No. By “evolved psychology”, I mean the (nearly) constant, lower level mental substrate we are all born with – the impulses toward greed, empathy, selfishness, love, cruelty, creativity, etc., as visceral “raw materials” for our personality, our motivating goals and ethics, etc.
I do think human thought – as a function of culture (or more precisely culture) – does evolve. It “changes over time”, certainly. But I do not attach that to biological evolution. They are both “change over time”, but the mechanisms are quite different – genes and alleles change in populations with variations in heritable traits via DNA, and “evolving thought patterns” change… well, we know enough to say the dynamics are not expressed through DNA, at least.
I’m not a subscriber to notion of memes as Dawkins introduced it as a hypothesis some years ago, the formalized idea of a “mind virus”. And yes, I’m certainly familiar with the history of the term, as well as quite immersed in “Internet culture”, where “meme” has taken hold in a different sense (see
Reddit.com, etc.)
That said, I do understand that some ideas are “conceptually portable” and durable across many transmissions, from person to person in ways other ideas are not. Richard Dawkins uses the example in one of his books (“Devil’s Chaplain”?) of teaching a child to make a “swan” in Origami style, folding paper. This “recipe” for making a swan is remarkably durable as a “meme”, or just a transmissible concept. You can teach me, I can teach A, A can teach B, B can teach C, and on and on, and at the end of the chain, we can fairly expect something quite similar to your original origami swan to be reproduced.
Other ideas, say a drawing of a swan, are likely to be barely recognizable at the end of 50 different transmissions from person to person, each person in sequence trying to reproduce the other.
The reason for this is because some concepts are more discrete and “notched” than others. Drawing is given to much more approximation than “Fold this sheet exactly in half”, for example.
Anyway, the point being that ideas and concepts have interesting properties in terms of the durability and “intactfulness” in the context of social transmission and propagation. This obviously has implications for religious ideas.
Broadly speaking, I understand “culture” to mean “things people do by social habit, tradition or convention”. That may be overly broad, here, but fits just fine with your understanding, I think. An “atheist culture” would be a “virtual culture”, I submit, as there are not (that I know of) any real societies are that homogeneously atheistic, beyond, of course, all the people in the history of the world who have died, and are “unbelieving” because they are dead, worm food, and conspicuously NOT participating in the “afterlife” so many of us fantasize about.
“Gay culture” would be something similar. “Baptist Culture”, same deal, etc. We can look at societies, and make statements about their language, aggregate culture, etc., values, habits and traditions that span many generations, wide geographical areas and possibly a whole lot of languages.
-TS
