through ritual communication based on basic assumptions and values, group memories of institutional history, and narratives—one word: populations of ideas.

The infosphere also shares the features of replicative networks in general. Memetic patterns of brain codes might become a coherent replicating population of ideas through language, writing, and mass communication. The networks of ideas that copy themselves are made up of idea compartments that have both structural and functional information. This creates a component system that is similar to chemical, biological, and social component systems. The complexity of idea compartments develops from the status of diffuse, and diverse parametrical information patterns toward a regulated network of functionally connected ideas, where functional, replicative information content is transmitted through memory and transgenerational transfer and in space through all forms of communication: education, propaganda, PR, and mass media, too. M-E-O, with its four-dimensional replication compartment system, has two important features: stability and resilience. Stability is rooted in the ability to keep M-E-O’s characteristic features within a given interval of environmental limits through cybernetic processes, while resilience reflects its ability to recover after exposure to the pressure of change.

In the next parts of the paper, we deal with the replication of M-E-O, through the coevolutionary aspects of language based on genetic/memetic abilities and conditions; examining the circular logic of birth and childrearing customs embedded in their natural, technospherical, infospherical, and social milieus. The third focus points to the resilience of M-E-O in the case of the extreme “catastrophic” challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

4.3 Language is the house of being

Heidegger [23] wrote the above statement about human existence in his “Letter on Humanism,” 1947, which might gain coevolutionary meaning in the context of the M-E-O model. Geertz’s statement has similar coevolutionary significance, saying Man “is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” [24]. According to the hypothesis of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf [25, 26], the semantic structure of a language determines how the speaker’s conceptions of the world are formed, and a similar basic concept is the core of Sándor Karácsony’s [27] theory, who created a social psycholinguistic theory in the early forties comparing Hungarian and German grammar.

Bourdieu [28] analyzes the power of memes to shape social relationships and dominance. Ideologies and political discourses also shape social relationships, hierarchies, and the ingroup and outgroup positions of social players. Baudrillard writes about the political economy of signs, saying: “Mastery of the transubstantiation of economic exchange value into sign exchange value is based on a monopoly of the code” [29]. One can follow how discourses as social memetic products generate institutions and social power dynamics by reading Foucault’s discourse theory. These theories have a common basis: memetic determinism, but language also represents and expresses changes in the technosphere, social environment, and natural environment.

Technological advances generate new terminologies, and the development of communication technologies influences social linguistic phenomena. The technospheric changes played an important role in the evolutionary “synchronization” of diverse local dialects, vocabularies, commonsense, and collective mentalities, as the metaphors of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the Global Village of Marshall McLuhan offer a good sample of technomemetic-social coevolutionary dynamism. The electronic mass media of the “global village” and WEB2 social media lent further power to the English language as a new Latin, or lingua franca, mediating strong lifestyle-shaping influence. According to Manuel Castells [30], the essence of globalization rests in the (techno memetic) networks that structure society: “The culture of real virtuality, created around an increasingly interactive and audiovisual universe, permeates intellectual images and communication everywhere, integrating the diversity of cultures into a kind of electronic hypertext.” As these codes influence important personal decisions regarding lifestyle, career expectations, gender identification, marriage, reproduction, and migration, their coevolutionary agency is remarkable.

By looking at the archeogenetics of certain populations and the etymology of their words and phrases, it is possible to track the genetic-memetic coevolutionary changes that have taken place in certain communities over time [31]. The scientific discourse regarding genetic and linguistic coevolution is paradigmatically articulated by the works of Cavalli-Sforza [32], who showed, how languages might create barriers to gene flow between different human populations. (The opposite socio-memetic direction is also true when language mirrors the collision of different groups, like in cases of invasion, subversion, or assimilation.)

Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman [33] established a coevolutionary discourse in linguistic anthropology as part of social and cultural anthropology, referring to gene-culture coevolution, dealing with dual inheritance processes of cultural transmission in an evolutionary context.

4.4 Coevolution and reproductive dynamism in different M-E-Os

The culture of reproduction is the most intimate interface, where genetic and memetic reproduction are intertwined. Mating and reproduction create a “hot” interface of memetic and genetic fusion of different genetic and memetic pasts of wife and husband, with further physiological, transgenerational memetic consequences for the offspring. This genetic and memetic fusion involves the wider family and, in a wider sense, the background of different M-E-Os, mixing cultural, technospherical, and social memetic contents in the sense of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, social capital, and field [34]. Different M-E-Os produce various memetic, technical Actor-Network settings for reproduction, including nature-dominated, agricultural sociocratic, industrial technocratic, and postindustrial infocratic M-E-Os. The consumerist, neoliberal, and postindustrial infocratic M-E-Os have a very low reproduction rate (1,2-1,7), not enough to sustain the given population, which leads to economic difficulties and pension crises. Even nations with former family-friendly cultural traditions, like Italy, Ireland, or Central European nations, can experience this. The coevolutionary, genetic, and memetic consequences of reproductive crises of M-E-O in depopulating societies are obvious if mass migration from Asia and Africa is expected to substitute for the loss of given populations. In contrast, residents of the “less developed” agricultural, sociocratic M-E-O desire more children and live in extended families even in poor socioeconomic circumstances.

Examining how infospherical, technological, and social memes affect reproduction is crucial. The condition of human ethological norms in early mother-child attachment systems may be an appropriate target to draw attention to the differences between agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial M-E-Os. The circumstances, laws, and medical procedures surrounding childbirth are influenced by the cultural, technological, and cognitive environment as well as the social and institutional structures of the specific society. It is important to examine the influences of technology, information, and social memes on reproduction, including contraceptives, changing gender roles, counter- or profamily state policies, and various “r” and “K” reproductive strategies [35] found predominant in different social strata. In addition to having an impact on the mother-child bond, birth has long-term psycho-developmental and projective secondary socio-cultural effects (Figure 2).

1. Nature dominated archaic magical complex: Various kinship systems, archaic group relationships, Traditional Birth and Childrearing Complex, socially embedded material life (Gift systems, reciprocity).

2. Sociocratic, traditionalist: Extended family, traditional communities, socially embedded material life, (Gemeinschaft), Traditional Birth and Childrearing Complex, secure attachment ideal.

3. Technocratic modern materialist: Nuclear family, institutionalized, rationalized social life (Gesellschaft) Technocratic birth, a detached, disembedded market economy, childrearing complexes, and tendencies toward distorted attachment.

4. Infocratic, postmodern: Plural birth cultures, home birth, rooming in, feminist criticism of paternal obstetrics.

Figure 2.

Historical paradigms of social patterns and childrearing complexes in the MEO context [6].

The M-E-O context consists of a variety of technological settings, customs, and belief systems. These elements may have an impact on how mothers behave and raise their children, resulting in different internal working models (IWM) of secondary adult attachment styles [36].

Environmental and climatic factors affect mother-child relationships in every culture. For instance, traditional communities in the southern countries usually permitted piggybacking, whereas infants were frequently kept in cradles in the Northern countries. According to Freedman and Gorman, keeping one’s distance and cueing for independence between a mother and child were common signs of insecurity in Iceland [37]. Different M-E-Os that are based on pastoralist, agricultural cultivator, or industrial technocultural subsistence systems produce different birth practices, protocols, and attachment organizations.

The intergenerational transcription of attachment styles takes place within the context of the family, and it may even be essential for the repetition of sociocultural M-E-O patterns. Anthropological works by Kardiner, Barry, Margaret Mead, Whiting, and Child illustrate the importance of childrearing in cultural transmission. According to Kardiner [38], secondary institutions like art, religion, and rituals are partially the results of this basic personality structure, while the primary social influences of childrearing practices and specific child-training practices shape the so-called basic personality structure. The comparison of 110 ancient, prehistoric cultures by Barry, Bacon, and Child [39] revealed two fundamental trends: secure mothering and appropriate gender socialization. In 61% of the civilizations, girls showed higher degrees of responsibility, and in 82% of the cultures, they could show superior caring and caregiving skills. Boys, on the other hand, displayed higher degrees of dominance, self-centered dignity, and achievement-centered views in 87% of these cultures under examination. According to Barry, children in shepherding, pastoralist civilizations are nurtured with an emphasis on developing strong indepen-dence and competence, in contrast to children in farming cultures, who are taught submission [40]. According to Whiting and Child [41], the same early experiences might give rise to the same unconscious tensions and fixations as neurotic tendencies that are reflected in the cultural belief system. When Margaret Mead [42] observed Mundugumors and Arapesh people, it became clear that child-rearing practices might affect the communication and behavioral norms of interpersonal relationships, ethics, etc. in the given tribes. Comparing East-West cultural differences, separateness against connectivity, individualism versus collectivism, and perhaps detached versus attached motives, more family context distinctions become apparent [43]. The sociocultural and birth culture perspectives taken by LeVine [44] are a good illustration of the four-dimensional human ecological dynamics of M-E-O. His advanced methodology widens the scope of investigations into the historical and intercultural variances in birth and childrearing practices that are rooted in human ecological variables that include geographic, technological, and cultural contexts. Sustainability, the psychological basis of economic attitudes, and environmental attitudes are influenced by attachment styles shaped by mother-child relationships and environmental education; in this way, our environmental crisis is a coevolutionary challenge [45].

Industrial and postindustrial M-E-Os differ significantly from preindustrial M-E-Os in terms of giving birth and raising children. As a result of modernization and industrialization based on new technologies, the time for uninterrupted mother-child attachment systems was reduced to 6 weeks. Due to this depriving human ethological condition, avoidant-independent and anxious-ambivalent attachment tendencies proliferated. Millions of children’s attachment systems were burdened or twisted by Hungary’s rigorous, technocratic birth rules and early weaning (after 6 weeks) in the 1950s and 1960s. When this generation experiencing this early burdened attachment reached their age of thirties and fourties, sociologists reported a rising divorce rate, and the reproduction rate decreased. Even in the millennium era, when the children of the baby boomers became fertile, the low reproduction rate persisted. According to Csóka and Lázár [46], who reported a considerable shift toward avoidant, dismissive adult attachment (58% in the representative sample of 600 under age 35) in both genders, it was a transgenerational impact, where significant relationships between avoidants and the aversion toward having children were confirmed, too.

A critical interpretive discourse of medical anthropology [47] vividly illustrates the issues with technological birth with coevolutionary accents. Based on human ethological considerations, the traumatic separation of the newborn from the mother in the first hours after birth during the imprinting phase, or keeping the baby apart from the mother between breastfeeding sessions can be seen as stressful microtraumas. For instance, rats can suffer separation traumas in just 180 minutes, with long-lasting neurophysiological repercussions and epigenetic consequences [48].

As a remedy, “rooming in” is commonly used in maternal wards, occasionally replicating a homely birth setting with the father’s involvement. Changes in employment and professional expectations and limitations that force some women to leave their newborns in the care of daycare providers during the first few months of life further strain the mother-child bond.

The changing value and role system caused by industrialism, and the postmodern information society that followed, as well as changes in female life strategies and gender identity, childbearing attitudes, all contributed to the present day’s coevolutionary M-E-O shift with considerable demographical and cultural impact.

4.5 COVID-19 and M-E-O

Whether a disaster physically damages networks or has an infospherical impact, which results from active information carriers interfering with the social system’s cycles of reproduction, it can cause functional changes that disrupt or destroy some M-E-O. Some compartments may lose their functional relationships and stop participating in the replicative cycles, changing the identity of the system. The COVID-19 pandemic inspired intellectuals to rethink the cosmological, economic, and ethical memeplexes of our modern M-E-Os with suggestions to change their techno- and socio-spheric compartments as the concepts of the Great Reset [49] emerged in mass communications, much like how the Great Plague had profound cosmological, ethical, and social effects on Medieval Europe. The pandemic itself had a significant impact on the techno-economic environment as well as the infosphere portion of M-E-O. The sociosphere also faced significant problems at both the micro and macro levels. The entire M-E-O entered a new “attractor basin,” a posttraumatic state of the system, as a result of these circular and reverberating changes, while the global M-E-O showed significant resilience on the one hand with infospherical synchronization and technospherial adaptation, and on the other hand, a tendency toward industrial deglobalization emerged because of breaking off international travel and supply chains.

The global M-E-O system underwent profound, multitargeted modifications as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It altered the commonplace social and cultural structures that govern our lives. In an era of the sensual culture of services and entertainment, lockdown, social isolation, internet-based communication, home office work, suspension of travel, theater life, communal cultural life, restaurant business, and hotel business all proved to be prone to by radical socio-cultural transformation driven by epidemiological considerations and policy. The techno-memetic, info-memetic, and socio-memetic compartments all underwent these alterations. The SARS-CoV-19 pandemic has had an impact on the relationships and organizational frameworks of adaptive and maladaptive human agency in the context of ecological processes that create, mold, and sustain people in their multidimensional, intersecting environments. De Ver Dye and Muir’s [50] critical medical anthropological approach provides the appropriate perspective for this investigation. This method is quite similar to the M-E-O tetrahedron model’s hybridizing notion [6]. Destruction of long supply chains, market competition over the availability of masks, respirators, and drugs like remdesvir and favipiravir, as well as vaccines with various East-West cultural-political connotations (AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech versus Sputnik V, Sinovac), created infodynamic tension at the level of health politics and media, as well as among providers of health services and people from various sociocultural backgrounds. The new normal of lockdown, giving up personal freedom for perceived security, and media exposure to the COVID-19 epidemic’s deadly hazards all had a significant impact on the psychological, social, and memetic climate of pandemic M-E-O (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Effects of the SARS-CoV-19 pandemic on the M-E-O.

The COVID-19 outbreak seems to have caused a social shift toward a new, more “cyberized” way of life. Robots will soon replace hundreds of millions of people’s physical labor thanks to the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. The challenges of permanent adaptation strain in the world of work and the growing risk of sedentism caused by the virtualization of human work through information technology could make people less able to deal with stress, which could increase biological health risks.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on regional and local businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, and family-run operations, and it also created new opportunities for the digitalization of education, homework, and several other jobs where intellectual or other products could be transferred over the Internet. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone, the poor and vulnerable groups, such as low-skilled laborers and immigrants, have suffered significantly more than the wealthy in terms of fatalities, infection risk, decreased earnings, and unemployment. Telemedicine, which puts patients and doctors at a distance, was the direction in which health services were moving, but eHealth showed a real surge. The medical sector, Big Pharma, vaccination, and the market for items that boost the immune system were all growing. B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, and multivitamins all rank among the immune enhancers recommended by the WHO, and sales of these supplements have increased significantly. Additionally, certain independent business owners and service providers, such as trainers, coaches, and advisers, expanded their services online. Local manufacturers established their websites, online stores, or other online platforms to enable the ordering of their products through interfaces. Aside from that, the opening of virtually huge department stores and mass producers gave farmers’ markets and consumers a chance to help local small companies survive. The most important Hungarian business players also emphasized that the outbreak contributed most to an increase in B2C sales. Not only have the already established courier businesses grown recently but several unimportant new players have also entered the market. Rural areas offered great opportunities for this, such as creating a network in areas where larger businesses only had a limited scope of operations and concentrated on a single product category, such as the goods of a major producer of vegetables and fruits.

The resilience of M-E-Os at different scales during the COVID-19 pandemic was expressed through an articulated memetic, technological, and social transformation, as an adaptive response to a catastrophic challenge, where over 6 million people died and people paid a very high price expressed in health deficits, family situations, employment, and loss of feeling of security.

5. Summary

The coevolutionary model of Man-Environment-Organism focuses on the unity of human-environment and offers a framework for human coevolution, where the given, particular M-E-O is the subject of evolutionary selection. On the one hand, the Darwinian fight for survival is the fate of all forms of M-E-Os, and on the other, Kropotkinian cooperation and mutuality among different M-E-Os can offer an adaptive advantage. We have shown, how human ecological models, some general theories of evolution and coevolution, and neoevolutionary concepts of archeology and cultural anthropology meet the M-E-O model as a common framework.

The human ecological sphere of competing M-E-Os is the theater of the coevolutionary drama, a historical process of memetic, economic, and social evolution. M-E-Os, be they families, nations, or organizations, are synchronized replicative systems with natural, technological, social, and infospherical components. The function of M-E-O depends on the ability of components to influence the probability of the genesis or survival of other components. The sustainability of M-E-O systems depends on their replicative functions, which result from transgenerational information transcription in genetic and memetic ways. Autogenesis of M-E-O systems comes from autogenetic system precursors, which can be sets of natural, technological, memetic, and social parts that are passed down through genes or memes.

We overviewed, how language has a memetic-social, memetic-technological transfer function in Actor-Network agency and coevolutionary processes, too. Language plays an important, niche-constructive role in influencing the selection of genes and memes. Language, ideologies, and political discourses shape social relationships, hierarchies, and the ingroup and outgroup positions of social players. The archeogenetics of given populations and the etymological analysis of their vocabulary and idioms let us trace genetic-memetic coevolutionary changes in the past of given communities.

We examined the culture of biological replication, the birth culture, and mother-child relationships as genetic/memetic transgenerational mixed ways of selective dynamism in M-E-Os. Different M-E-Os create different memetic and technological Actor-Network contexts for reproduction, with different cultural and cognitive worlds and social institutional arrangements influencing the conditions, legal regulations, and technical practices of birth and early mother-child relationships. The mother-child attachment organization is influenced by various technical environments, rituals, and belief systems, influencing maternal behavior and childrearing. Family structures play a crucial role in the intergenerational transcription of attachment styles and the replication of sociocultural M-E-O patterns. Child-rearing practices shape cultural transmission, with some cultures focusing on nurturing and caregiving abilities while others emphasize independence and competence.

We also examined the impact of the environmental catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic on the late- or postindustrial M-E-O, altering technological, social, and cultural structures. The pandemic led to a new traumatic “attractor basin” of global M-E-O showing resilience and a tendency toward radical transformation of technospherial and infosperial compartments of the M-E-O, including synchronized infospherial globalization and industrial and commercial deglobalization with broken supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted regional and local businesses, causing a decline in gross domestic product and affecting vulnerable groups like low-skilled laborers and immigrants. Telemedicine, eHealth, and the market for immune-boosting supplements have experienced significant growth, and telework and home office activities have expanded. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of understanding sociocultural and psychological networks in public health problems. The Actor-Network dynamism induced by the COVID-19 pandemic proved the resilience, the interrelatedness, and the potential for effective synchronization of the info-, techno-, social-, and natural compartments of M-E-O with a high level of functional and replicative information as an evolutionary system. The coevolutionary frame of linguistic-memetic and population genetic connections, the coevolutionary interrelatedness of memetic and biological components of the human reproduction process, and the interrelated and synchronized changes of the M-E-O during the pandemic as a natural disaster support accepting the M-E-O as the subject of coevolutionary dynamism.