Introduction
Fitness landscapes are one of the most enduring metaphors in evolutionary theory. Organisms climb peaks of adaptation, guided by the external criterion of reproductive success. Yet when we shift this metaphor from biology to culture, something subtle but profound changes. In cultural evolution, the measure of "fitness" is not external—it is generated from within. Values, norms, aesthetics, and status signals define what counts as fit. As those values change, the very landscape of cultural fitness reshapes itself, producing not just new positions on the map but a new topology of evaluation.
This article argues that cultural evolution is best understood not as hill-climbing on a fixed landscape but as movement through a self-curved manifold, akin to general relativity. Just as mass-energy tells spacetime how to curve, culture tells fitness how to be measured. The trajectories of cultural drift are geodesics in this curved space: locally rational, globally unpredictable. This shift in metaphor—from climbing peaks to navigating a curved manifold—changes how we understand cultural change, cultural loss, and the possibility of cultural invariants.
Fixed Landscapes: The Biological Baseline
In biology, the fitness landscape metaphor is straightforward. Genotypes map to phenotypes, which map to survival and reproduction. The landscape is rugged, with peaks and valleys, but the measure of height—fitness—is fixed. Reproductive success does not depend on whether organisms value fertility or autonomy. It is simply imposed by the logic of natural selection. The landscape is difficult but stable: no matter where you are, the peaks remain peaks and the valleys remain valleys.
Reflexive Landscapes: The Cultural Twist
Culture operates differently. Cultural configurations not only move across the landscape but also redefine what counts as elevation.
In one culture, fertility is paramount: success is measured in offspring.
In another, autonomy, beauty, or novelty may be more important than reproduction.
In still others, status may come from abstinence, asceticism, or acts of self-destruction.
Entire civilizations may valorize martial prowess, religious devotion, or artistic originality above all else.
Thus, cultural fitness is reflexive. The criteria of success are themselves products of the evolving system. When the evaluative function changes, what looked like a peak yesterday may become a valley tomorrow. Cultural actors are not just climbing a mountain—they are reshaping the mountain as they climb.
General Relativity as Analogy
General relativity teaches us that mass and energy curve spacetime, and spacetime guides motion. There is no external flat grid to measure against. Instead, the geometry is endogenous. The universe is self-bending, and movement follows geodesics that make sense locally even when they look strange globally.
The cultural analogy works like this:
Culture = mass-energy (the substance of values, norms, practices).
Fitness function = curvature of the cultural manifold (what counts as "uphill").
Cultural evolution = geodesic motion (following the locally defined straightest path).
There is no global direction of improvement. Every cultural vantage defines its own metric of progress. What looks like a straight line from the inside may look like a spiral from the outside. And what looks maladaptive by one metric may look optimal by another.
Consequences of Reflexive Fitness
1. Cultural Drift (Hanson)
Robin Hanson has warned that cultures drift rapidly because local fitness criteria shift too quickly, and selection is too weak to correct maladaptive changes. Fertility decline is his central example: what once counted as "fit" (many children) now counts as "unfit" (lost autonomy). Entire societies may drift toward values that undermine their own survival without ever perceiving it as failure.
2. Accumulated Loss (Wilford)
Lauren Wilford notes that each wave of technology displaces embodied practices: piano → radio → TV → smartphones. From within each step, the drift feels natural, even positive. Families may prefer the ease of television over the discipline of making music together, or the solitude of scrolling over the patience of conversation. But the long-term accumulation of loss—co-creation, embodiment, shared ritual—is profound. What disappears is not just one practice but the habit of embodied co-presence itself.
3. Value Relativism Built In
From old standards, new practices look decadent. From new standards, old practices look oppressive or archaic. Both are right by their own metrics. The landscape itself has bent to accommodate their values. There is no neutral vantage point to declare one set superior without smuggling in values from one frame or another. Relativism is built into the very geometry of cultural evolution.
4. Local Rationality, Global Dead Ends
Because culture defines its own criteria of fitness, every cultural step is locally rational. But local rationality can lead to global dead ends. Cultures can follow their own values faithfully straight into collapse, much as a geodesic can lead straight into a singularity.
Toward Cultural Invariants
General relativity is not pure chaos: it contains invariants. Scalars and tensors describe conserved quantities across frames. Might culture also contain invariants—deep measures that persist even as values bend? Candidates include:
Agency preservation: Do practices increase or diminish the scope of choice?
Coherence of shared meaning: Can groups still coordinate around a common frame?
Survival/extensibility: Does the culture reproduce itself, or collapse into sterility?
Complexity retention: Does cultural drift increase or erode the richness of forms, ideas, and practices?
If such invariants exist, they may offer us a way to evaluate drift beyond local relativism. They would not fix the landscape in place but provide something akin to a compass—measures that remain intelligible even as values shift.
Visual Models
Two metaphors can clarify the relativistic view:
The deforming landscape: As culture moves, the peaks and valleys shift, reshaping the terrain. A family that once measured fitness by musical participation shifts to valuing shared screen time, and the mountain under their feet changes shape.
The cultural spacetime manifold: Values act as sources of curvature. Cultural trajectories follow geodesics, bending around value-masses. A culture that prizes autonomy bends the manifold in one direction; a culture that prizes fertility bends it in another.
Both models emphasize that cultural evolution is not optimization on a fixed grid but motion in a reflexive, curved geometry. The map is not just the territory—it is the terrain actively reconfiguring itself.
Conclusion
We cannot evaluate culture by fixed yardsticks. Each cultural configuration generates its own yardsticks, bending the space of evaluation around itself. But this does not mean that all cultural drift is benign or that nothing transcends local frames. Just as physics has invariants, culture may too. The task is to discern which values are mere local curvature and which are constants of cultural motion.
If we fail, we risk wandering down locally rational geodesics that lead to global dead ends. A society that redefines success away from survival may flourish by its own lights even as it withers demographically. If we succeed, we may identify the invariant principles that preserve flourishing across the shifting landscapes of human history, finding guideposts that endure even as the terrain bends and folds beneath our feet.
The relativistic view of culture does not deny progress, but it denies simple progress. It forces us to see that improvement is always relative to a frame, and that frames themselves evolve. Our challenge is to anchor our journey not in fixed peaks but in invariants that outlast the bending of the cultural manifold. Only then can we hope to chart a trajectory that avoids the singularities of self-destruction and moves instead toward enduring forms of human flourishing.