If I have a concern it is that only a small proportion of even the sub-population of people who should come to know it have sufficient understanding of the disciplines you tie together to fully ‘get’ what you are proposing. I’m not going to pretend that I am well-enough informed to be a full member of that group but you trigger enough of my little grey cells foment a few comments. Actually, I could spend the rest of the day ruminating on your ‘guide’ but will confine myself to a few points that intrigued me and, IMHO, beg further explanation.
First, you compare the PSH mechanism with biological natural selection (transmission of adaptive genes) and then with the workings of cultural evolution which “…extends this idea by examining how information, beliefs, norms, technologies, and practices are transmitted socially.” You then suggest that the PSH introduces an “additional mechanism” (for transmission) in that successful endogenous behaviours can “become encoded into institutions themselves.”
I agree that this is an extension, but it would be helpful if you could expand on how transmissible institutional structure as artifice are distinct from various ideas and technological innovations (which are also artifices). Could it not be argued that technologies and your “institutional behaviours”, once encoded, are both cultural memes as defined by Richard Dawkins’? (From memory, Dawkins described a meme, or meme complex, as a nugget of cultural ‘information’ that can be transmitted, not only between generations—like genes—but also within generations. This latter mechanism is one reason why cultural evolution advances so much more quickly that bio-evolution.)
Second, but in a similar vein, you earlier state that “PSH proposes that symbolic systems introduce an additional mechanism. Successful actors may acquire increasing influence over the structure of the game itself.”
A double-barrelled point: If we can agree that the ‘structure of the game’ is a transmissible cultural meme complex (as noted, memes can be socially constructed beliefs, technologies or institutional frameworks ) then ‘successful actors’ by adapting to and asserting influence over the structure of the game, are participating in a form of cultural transmission are they not? How is the engagement of successful actors an “additional mechanism”, i.e., different from ordinary cultural transmission?
Third, you also assert: “Once encoded, those strategies no longer depend upon the continued presence of the individuals who originally developed them. The environment becomes capable of preserving and reproducing behavioural logic across time.”
Again, I agree this is an important insight. But it would be a more crucially distinct contribution if you demonstrated how it differs significantly from the functioning of other cultural innovations and their forms of transmission. For example, once installed, the internet and its evolution is no longer dependent on its originators. Moreover, like your strategic environment, the internet environment continuously preserves, propagates and evolves its logic and induced behaviours across time.
Fourth, you argue, that “In most biological environments, organisms adapt to conditions they do not fundamentally control. A deer cannot redesign predation. A tree cannot legislate changes to the climate. A wolf cannot alter the ecological principles governing the forest. Human symbolic systems introduce a profoundly different dynamic. Successful actors may acquire influence over the rules governing future participation.”
Now, again, there is a truly important insight here but, IMHO, it needs to be shaped and nuanced to stand out. It is true that deer cannot redesign predation; neither can a wolf alter ecological principles. However, remove the wolf population (or introduce a wolf population to a new habitat) and the structure, function, species composition, energy flows etc., of affected ecosystems will change dramatically. In short, one could argue that successful keystone actors acquire massive influence over the rules governing future participation, not only of the wolves, but of other species. So, how does the dynamic within human symbolic systems differ “profoundly”? Is it basically a question of self-conscious manipulation and purposeful influencing? These would be uniquely human attributes.
Fifth, in discussing neoliberalism as an example, of PSH at work, you suggest (accurately) that “…it may function as an environment that disproportionately rewards behavioural architectures optimized for symbolic competition while simultaneously weakening the influence of empathic, reciprocal, and communal constraints. In this sense, PSH attempts to provide a selection-based explanation for why certain institutional forms repeatedly emerge, stabilize, and expand.”
Again, I can agree but with the proviso that the architecture of ‘certain institutional forms’ repeats, in part, because of innate behaviours of human beings in large populations or large-scale societies—there will always be some people predisposed to exploit the architecture opaque institutions within human societies in repeatable ways, eventually enabling them to self-produce to just as you describe.
(In passing, this reminds me of the notion of ‘autopoiesis’ as advanced by Maturana and Varella. Complex living systems are self-referencing and self-producing – they are governed by endogenous rules that result in continuous self-replication and resistance to external pressures.)
Sixth, you show that “At this point, selection no longer operates exclusively on individuals. It begins operating on architectures. This represents another major extension of evolutionary thinking. Traditional evolutionary theory focuses on organisms competing within environments. PSH proposes that symbolic systems create environments capable of competing through their underlying rule structures.”
Again, I’m not so sure the distinction is that clear cut (to put it another way, you need to show why you think it is so clear cut). The idea that ‘symbolic systems’ become object of selection based on underlying rule structures is arguably analogous to the notion in evolutionary biology of group selection (see particularly David Sloan Wilson’s ‘multi-level selection theory’). As I understand it, Wilson argues that different groups can have unique behavioural and structural properties not expressed at the level of members individuals so that groups per se may become objects of natural selection. Again, the issue for the PSH is to make clarify its unique character-- what makes it a novel idea different from Sloan Wilson’s macro-level group selection, for example?
Seventh; I am intrigued by your assertion that “This is the deeper significance of institutional memory within the PSH framework. Institutions are not merely systems of coordination. They are evolutionary storage devices. They preserve successful strategies across generations and transmit them through symbolic rather than biological inheritance.”
Brilliant! And to me it begs a question about the following involution: have the the ‘heritable’ symbolic institutional structures (‘storage devices’) begun to feedback on the genetic profile of human participants over the course of human social/civilizational evolution? Is there an interaction between institutional and biological inheritance? Do our abstracted symbolic environments select for particular genotypes? In particular, is the proportion of dark triad personalities in human populations very gradually increasing?
Eighth, you argue that “If symbolic systems preserve and amplify behavioural logics across generations, then collapse can no longer be understood solely as a problem of resources, energy, complexity, or ecological limits. It must also be understood as a problem of selection.”
Absolutely and double-layered! This says to me that selection operates to favour fundamentally unsustainable institutional architectures (macro-level) which are, in turn, the product of innate (micro-level) human behavioural characteristics. In other words, PSH is a macro-level phenomenon that springs from the micro-level phenomenon that I called the ‘human maladaptation syndrome’: H. sapiens does not generate stable, sustainable societies because H. sapiens cannot generate stable, sustainable societies. It is simply not in us to be sustainable! (see: https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/civilization-and-the-human-maladaptation in which I riff on some of your earlier posts).
Ninth, you observe that “Entire societies become organized around the avoidance of short-horizon losses. The immediate penalties associated with slowing down consistently outweigh the delayed benefits associated with ecological recovery, regeneration, or reduced throughput.”
I agree absolutely, and point out that this is the essence of temporal, social and spatial discounting. Humans favour the certain, comfortable here and now and personal relatives and friends over all alternatives. Politicians therefore much prefer to risk imposing uncertain harm on future generations of strangers in distant lands than impose definite economic grief today on their relatives, friends and constituents within their home countries.
Tenth, you note that “This distinction is important because adaptive success and long-term viability are not necessarily the same thing.”
This is an absolutely crucial point (also reflected in the human maladaptation syndrome.) Why so? As you say, “The consequence is profound. Strategies can become highly successful within the symbolic game while simultaneously degrading the underlying ecological, social, and institutional substrates upon which that game depends.
All I can say is “Yes!!” this nails down MTI culture’s (un)sustainability predicament.
That’s all for now. Thanks for a morning of engaging deep-think and rumination!
First, thank you again for taking the time to read through the guide so carefully. Your comments had a far greater impact on me than I initially expected. In fact, I found myself ruminating on them well into the early morning hours and revisiting several sections of the manuscript and supporting notes. After a large latte and another round of reflection, I realized that your questions had forced me to think less about what PSH is and more about what it is not.
As we've discussed before, my formal background is mathematics, game theory, and mathematical physics. Evolutionary biology, systems theory, sociology, and political economy have largely been intellectual obsessions pursued outside of my formal training. The original inspiration for PSH emerged less from biology than from years spent in banking, large corporations, and highly competitive institutional environments. I became fascinated by recurring observations that seemed difficult to explain through conventional narratives alone. Certain behavioural architectures appeared to repeatedly rise to positions of influence, while others appeared constrained, marginalized, or selected against. More intriguingly, the institutions themselves often seemed to mirror the behavioural tendencies of those who successfully navigated them.
Initially, I framed PSH as introducing an additional mechanism of transmission. After working through your comments, I increasingly think that framing may be mistaken.
Cultural evolution, memetics, institutional theory, autopoiesis, niche construction, and multi-level selection all provide powerful explanations for how information, norms, technologies, beliefs, and practices persist through time. In that sense, I agree that institutions, technologies, and behavioural practices can all be understood as forms of cultural inheritance. Institutions certainly transmit norms. They shape beliefs. They influence what it means to be successful, respectable, productive, professional, or even a "good citizen." I would not dispute that.
What I truly believe PSH is attempting to explain is something different.
My discomfort with reducing the phenomenon to memes or norms was that neither seemed to explain why particular behavioural architectures repeatedly acquired influence over the institutions responsible for transmitting those norms in the first place.
This is what ultimately led me toward game theory.
Adam Smith demonstrated how self-interested behaviour could, under certain conditions, produce emergent social order through decentralized exchange. John Nash extended this line of thinking by showing that stable outcomes emerge through strategic interaction among multiple actors. In Nash's formulation, equilibrium arises when no "rational" participant can improve their position by unilaterally changing strategy given the strategies of everyone else.
However, both frameworks largely assume a fixed game.
PSH emerged from a different question: what happens when successful actors acquire influence over the game itself?
In other words, what happens when the most successful participants are no longer merely responding to incentives, but increasingly gain the capacity to shape the incentives, constraints, rewards, penalties, and strategic conditions governing future participation?
From this perspective, the central question is not simply how information is transmitted. Rather, it is how symbolic systems become capable of preserving and reproducing the game dynamics that determine which behavioural architectures become adaptive.
To use a corporate example, a new employee entering a firm certainly inherits information, norms, procedures, values, and expectations. However, they also inherit something deeper: a strategic environment. They learn what behaviours are rewarded, what behaviours are punished (constrained), what constitutes success, what constitutes failure, what creates opportunity, and what creates risk. In game theoretic terms, they inherit a payoff structure.
Importantly, individuals entering the same environment may possess radically different behavioural architectures, intellectual abilities, temperaments, motivations, and psychological traits. Yet the symbolic environment will tend to reward some combinations more than others. Over time, the individuals who successfully navigate those conditions may acquire increasing influence over compensation systems, promotion criteria, governance structures, reporting mechanisms, hiring practices, and performance metrics. Future participants then inherit those conditions.
This is where I truly see the distinction.
Memetics explains how ideas spread...Cultural evolution explains how practices spread.
...Multi-level selection explains how groups can become objects of selection.
PSH attempts to explain how symbolic systems preserve and reproduce the payoff structures that determine which behavioural architectures become adaptive in the first place.
In that sense, I am beginning to think that the distinctive contribution of PSH is not an additional transmission mechanism at all. Rather, it is a theory of symbolic selection.
The focus shifts away from the transmission of cultural content and toward the interaction between behavioural architecture, selection pressure, and recursive modification of the game itself. Successful actors do not merely transmit information. They may acquire influence over the incentive structures, rewards, penalties, constraints, and strategic conditions governing future participation.
Viewed this way, institutions become more than repositories of information. They become repositories of game dynamics. They preserve definitions (ontologies) of success and failure, reward and punishment, inclusion and exclusion. Future participants inherit not merely cultural content, but the strategic conditions under which adaptation occurs.
This also helps explain why concepts such as entrapment and loss dominance became central to the framework. A belief can be rejected. A norm can be rejected. A meme can be rejected. However, inherited payoff structures are far more difficult to reject because they define the consequences associated with participation and non-participation in game architectures. Participants frequently adapt not because they agree with the system, but because the strategic consequences of refusing participation become increasingly costly (constraining).
Within the PSH framework, this often produces what I describe as a loss-dominant equilibrium. Individuals may continue participating in systems they privately dislike because the immediate losses associated with deviation outweigh the perceived benefits of alternative strategies. Employment may be unsatisfying, debt burdensome, and institutional demands exhausting, yet the risks associated with unemployment, insolvency, exclusion, or downward mobility frequently make continued participation the rational choice. Over time, adaptation becomes less a matter of belief and more a matter of survival within the inherited game structure.
Entrapment emerges when these costs become sufficiently asymmetrical that participation is maintained not through genuine alignment, but through the systematic avoidance of loss. In this sense, symbolic systems preserve more than information, norms, or cultural practices. They preserve the payoff structures that shape future adaptation by defining what constitutes success, failure, reward, punishment, inclusion, and exclusion.
Your comments helped me realize that this may be much closer to the actual center of gravity of PSH than my earlier emphasis on transmission. If there is a novel contribution here, I suspect it lies not in explaining how culture spreads, but in explaining how symbolic systems preserve and reproduce the game dynamics that shape future selection.
In short, future actors inherit not merely information, but the game itself. I don't know if this answers all of your questions, but thank you again this stress testing exercise is necessary. There's certainly going to be more discussion around this as I still need to digest a lot of what you've shared. Very greatly appreciated for the thought provoking discourse.
I've reflected further on your comments and, rather than restating my previous note, I wanted to push one particular point a little further because I suspect it sits closer to the heart of what you were asking regarding memetics, cultural transmission, and institutional inheritance.
To push the distinction further, consider a corporation in which multiple competing beliefs coexist. One employee believes the purpose of the company is long-term stewardship, employee development, and sustainable growth. Another believes the purpose of the company is maximizing quarterly revenue regardless of downstream consequences. Both beliefs can be understood as memes in the Dawkinsian sense. Both can be transmitted, discussed, copied, and socially reinforced.
The interesting question is what happens next.
If the organization rewards quarterly revenue above all else, then the second belief acquires a structural advantage that has little to do with its intrinsic truth, moral value, or transmissibility. More importantly, certain behavioural architectures may possess advantages under those conditions. Individuals who are highly reward-oriented, comfortable with aggressive competition, less constrained by affective empathy, and willing to subordinate long-term consequences to immediate gains may systematically outperform individuals operating under different psychological constraints. Over time, such individuals may acquire larger bonuses, more promotions, greater authority, and eventually influence over hiring decisions, compensation frameworks, reporting structures, governance mechanisms, and performance metrics.
As this occurs, the symbolic environment itself begins changing. Future participants enter a game in which behavioural strategies associated with revenue optimization are rewarded more heavily while alternative strategies become progressively more costly. The institution begins reflecting the behavioural architectures that succeeded within it.
At this point, selection is no longer acting primarily on beliefs. Selection is acting on behavioural strategies interacting with a symbolic payoff structure. Another way of thinking about this is as an optimization problem. The beliefs may remain visible, but the game begins determining which beliefs are survivable because different behavioural architectures optimize differently within the same symbolic environment. Long-term stewardship may still appear in mission statements, corporate values documents, and annual reports, yet employees quickly learn that advancement depends upon different criteria.
From this perspective, symbolic systems do more than transmit information. They define objective functions and the reward structures through which those objectives are pursued. Participants learn what must be optimized in order to survive and succeed within the game. A trader learns to optimize revenue. A manager learns to optimize performance metrics. A politician learns to optimize votes. The crucial point is that individuals entering the same environment may possess very different behavioural architectures, psychological constraints, motivations, and utility functions. However, the symbolic environment systematically rewards some optimization strategies more than others.
This distinction may be important. A belief describes what an actor thinks is true or valuable (in plain terms). A meme describes how that belief is transmitted culturally. An objective function describes what the system actually rewards. These are not necessarily the same thing. An organization may publicly celebrate stewardship, collaboration, and employee well-being while simultaneously rewarding quarterly revenue above all else. In such cases, the beliefs and memes remain visible, but selection operates primarily through the objective function because rewards and penalties determine which behavioural strategies ultimately succeed (or fail to succeed).
Over time, the individuals who most successfully optimize against those objectives may acquire greater influence over compensation systems, promotion criteria, governance structures, reporting mechanisms, hiring practices, and performance metrics. In doing so, they begin influencing the optimization landscape itself. Future participants therefore inherit not merely beliefs, norms, or cultural practices, but the objective functions, incentives, constraints, rewards, and penalties that define success and failure within the symbolic game.
This is also where concepts such as loss dominance and entrapment became important within the PSH framework. If most employees genuinely value family, community, sustainability, reciprocity, and meaningful work, one might expect those beliefs to eventually dominate institutional life. However, this often does not occur. The reason, I suspect, is that beliefs do not compete in isolation. They compete within strategic environments characterized by rewards, penalties, incentives, and constraints. An employee may privately reject the prevailing logic of the organization while simultaneously continuing to participate within it because the immediate costs of deviation exceed the perceived benefits of resistance. Loss of income, status, career progression, security, healthcare, or social standing may outweigh the uncertain gains associated with alternative strategies (since survival is routed through symbolic tokens that provide access to material reality).
Under these conditions, adaptation becomes less a matter of belief and more a matter of navigating consequences. Participation may be maintained not through genuine alignment (beliefs & norms) but through the loss-dominant equilibrium concept I introduce in my book. Individuals continue playing a game they privately dislike because the penalties associated with leaving, resisting, or deviating become asymmetrical. Entrapment emerges when the strategic costs of deviation become sufficiently large that the game stabilizes itself through the avoidance of loss rather than the pursuit of shared values.
Viewed through this lens, psychopathy becomes less a moral category and more a behavioural architecture. The question is not whether psychopathic traits are inherently good or bad. The question is whether particular symbolic environments disproportionately reward traits such as emotional detachment, manipulativeness, superficial charm, strategic calculation, dominance seeking, and reward acquisition. If they do, those behavioural architectures may gradually acquire greater influence over the institutions responsible for shaping future participation.
One realization that emerged from reflecting on your comments is that PSH may ultimately be selecting a different object than either memetics or multi-level selection. Dawkins is primarily interested in the replication of cultural information. Wilson is interested in the selection of groups and group-level properties. PSH appears concerned with the selection of behavioural architectures interacting with symbolic payoff environments. In other words, the central question is not merely which ideas spread, nor which groups survive, but which behavioural strategies repeatedly acquire influence over the symbolic systems responsible for determining future rewards, penalties, opportunities, and constraints.
This may seem subtle, but it became particularly important as I worked through your examples. A meme may spread, a group may persist, and an institution may reproduce itself, yet none of these necessarily explain why particular behavioural architectures repeatedly acquire disproportionate influence over the environments responsible for transmitting culture in the first place.
In that sense, the core concern of PSH is not the transmission of memes themselves, but the selection dynamics that determine which behavioural architectures ultimately gain the power to define the game within which future memes, norms, beliefs, and institutions compete.
This is a great supplement to the book, where I am now in chapter 2. I haven't finished reading this overview yet but plan to print it out and fold it into the book in lieu of a table of contents. As an 'early' reader may I suggest that you think about having either an index and/or of a table of key terms in a later edition? An example of what can be done in a text for readers unfamiliar with a new theory, is an ecological monograph, by Erle Ellis entitled "Ecology in the Anthropocene Biosphere' published as an ESA (Ecology Society of America) Centennial Paper in 2015. Forgive me for this suggestion; back in the day I taught (and also supervised students on) academic writing so I'm saddled with the professional habit of focussing on textual elements.
Further I wish you would send the PSH book to Dr. Nafeez Ahmed. I expect you know his work. Just in case you don't, he is a serious and important analist of 'collapse' with several highly regarded books and many articles. Recently he has aligned with the techno-optimist side, starting with Toby Siba's RethinkX a couple of years ago.
You can find him on Substack at 'The Age of Transformation'. He strongly applies Holling's CAS framework without ever, as far as I know, referring to D.S. Wilson's distinction of CAS1 and CAS2. He would benefit from reading about the PSH. Thanks again for your serious and valuable contribution.
Hi Marion, I appreciate the feedback, and that's a wonderful idea. I've had some early readers provide similar suggestions. I intend to put some effort into this in the coming weeks.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the pleasure of connecting with Dr. Ahmed, but certainly will make a concerted effort to do so :)
As a side note, I had to make some critical updates to Section 3 (from a logic standpoint) which are now complete.
Again, I'm very much appreciative of the feedback and the time you've invested to get to know the work. It certainly means a lot! Chat soon!
Greg, this is a brilliant synthesis.
If I have a concern it is that only a small proportion of even the sub-population of people who should come to know it have sufficient understanding of the disciplines you tie together to fully ‘get’ what you are proposing. I’m not going to pretend that I am well-enough informed to be a full member of that group but you trigger enough of my little grey cells foment a few comments. Actually, I could spend the rest of the day ruminating on your ‘guide’ but will confine myself to a few points that intrigued me and, IMHO, beg further explanation.
First, you compare the PSH mechanism with biological natural selection (transmission of adaptive genes) and then with the workings of cultural evolution which “…extends this idea by examining how information, beliefs, norms, technologies, and practices are transmitted socially.” You then suggest that the PSH introduces an “additional mechanism” (for transmission) in that successful endogenous behaviours can “become encoded into institutions themselves.”
I agree that this is an extension, but it would be helpful if you could expand on how transmissible institutional structure as artifice are distinct from various ideas and technological innovations (which are also artifices). Could it not be argued that technologies and your “institutional behaviours”, once encoded, are both cultural memes as defined by Richard Dawkins’? (From memory, Dawkins described a meme, or meme complex, as a nugget of cultural ‘information’ that can be transmitted, not only between generations—like genes—but also within generations. This latter mechanism is one reason why cultural evolution advances so much more quickly that bio-evolution.)
Second, but in a similar vein, you earlier state that “PSH proposes that symbolic systems introduce an additional mechanism. Successful actors may acquire increasing influence over the structure of the game itself.”
A double-barrelled point: If we can agree that the ‘structure of the game’ is a transmissible cultural meme complex (as noted, memes can be socially constructed beliefs, technologies or institutional frameworks ) then ‘successful actors’ by adapting to and asserting influence over the structure of the game, are participating in a form of cultural transmission are they not? How is the engagement of successful actors an “additional mechanism”, i.e., different from ordinary cultural transmission?
Third, you also assert: “Once encoded, those strategies no longer depend upon the continued presence of the individuals who originally developed them. The environment becomes capable of preserving and reproducing behavioural logic across time.”
Again, I agree this is an important insight. But it would be a more crucially distinct contribution if you demonstrated how it differs significantly from the functioning of other cultural innovations and their forms of transmission. For example, once installed, the internet and its evolution is no longer dependent on its originators. Moreover, like your strategic environment, the internet environment continuously preserves, propagates and evolves its logic and induced behaviours across time.
Fourth, you argue, that “In most biological environments, organisms adapt to conditions they do not fundamentally control. A deer cannot redesign predation. A tree cannot legislate changes to the climate. A wolf cannot alter the ecological principles governing the forest. Human symbolic systems introduce a profoundly different dynamic. Successful actors may acquire influence over the rules governing future participation.”
Now, again, there is a truly important insight here but, IMHO, it needs to be shaped and nuanced to stand out. It is true that deer cannot redesign predation; neither can a wolf alter ecological principles. However, remove the wolf population (or introduce a wolf population to a new habitat) and the structure, function, species composition, energy flows etc., of affected ecosystems will change dramatically. In short, one could argue that successful keystone actors acquire massive influence over the rules governing future participation, not only of the wolves, but of other species. So, how does the dynamic within human symbolic systems differ “profoundly”? Is it basically a question of self-conscious manipulation and purposeful influencing? These would be uniquely human attributes.
Fifth, in discussing neoliberalism as an example, of PSH at work, you suggest (accurately) that “…it may function as an environment that disproportionately rewards behavioural architectures optimized for symbolic competition while simultaneously weakening the influence of empathic, reciprocal, and communal constraints. In this sense, PSH attempts to provide a selection-based explanation for why certain institutional forms repeatedly emerge, stabilize, and expand.”
Again, I can agree but with the proviso that the architecture of ‘certain institutional forms’ repeats, in part, because of innate behaviours of human beings in large populations or large-scale societies—there will always be some people predisposed to exploit the architecture opaque institutions within human societies in repeatable ways, eventually enabling them to self-produce to just as you describe.
(In passing, this reminds me of the notion of ‘autopoiesis’ as advanced by Maturana and Varella. Complex living systems are self-referencing and self-producing – they are governed by endogenous rules that result in continuous self-replication and resistance to external pressures.)
Sixth, you show that “At this point, selection no longer operates exclusively on individuals. It begins operating on architectures. This represents another major extension of evolutionary thinking. Traditional evolutionary theory focuses on organisms competing within environments. PSH proposes that symbolic systems create environments capable of competing through their underlying rule structures.”
Again, I’m not so sure the distinction is that clear cut (to put it another way, you need to show why you think it is so clear cut). The idea that ‘symbolic systems’ become object of selection based on underlying rule structures is arguably analogous to the notion in evolutionary biology of group selection (see particularly David Sloan Wilson’s ‘multi-level selection theory’). As I understand it, Wilson argues that different groups can have unique behavioural and structural properties not expressed at the level of members individuals so that groups per se may become objects of natural selection. Again, the issue for the PSH is to make clarify its unique character-- what makes it a novel idea different from Sloan Wilson’s macro-level group selection, for example?
Seventh; I am intrigued by your assertion that “This is the deeper significance of institutional memory within the PSH framework. Institutions are not merely systems of coordination. They are evolutionary storage devices. They preserve successful strategies across generations and transmit them through symbolic rather than biological inheritance.”
Brilliant! And to me it begs a question about the following involution: have the the ‘heritable’ symbolic institutional structures (‘storage devices’) begun to feedback on the genetic profile of human participants over the course of human social/civilizational evolution? Is there an interaction between institutional and biological inheritance? Do our abstracted symbolic environments select for particular genotypes? In particular, is the proportion of dark triad personalities in human populations very gradually increasing?
Eighth, you argue that “If symbolic systems preserve and amplify behavioural logics across generations, then collapse can no longer be understood solely as a problem of resources, energy, complexity, or ecological limits. It must also be understood as a problem of selection.”
Absolutely and double-layered! This says to me that selection operates to favour fundamentally unsustainable institutional architectures (macro-level) which are, in turn, the product of innate (micro-level) human behavioural characteristics. In other words, PSH is a macro-level phenomenon that springs from the micro-level phenomenon that I called the ‘human maladaptation syndrome’: H. sapiens does not generate stable, sustainable societies because H. sapiens cannot generate stable, sustainable societies. It is simply not in us to be sustainable! (see: https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/civilization-and-the-human-maladaptation in which I riff on some of your earlier posts).
Ninth, you observe that “Entire societies become organized around the avoidance of short-horizon losses. The immediate penalties associated with slowing down consistently outweigh the delayed benefits associated with ecological recovery, regeneration, or reduced throughput.”
I agree absolutely, and point out that this is the essence of temporal, social and spatial discounting. Humans favour the certain, comfortable here and now and personal relatives and friends over all alternatives. Politicians therefore much prefer to risk imposing uncertain harm on future generations of strangers in distant lands than impose definite economic grief today on their relatives, friends and constituents within their home countries.
Tenth, you note that “This distinction is important because adaptive success and long-term viability are not necessarily the same thing.”
This is an absolutely crucial point (also reflected in the human maladaptation syndrome.) Why so? As you say, “The consequence is profound. Strategies can become highly successful within the symbolic game while simultaneously degrading the underlying ecological, social, and institutional substrates upon which that game depends.
All I can say is “Yes!!” this nails down MTI culture’s (un)sustainability predicament.
That’s all for now. Thanks for a morning of engaging deep-think and rumination!
Hi Bill,
First, thank you again for taking the time to read through the guide so carefully. Your comments had a far greater impact on me than I initially expected. In fact, I found myself ruminating on them well into the early morning hours and revisiting several sections of the manuscript and supporting notes. After a large latte and another round of reflection, I realized that your questions had forced me to think less about what PSH is and more about what it is not.
As we've discussed before, my formal background is mathematics, game theory, and mathematical physics. Evolutionary biology, systems theory, sociology, and political economy have largely been intellectual obsessions pursued outside of my formal training. The original inspiration for PSH emerged less from biology than from years spent in banking, large corporations, and highly competitive institutional environments. I became fascinated by recurring observations that seemed difficult to explain through conventional narratives alone. Certain behavioural architectures appeared to repeatedly rise to positions of influence, while others appeared constrained, marginalized, or selected against. More intriguingly, the institutions themselves often seemed to mirror the behavioural tendencies of those who successfully navigated them.
Initially, I framed PSH as introducing an additional mechanism of transmission. After working through your comments, I increasingly think that framing may be mistaken.
Cultural evolution, memetics, institutional theory, autopoiesis, niche construction, and multi-level selection all provide powerful explanations for how information, norms, technologies, beliefs, and practices persist through time. In that sense, I agree that institutions, technologies, and behavioural practices can all be understood as forms of cultural inheritance. Institutions certainly transmit norms. They shape beliefs. They influence what it means to be successful, respectable, productive, professional, or even a "good citizen." I would not dispute that.
What I truly believe PSH is attempting to explain is something different.
My discomfort with reducing the phenomenon to memes or norms was that neither seemed to explain why particular behavioural architectures repeatedly acquired influence over the institutions responsible for transmitting those norms in the first place.
This is what ultimately led me toward game theory.
Adam Smith demonstrated how self-interested behaviour could, under certain conditions, produce emergent social order through decentralized exchange. John Nash extended this line of thinking by showing that stable outcomes emerge through strategic interaction among multiple actors. In Nash's formulation, equilibrium arises when no "rational" participant can improve their position by unilaterally changing strategy given the strategies of everyone else.
However, both frameworks largely assume a fixed game.
PSH emerged from a different question: what happens when successful actors acquire influence over the game itself?
In other words, what happens when the most successful participants are no longer merely responding to incentives, but increasingly gain the capacity to shape the incentives, constraints, rewards, penalties, and strategic conditions governing future participation?
From this perspective, the central question is not simply how information is transmitted. Rather, it is how symbolic systems become capable of preserving and reproducing the game dynamics that determine which behavioural architectures become adaptive.
To use a corporate example, a new employee entering a firm certainly inherits information, norms, procedures, values, and expectations. However, they also inherit something deeper: a strategic environment. They learn what behaviours are rewarded, what behaviours are punished (constrained), what constitutes success, what constitutes failure, what creates opportunity, and what creates risk. In game theoretic terms, they inherit a payoff structure.
Importantly, individuals entering the same environment may possess radically different behavioural architectures, intellectual abilities, temperaments, motivations, and psychological traits. Yet the symbolic environment will tend to reward some combinations more than others. Over time, the individuals who successfully navigate those conditions may acquire increasing influence over compensation systems, promotion criteria, governance structures, reporting mechanisms, hiring practices, and performance metrics. Future participants then inherit those conditions.
This is where I truly see the distinction.
Memetics explains how ideas spread...Cultural evolution explains how practices spread.
...Multi-level selection explains how groups can become objects of selection.
PSH attempts to explain how symbolic systems preserve and reproduce the payoff structures that determine which behavioural architectures become adaptive in the first place.
In that sense, I am beginning to think that the distinctive contribution of PSH is not an additional transmission mechanism at all. Rather, it is a theory of symbolic selection.
The focus shifts away from the transmission of cultural content and toward the interaction between behavioural architecture, selection pressure, and recursive modification of the game itself. Successful actors do not merely transmit information. They may acquire influence over the incentive structures, rewards, penalties, constraints, and strategic conditions governing future participation.
Viewed this way, institutions become more than repositories of information. They become repositories of game dynamics. They preserve definitions (ontologies) of success and failure, reward and punishment, inclusion and exclusion. Future participants inherit not merely cultural content, but the strategic conditions under which adaptation occurs.
This also helps explain why concepts such as entrapment and loss dominance became central to the framework. A belief can be rejected. A norm can be rejected. A meme can be rejected. However, inherited payoff structures are far more difficult to reject because they define the consequences associated with participation and non-participation in game architectures. Participants frequently adapt not because they agree with the system, but because the strategic consequences of refusing participation become increasingly costly (constraining).
Within the PSH framework, this often produces what I describe as a loss-dominant equilibrium. Individuals may continue participating in systems they privately dislike because the immediate losses associated with deviation outweigh the perceived benefits of alternative strategies. Employment may be unsatisfying, debt burdensome, and institutional demands exhausting, yet the risks associated with unemployment, insolvency, exclusion, or downward mobility frequently make continued participation the rational choice. Over time, adaptation becomes less a matter of belief and more a matter of survival within the inherited game structure.
Entrapment emerges when these costs become sufficiently asymmetrical that participation is maintained not through genuine alignment, but through the systematic avoidance of loss. In this sense, symbolic systems preserve more than information, norms, or cultural practices. They preserve the payoff structures that shape future adaptation by defining what constitutes success, failure, reward, punishment, inclusion, and exclusion.
Your comments helped me realize that this may be much closer to the actual center of gravity of PSH than my earlier emphasis on transmission. If there is a novel contribution here, I suspect it lies not in explaining how culture spreads, but in explaining how symbolic systems preserve and reproduce the game dynamics that shape future selection.
In short, future actors inherit not merely information, but the game itself. I don't know if this answers all of your questions, but thank you again this stress testing exercise is necessary. There's certainly going to be more discussion around this as I still need to digest a lot of what you've shared. Very greatly appreciated for the thought provoking discourse.
Greg
PS I intend to revisit this wonderful piece as you nail a number of interesting points: https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/civilization-and-the-human-maladaptation
Bill,
I've reflected further on your comments and, rather than restating my previous note, I wanted to push one particular point a little further because I suspect it sits closer to the heart of what you were asking regarding memetics, cultural transmission, and institutional inheritance.
To push the distinction further, consider a corporation in which multiple competing beliefs coexist. One employee believes the purpose of the company is long-term stewardship, employee development, and sustainable growth. Another believes the purpose of the company is maximizing quarterly revenue regardless of downstream consequences. Both beliefs can be understood as memes in the Dawkinsian sense. Both can be transmitted, discussed, copied, and socially reinforced.
The interesting question is what happens next.
If the organization rewards quarterly revenue above all else, then the second belief acquires a structural advantage that has little to do with its intrinsic truth, moral value, or transmissibility. More importantly, certain behavioural architectures may possess advantages under those conditions. Individuals who are highly reward-oriented, comfortable with aggressive competition, less constrained by affective empathy, and willing to subordinate long-term consequences to immediate gains may systematically outperform individuals operating under different psychological constraints. Over time, such individuals may acquire larger bonuses, more promotions, greater authority, and eventually influence over hiring decisions, compensation frameworks, reporting structures, governance mechanisms, and performance metrics.
As this occurs, the symbolic environment itself begins changing. Future participants enter a game in which behavioural strategies associated with revenue optimization are rewarded more heavily while alternative strategies become progressively more costly. The institution begins reflecting the behavioural architectures that succeeded within it.
At this point, selection is no longer acting primarily on beliefs. Selection is acting on behavioural strategies interacting with a symbolic payoff structure. Another way of thinking about this is as an optimization problem. The beliefs may remain visible, but the game begins determining which beliefs are survivable because different behavioural architectures optimize differently within the same symbolic environment. Long-term stewardship may still appear in mission statements, corporate values documents, and annual reports, yet employees quickly learn that advancement depends upon different criteria.
From this perspective, symbolic systems do more than transmit information. They define objective functions and the reward structures through which those objectives are pursued. Participants learn what must be optimized in order to survive and succeed within the game. A trader learns to optimize revenue. A manager learns to optimize performance metrics. A politician learns to optimize votes. The crucial point is that individuals entering the same environment may possess very different behavioural architectures, psychological constraints, motivations, and utility functions. However, the symbolic environment systematically rewards some optimization strategies more than others.
This distinction may be important. A belief describes what an actor thinks is true or valuable (in plain terms). A meme describes how that belief is transmitted culturally. An objective function describes what the system actually rewards. These are not necessarily the same thing. An organization may publicly celebrate stewardship, collaboration, and employee well-being while simultaneously rewarding quarterly revenue above all else. In such cases, the beliefs and memes remain visible, but selection operates primarily through the objective function because rewards and penalties determine which behavioural strategies ultimately succeed (or fail to succeed).
Over time, the individuals who most successfully optimize against those objectives may acquire greater influence over compensation systems, promotion criteria, governance structures, reporting mechanisms, hiring practices, and performance metrics. In doing so, they begin influencing the optimization landscape itself. Future participants therefore inherit not merely beliefs, norms, or cultural practices, but the objective functions, incentives, constraints, rewards, and penalties that define success and failure within the symbolic game.
This is also where concepts such as loss dominance and entrapment became important within the PSH framework. If most employees genuinely value family, community, sustainability, reciprocity, and meaningful work, one might expect those beliefs to eventually dominate institutional life. However, this often does not occur. The reason, I suspect, is that beliefs do not compete in isolation. They compete within strategic environments characterized by rewards, penalties, incentives, and constraints. An employee may privately reject the prevailing logic of the organization while simultaneously continuing to participate within it because the immediate costs of deviation exceed the perceived benefits of resistance. Loss of income, status, career progression, security, healthcare, or social standing may outweigh the uncertain gains associated with alternative strategies (since survival is routed through symbolic tokens that provide access to material reality).
Under these conditions, adaptation becomes less a matter of belief and more a matter of navigating consequences. Participation may be maintained not through genuine alignment (beliefs & norms) but through the loss-dominant equilibrium concept I introduce in my book. Individuals continue playing a game they privately dislike because the penalties associated with leaving, resisting, or deviating become asymmetrical. Entrapment emerges when the strategic costs of deviation become sufficiently large that the game stabilizes itself through the avoidance of loss rather than the pursuit of shared values.
Viewed through this lens, psychopathy becomes less a moral category and more a behavioural architecture. The question is not whether psychopathic traits are inherently good or bad. The question is whether particular symbolic environments disproportionately reward traits such as emotional detachment, manipulativeness, superficial charm, strategic calculation, dominance seeking, and reward acquisition. If they do, those behavioural architectures may gradually acquire greater influence over the institutions responsible for shaping future participation.
One realization that emerged from reflecting on your comments is that PSH may ultimately be selecting a different object than either memetics or multi-level selection. Dawkins is primarily interested in the replication of cultural information. Wilson is interested in the selection of groups and group-level properties. PSH appears concerned with the selection of behavioural architectures interacting with symbolic payoff environments. In other words, the central question is not merely which ideas spread, nor which groups survive, but which behavioural strategies repeatedly acquire influence over the symbolic systems responsible for determining future rewards, penalties, opportunities, and constraints.
This may seem subtle, but it became particularly important as I worked through your examples. A meme may spread, a group may persist, and an institution may reproduce itself, yet none of these necessarily explain why particular behavioural architectures repeatedly acquire disproportionate influence over the environments responsible for transmitting culture in the first place.
In that sense, the core concern of PSH is not the transmission of memes themselves, but the selection dynamics that determine which behavioural architectures ultimately gain the power to define the game within which future memes, norms, beliefs, and institutions compete.
Greg
This is a great supplement to the book, where I am now in chapter 2. I haven't finished reading this overview yet but plan to print it out and fold it into the book in lieu of a table of contents. As an 'early' reader may I suggest that you think about having either an index and/or of a table of key terms in a later edition? An example of what can be done in a text for readers unfamiliar with a new theory, is an ecological monograph, by Erle Ellis entitled "Ecology in the Anthropocene Biosphere' published as an ESA (Ecology Society of America) Centennial Paper in 2015. Forgive me for this suggestion; back in the day I taught (and also supervised students on) academic writing so I'm saddled with the professional habit of focussing on textual elements.
Further I wish you would send the PSH book to Dr. Nafeez Ahmed. I expect you know his work. Just in case you don't, he is a serious and important analist of 'collapse' with several highly regarded books and many articles. Recently he has aligned with the techno-optimist side, starting with Toby Siba's RethinkX a couple of years ago.
You can find him on Substack at 'The Age of Transformation'. He strongly applies Holling's CAS framework without ever, as far as I know, referring to D.S. Wilson's distinction of CAS1 and CAS2. He would benefit from reading about the PSH. Thanks again for your serious and valuable contribution.
Hi Marion, I appreciate the feedback, and that's a wonderful idea. I've had some early readers provide similar suggestions. I intend to put some effort into this in the coming weeks.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the pleasure of connecting with Dr. Ahmed, but certainly will make a concerted effort to do so :)
As a side note, I had to make some critical updates to Section 3 (from a logic standpoint) which are now complete.
Again, I'm very much appreciative of the feedback and the time you've invested to get to know the work. It certainly means a lot! Chat soon!