Atlantis Dispatch 009:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates cultural origins…
Brooklyn Mural by Owen Dippie.
September 3rd, 2021
…begin transmission…
After our flight into billionaire space tourism last dispatch — which, you may recall, inspired our hunt for the true mavericks of the planet — we found ourselves setting sail due East, and back in time, to an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For there, in the grand old halls of the museum, hung portraits of an old family that turned out to be more captivating to Atlantis than one might at first imagine. Of whom are we speaking? Why, of the Medici, of course!
Why on Earth, when Atlantis is a space-oriented ship, would we feel ourselves drawn to a bunch of old oil faces? When we leaned in, our puffed sails intuited the fact that the Medici bear resemblances to both the false mavericks and the true ones in our midst.
On the one hand, the Medici marked Florence’s transition away from its Republic and into the hands of a Duchy, and in this sense, they seem to bear some kinship to those billionaires of yesterweek. Yet at the head of the Medici Duchy, the family also dedicated their labors to some of the grandest art-sci ventures ever undertaken on our planet. If you follow the money, you’ll find the Medici behind the grand Duomo of Brunelleschi, Galileo’s astronomical investigations, Florence’s aqueduct, the Uffizi, Dante’s epic poem, Petrarch’s sonnets, Vasari’s biographies, and Michelangelo’s, Raphael’s, Donatello’s, and Leonardo’s masterpieces. Outside the Met, we contemplated that list over a slice of street pizza, along with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for which, we considered, the Medici are responsible. Talk about cultural persistence.
The name Cosimo, as in Cosimo de Medici, also made us think “cosmos,” which reminds us of those whole ecosystems that are the true individuals of the biosphere — whole worlds indeed. Cosimo de Medici’s bust, and the slick portraits of his kin, reminded us that the Medici family functions as a biological individual of the sort we are fascinated by — that is, as a life form that transmits cultural information into the future. Unlike the billionaires in space (who gave us, primarily, images of themselves), history looks kindly on the Medici because they gave us the art and science of the Renaissance. Their efforts enlivened a whole cultural universe which copied, transformed, and adapted that art in Italy, across Europe, and around the globe.
Now, at this point in our dispatch series, it’s probably time for Atlantis to let our readers in on a little secret, which is this: when Atlantis thinks about cultural movements and artifacts, we entertain the possibility that they are biological phenomena. There are a few ways to understand this idea. One is that culture is an emergent property of biological systems. It has a life of its own that springs forth from the biological patterns of living things. A slightly more radical way of thinking about culture (for we are, in the very nature of Atlantis, a little radical), is to say that culture is, in fact, alive. What, you say? Have you gone off of your rudder, Atlantis?
Well, reader, maybe; but then again, maybe not. Back at our home port, the Santa Fe Institute, Atlantis has been listening in on conversations about culture, those talks where scientists treat culture as a living system. In the words of SFI Professor Chris Kempes, “human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms.” And in the words of SFI President David Krakauer, “the primordial soup of culture is the human species.”
For Krakauer and Kempes, moreover, we would do well to think of the origin of culture as another origin of life — one of many. This idea lies at the heart of a new paper of theirs, in which they argue that life has multiple origins and takes multiple forms. For Kempes and Krakauer, treating life as a single form that has only one origin prevents us from seeing both the other occasions when life emerges, and the variety of forms that it takes — including its cultural forms.
According to Krakauer, we treat life as though it has only a single origin and form because the field of biology has been dominated by the idea that life is the ultimate homology, that is, a similarity in structure that is passed through all of known biology ancestrally — all the way back to LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Instead of thinking of life as a single form passed through all subsequent biology, we’d do better to think of life on the analogy of the eye, which emerges at multiple times, independently, or on the analogy of simultaneous idea formation. Think, Darwin and Wallace, or Leibniz and Newton, for instance. Evolution and Calculus were conceived simultaneously and independently. They just sprang forth from the zeitgeist.
This set of wild ideas — that life has multiple origins, that culture is one of them, that all of the many life forms that emerge do so in a way that is analogous to the eye — is not without its detractors or qualifiers. SFI External Professor Sara Walker, for example, notes in a conversation on a different quasi-lifeform (Michael Crichton’s the Andromeda Strain), that even if different configurations of life emerge that are distinct from all the others, the single origin of life event remains the essential start to the story. As she says,
“There’s one origin of life event that kickstarts the physics of self-reproducing systems that can construct new possibilities, and the set of things that can exist. . .and that includes technology and everything else that life has produced since the origin of life. Even if we go into the lab and make an origin of life from scratch, it’s still part of that biological lineage. Or, if we have new structures. . .like the origins of multicellularity or social systems, those are origins events, but they’re not the origin of life, because they’re not the origin of that entire evolutionary process that’s building all of those hierarchical structures.”
One thing is for sure, these new origins of life, all of these emergent eyeballs (Zeitgeist-balls?), retain a significant connection to the old origin story, after all.
Still, there seems to be something fascinating about thinking of cultural origins in this way and, Atlantis won’t lie, we’re kind of excited about it. What is the Last Universal Cultural Artifact? What do we gain by looking at culture as a living thing with its very own origin? Well, we open up the possibility that biological theories, like evolutionary theory, for one, can help us understand culture. It also inspires us to think about cultural moments as kinds of origins — origins in which new kinds of cultural information emerge and are, in turn, transmitted into the future like the works generated by the Medici fortune.
So, do cultural phenomena act like biological phenomena? Do they evolve? Or do they act in another way? The predominant thinking on this matter is that biological organisms and cultural artifacts evolve in very much the same way. However, Helena Miton, a cognitive anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow at SFI who studies the ways that cultural information is transmitted, has a different, and provocative, take. For Miton,
...cultural information is not actually passed on through generations with the same degree of fidelity as genetic information. The frequency of certain misspellings is one example that suggests a more complicated explanation for how humans achieve culturally stable forms. As a cognitive anthropologist working in the emergent interdisciplinary field of complexity science, I am interested in how cultural forms persist not because they get reproduced with high fidelity, like genetic information — but for the opposite reason, because they’re often copied wrongly.
If a cell makes enough mistakes in its attempt to replicate, it gets into some trouble. Cross the error threshold and death is inevitable. Ciao, cell-a. But, even when the copying errors border on egregious, a cultural artifact persists, like it or not. It occurs to Atlantis that cultural artifacts are more robust to infidelity and replication errors because, even if we are willing to consider culture to be alive, we have to admit that the stakes are lower. And, low stakes support and inspire improvisation. Consider the fuel for our vigilante teen tortoises: Pizza. Now while the core essence of pizza (dough, sauce, cheese) has for centuries endured, the way that artifacts take on new characteristics, usually as a result of their milieu, is glaring, nay, offensive. The Medici would no doubt weep to see their delicious and delicate Margarita pizza transformed to the point of bastardization into the freakishly popular Canadian bacon and pineapple monstrosity on menus across the US. Nevertheless, pizza lives on. And hey, if Michelangelo likes it, who is Atlantis to judge?
So, where do we sail from here? Well, first let’s start thinking about what kinds of life forms world historical ecosystems, like the Medici, actually spawn. Are they like other biological phenomena? Or are they distinct kinds of life forms that need to be explained in their own special way? In any event, we can perhaps start by thinking of the works as information systems that persist — much like life.
As for the Medici, their legacy, so far, has been a shiny one. Give life to great art and science, and perhaps the sun will shine on you, too. Atlantis has to admit, those portraits at the Met are quite handsome. . .suspiciously handsome, in fact. So many stately portrayals, and little to no mention of the bribery, corruption, and violence that turned them from humble bankers to rulers. (Note to whom Machiavelli’s Il Principe is dedicated!)
Patronage comes at a cost, it seems, and those financially supported researchers and artists knew that a flattering portrait is what gets you that pizza. Atlantis can’t think of a better example of a low fidelity copy. And now, that’s the main story: Medici = Heroes — lovers of art, supporters of science, fathers of the Renaissance. Surely, if Galileo had engineered a rocket instead of a telescope, Cosimo would have taken a ride into the “Cosimos” too. We wonder how news of Branson’s and Bezos’s 60-mile trips past the Karman line will be recorded for Mars museum-goers millennia from now. Will we see Branson’s smiling face on all of the planet’s coins? A bust of Bezos’s bald head gleaming forth for his role in the origins of space tourism?
As we stood in New York and admired Cosimo, patron of the arts, wealthiest man alive, and destroyer of a republic, will we likewise admire Bezos, inventor of the instant delivery library, wealthiest man alive, destroyer of the planet, when we venture out to New Earth? We’re not sure. We’ll reflect on this matter over two delicious, creamy cones of gelato. Atlantis sincerely thanks you, Medici, for gelato!
Tune in next time when ATLANTIS contemplates universal agnosticism...