Darwinism and the Cultural Evolution of Sports

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Darwinism and the Cultural Evolution of Sports

Andreas De Block* and Siegfried Dewitte †

ABSTRACT This article outlines a Darwinian approach to sports that takes into account its profoundly cultural character and thereby overcomes the traditional natureculture dichotomies in the sociology of sport.We argue that there are good reasons to view sports as culturally evolved signaling systems that serve a function similar to (biological) courtship rituals in other animals. Our approach combines the insights of evolutionary psychology, which states that biological adaptations determine the boundaries for the types of sport that are possible, and pure cultural theories, which describe the mechanism of cultural evolution without referring to sport’s biological bases. Several biological and cultural factors may moderate the direct effect that signaling value has on a sport’s viability or popularity. Social learning underlies many aspects of the cultural control of sports, and sports have evolved new cultural functions more-or-less unrelated to mate choice as cultural evolution itself became important in humans.

psychology and behavioral ecology have become mainstream academic approaches to understanding human cognition and behavior. Evolutionists are applying evolutionary theory to nearly every human phenomenon, from sexuality to beauty, from morality and politics

D

ESPITE INITIAL CRITICISM, evolutionary

* Institute

of Philosophy, University of Leuven. of Applied Economics, University of Leuven. Correspondence: Andreas De Block, Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]. † Department

The authors wish to thank Emiliano Battista and three anonymous referees for their helpful and inspiring comments.This work was supported by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen; A.D.B.). Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, volume 52, number 1 (winter 2009):1–16 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 1

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Andreas De Block and Siegfried Dewitte

to religion (e.g., Pinker 1997). Perhaps because of their complex nature, however, sports and sporting activities have been largely neglected in these analyses. Almost every sport is in itself an intricate system composed of the interaction of biological and cultural elements. But despite this interlacing of (evolved) nature and culture, a Darwinian theory of sports is possible. Our goal is to take a first step towards such a theory, to understand sports from an evolutionary perspective. To that end, we describe how the rise and decline of sports can be understood with the help of evolutionary culture theories, especially if such theories take into account the perverse or “maladaptive” effects of culture on human behavior.

Cultural, Yes. But All Too Cultural? In his classic work, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga (1955) points out the remarkable similarities between human game playing and animal courtship rituals. Huizinga’s comparison trades on the notion that human players do not seem to care about ordinary needs. Though his comparison is inspiring, its value is limited because human sports clearly lack the fixed character of animal mating games. Humans play an enormous variety of sports and games, and different sports are played in different parts of the world. Moreover, the same sport may serve different functions and have different meanings, depending on the geographical, religious, and socioeconomic context in which it is played (Guttman 1978; Maguire 1999). Baseball, bridge, chess, curling, and soccer are certainly not the products of the blind natural forces of random mutation and selective retention. Human sports are cultural and, like all things cultural, they have to be learned. We now briefly review three types of evolutionary culture theories and discuss how each of these might deal with a cultural phenomenon like sports. The first type of evolutionary culture theory argues that cultural evolution is analogous to biological evolution, and that it can be studied with the help of Darwinian theories such as memetics or cultural virus theory (Blackmore 1999; Cullen 2000; Dawkins 1976). Although these thinkers recognize that cultural replicators and selection processes differ significantly from biological replicators and processes, they argue that the analogies between biological evolution and cultural evolution justify the use of Darwinian methods and concepts in the study of human culture.1 Indeed, it is not so difficult to apply memetics to sports. For example, the strategic choice of an American football coach can be seen as an example of variation (all the available strategies), selective forces (experience, the coach’s idiosyncratic preferences, the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent, 1One

difference is that whereas biological evolution is blind, cultural change is often intentionally directed toward some specific goal. However, the extent to which culture is intentionally directed is much debated: successful innovations are frequently the result of trial and error (Mesoudi,Whiten, and Laland 2006).

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etc.), and selective retention (the eventual choice). Memetic approaches to cultural activities like sports may sometimes offer a fresh perspective on a cultural phenomenon, but such new perspectives rarely lead to much more than a fancy reformulation of common sense. Nowadays, even famous meme-enthusiasts like Dawkins and Dennett admit that the popularity of memetics among the general public contrasts glaringly with its apparent theoretical sterility (Mameli 2004). A second group of evolutionists focus on the biological underpinnings of human culture. In this approach, the emphasis tends to fall on how biologically evolved mental mechanisms determine, or at least set the boundaries for, cultural processes and cultural evolution (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). In general, these evolutionary psychologists stress that biologically evolved adaptations serve as preconditions for cultural activities, and they call these species-level biological adaptations “universal metaculture.” As some of the critics of evolutionary psychology have argued, however, this kind of evolutionary approach is not always fruitful for the study of culture (Rose 2001). Standing upright, which freed human hands for carrying, was an important step in human evolution (Stanford 2003), and is thus an undeniable biological precondition for playing the piano or playing basketball, but Coyne and Berry (2000) point out that this connection tells us essentially nothing of any interest about piano and basketball playing. Even though we think this criticism is too harsh—evolutionary psychology is successful in providing insights into individual behavior—we agree with Coyne and Berry that many of the findings of evolutionary psychology about human culture are often either far from accurate or far from new. A third type of evolutionary culture theory is the dual inheritance theory, developed by Boyd and Richerson, which is a creative mixture of evolutionary psychology and anti-nativist cultural theories (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd 2005). Dual inheritance theory holds that humans, unlike other animals, inherit behavior through two routes: genes and culture. Boyd and Richerson have explored the ways in which these two routes interact, and why people adopt certain cultural variants rather than others.They agree with evolutionary psychologists that our minds are not blank slates: biological evolution has shaped innate learning mechanisms, hard-wired (mating) goals, and the biases that guide cultural transmission. Culture, in other words, is to a certain extent an adaptation. In contrast to most evolutionary psychologists, however, Boyd and Richerson contend (1) that culture is not the expression of naturally selected adaptive genes, but should be seen as the behaviors and mental states that are acquired or modified by social learning, and (2) that culture and social learning often results in the spread of behaviors that reduce genetic fitness. Of these three evolutionary culture theories, the dual inheritance theory seems to us the one most likely to contribute something substantial to our understanding of the evolution of human sports. That is not to say that a dual inheritance approach of sport can replace the approach favored by more historically minded social scientists. Obviously, Boyd and Richerson’s focus is less on winter 2009 • volume 52, number 1

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historical contingencies and more on population thinking. However, precisely because of their willingness to simplify complex problems down to workable assumptions and models (Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland 2006), Boyd and Richerson have provided a fertile theoretical framework for the empirical and experimental study of historical phenomena. Dual inheritance theory has been used successfully to investigate longstanding problems in archaeology and anthropology, and their synthetic evolutionary methodology might link the more parochial approaches traditional in the social sciences with each other and with biology (Dupré 1987; Henrich 2001; Marwick 2005). We shall explore how the dual inheritance approach can complement and correct less nuanced evolutionary accounts of sports. Before we can do that, however, we will sketch out the more traditional evolutionary take on sports.

Sports as Culturally Invented Courtship Rituals According to Huizinga (1955), human game playing and the courtship rituals of other animals are both competitive and ornamental activities: competitive because winning is central to sports, as every sport is a formal or informal (physical) contest that tests the skills and abilities of the players; ornamental because there is no direct utility or usefulness to sports, as the obstacles individuals (or teams) try to overcome in sports are unnecessary (Caillois 1961; Suits 1978). Because of the ornamental character of sports , it may appear to be difficult to link sports to the concept of natural selection, but this characteristic is just what one would expect if sports were related to sexual selection (Lancy 1980). Darwin (1871) himself evoked sexual selection to account for the gaudy ornaments and burdensome armaments found both in the animal kingdom and in human culture. From a Darwinian perspective, sports may be seen as one of the cultural activities invented to promote the acquisition of status. And acquiring status is—on average, in the long run, and in the ancestral environment to which our species is adapted—beneficial to an individual’s reproductive success.That is not to say that gaining status is our (only) conscious or unconscious motive for participating in a game. Many players and observers are primarily interested in the fun of the game. The claim that sports result from sexual selection means only that sports (like many other games and cultural practices) establish a reliable prestige hierarchy loosely based on (Darwinian) fitness, and that this function is the ultimate cause of the cultural invention of sports (Mayr 1993). But why would ornaments enhance status? Why do ornaments increase the attractiveness of an individual? Ronald A. Fisher (1915) was the first to formulate a mathematically sound answer to this question. According to Fisher, male traits can evolve through a process in which the male trait and the female preference for that trait become genetically linked. The male trait does not necessarily have to be beneficial to the male in any way—all it has to do is to attract

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females. When males with the trait mate with females that prefer the trait, the trait and the preference for the trait are inherited by both their male and female offspring. In a “runaway” process fueled by the positive feedback loop of everexaggerated male traits and ever-increasing female preference, the male trait becomes more and more extreme. Fisherian runaway sexual selection offers a good explanation for extreme male traits. However, cultural mating games like sports are played by women as well. Moreover, good athletes tend to have qualities (strength, endurance, litheness) that probably enhanced the chances of survival (in the ancestral environment), and not only the relative probability of reproduction.Thus, if sport results from mate choice, it is probably not the Fisherian mechanism that accounts for its selection. A better candidate is the costly signaling mechanism developed by biologist and game theorist Alan Grafen (1990). Based on Zahavi’s (1975) handicap principle, Grafen showed that sexual selection especially favored traits with high fitness costs, because only very fit individuals could bear these costs. In other words, sexually propagated traits are costly signals that less fit individuals cannot fake.The peacock’s tail is a good example of such a costly signal: the tail’s form and bright colors are sexually selected because males signal their fitness to females by handicapping themselves, for instance through fanning their symmetric and colorful tail—a habit that attracts predators or is merely costly because it wastes valuable resources.The peacock’s tail is a cue that has evolved to make the male peacock more attractive to potential sexual partners by increasing the potential partner’s reliable knowledge of the male’s fitness. If sport is one of our species’ culturally invented versions of the peacock’s tail, it must signal a certain aspect of fitness in such a way that the signal cannot be (easily) faked by those who lack that aspect of fitness.2 According to the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller (1999), that is exactly what sports do: they signal fitness to potential sexual rivals and to potential partners. He writes:“Each sport could be viewed as a system for amplifying minor differences in physical fitness into easily perceivable status differences, to make sexual choice easier and more accurate. In this sense, sports are culturally invented indicators of physical fitness” (p. 253). According to Miller, sports are costly signals of the “amplifier” type (Grafen 1990): athletes expend effort in order to facilitate the signal receiver’s assessment of their quality. Put differently, performance in competitive sports 2 Fisherian

and Zahavian sexual selection are not mutually exclusive. As Ridley (1994) notes: “a peacock’s tail is, simultaneously, a testament to naturally selected female preferences for eye-like objects, a runaway product of despotic fashion among peahens, and a handicap that reveals its possessor’s condition” (pp.161–62). Our claim that athletic performances are costly signals does not imply that Fisherian sexual selection had no effect on athletic abilities. Fisherian runaway and Zahavian costly signalling are ends of a continuum, and there is little reason to separate the two conceptually. Most sexually selected traits are the effects of a mix of runaway and costly signalling (Kokko et al. 2002).

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can signal phenotypic quality and heritable fitness to potential partners.3 The costs of these performances vary among individuals in such a way that the benefits of these performances offset the cost only in a subset that scores high on that aspect of fitness. Compared to a well-endowed individual, a less-endowed individual needs to divert much more energetic resources to perform the activity that signals fitness. Linking sports with sexual selection and costly signaling theory seems quite convincing. First, evidence indicates that traits which contribute to athletic ability, such as explosive strength and neuromuscular coordination, are highly heritable (Beunen and Thomis 2006). High heritability is exactly what one would expect in a sexually selected trait, while low heritability suggests that natural selection is the key process. Second, it is almost common sense that a high-level performance in competitive sports is attractive to the opposite sex. Indeed, a recent French study showed that male and female students who compete in sports reported significantly higher numbers of partners than other students, and that within the athletes, higher levels of performance predicted more partners (Faurie, Pontier, and Raymond 2004). Thirdly, athletic ability correlates positively with other fitness indicators, such as facial attractiveness (Park, Buunk, and Wieling 2007). Finally, sports share a number of characteristics with other sexually selected traits: they differentiate between individuals, they are energy inefficient, and they can often be risky (Anderson 1994; Johnstone 1995). In short, sports may be understood as culturally invented courtship rituals. But many oddities that result from seeing sports in this way cannot be resolved by research into the mental adaptations underlying the capacity for sports on the part of evolutionary psychologists. Because sports evolve culturally, an evolutionary psychology approach inevitably falls short in attempting to explain several important aspects of sports. Dual inheritance theory, however, can help understand the cultural evolution of sports.

The Cultural Evolution of Sports Boyd and Richerson argue that human behavior and human culture are more complex than many evolutionary psychologists seem to think. For what concerns us, this means that the factors leading to the maturation and stabilization of a sport include both evolutionary processes and cultural mechanisms.We shall first discuss the evolutionary processes that underlie the emergence and stabilization of sports, thereby substantiating and elaborating upon Miller’s intuitive point about sports, and then go on to outline the cultural factors that play an essential role in both processes but that are largely neglected by Miller and most other evolutionary psychologists.

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Darwinism and the Cultural Evolution of Sports Sports’ Viability

Evolutionary psychologists expect people to choose the cultural variant that has the highest payoff with respect to adaptive benefits (Gintis 2006). If sports are culturally invented fitness indicators, then every sport should evolve in the direction of an optimal fitness indicator—any genuine test of fitness must enable the observer to decide which of the contestants is the fittest. From a Darwinian perspective, a sport lacks viability if there is no reliable correlation between the perceivers’ evaluation of the contestants and the contestants’ (Darwinian) fitness. We identify three aspects that affect this correlation: the sport’s informativeness, accuracy, and transparency. To be informative, a viable sport must provide information about a quality that is evolutionarily relevant. Since strength, intelligence, endurance, speed, and litheness influenced the relative probability of survival and reproduction in our ancestral environment, we would expect to find these among the qualities that potential partners are still interested in today (Buss and Schmitt 1993). The fitness-relevance of a sport then depends on the number and relative weight of such qualities in that sport.This is what determines the game’s informativeness. A viable sport also needs to be accurate. Evolutionists expect that games mature by reducing the luck component. Explicit and implicit rules, of course, are excellent means to fulfill this function. According to Miller (1999): “Sports rules are considered ‘fair’ insofar as they produce the highest correlation between a competitor’s fitness and his or her likelihood of winning” (p. 254). From this perspective, successful sports are accurate as well as informative. But accuracy and informativeness are useless if the signal sent by the winner cannot be decoded by the receivers of the signal. It is not enough that winning the javelin throw requires a lot of power and deftness—the winner of the javelin throw must also be perceived as more powerful and deft than his opponents, or at least as more attractive to potential mates who value power and deftness. In other words, a well-behaved culturally invented costly signal is one that the target of the signal receives and understands. Such transparency is a necessary precondition for attracting an audience (Cronk 2005), and it is eventually the audience that decides whether or not a sport becomes successful. A minimal level of each quality seems to be required if a sport is to be viable. If many board games never became popular sports, that may be due to the fact that they are not informative about any relevant qualities in the players. In popular sports, not all participants receive champion trophies, because such a practice would have detrimental effects on the game’s accuracy. And nearly every sport is played with an audience, because playing behind closed doors dramatically reduces the transparency of the achievement. Beyond these minimal requirements, however, the identification of three essential aspects of viable sports raises the following question: to what extent do selection processes shape these


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three aspects independently? In all likelihood, there exists a trade-off between a game’s informativeness, its transparency, and its accuracy. Concerning the trade-off between informativeness and transparency, we can say that the more traits that a signal encodes, the more difficult it becomes to decode it. Similarly, greater informativeness goes hand in hand with more room for transmission noise and hence a lower signal accuracy. Finally, high transparency requires simple messages, which inevitably reduces the validity of the information that can be transmitted. All this is meant to show that evolutionary theory would predict the most successful sport—the one that attracts the most players and the largest audience—to be a sport that has evolved towards an optimal balance between accuracy, informativeness, and transparency, or what we refer to as the sport’s signaling value. In that scenario, the history of most sports will show an evolution, sparked by cultural selection processes, towards such an optimal balance. But what happens when the optimal balance of a particular sport is relatively low? Is a sport with a relatively low level of informativeness, accuracy, and transparency doomed to disappear? Evolutionary psychologists acknowledge that there are important individual differences in partner preferences (Buss and Schmitt 1993; Gangestadt and Simpson 2000). This suggests that different sports testing different aspects of Darwinian fitness may coexist, even if one sport outruns the other with regard to its optimality. For example, chess and clay-pigeon shooting test such different qualities and attract such different audiences that they do not really compete with each other.4 And although professional athletes usually play only one sport, amateurs may play several (in different seasons), and nonparticipants may be fans of many. Hence, the amount of “space” for sports may be limited, but it is probably wrong to think that this “sport space” can be filled completely by one or even a few sports (Waddington and Roderick 1996). Furthermore, it is consistent with evolutionary psychology that even the success of a sport with the highest optimality balance may be restrained by natural factors, such as climate and geography (De Block and Dewitte 2007). Conversely, evolutionary psychology predicts that the competition between similar sports—sports that test the same fitness-relevant qualities and that are equally well suited to the same natural environment—will be decided by the optimality balance. But this is evidently not what happens. Soccer is popular everywhere except in the United States, where it is overshadowed by American football, basketball, and baseball (Markowitz and Hellerman 2001). But the evolved psychology of American citizens is the same as the evolved psychology of other 4 Relatively low informativeness can be compensated by relatively high transparency, and vice versa. Low transparency can even sometimes be promoted by the players of the game, since such a low transparency attracts a small, but high-quality audience, one able to decode the difficult and blurry signals. Although such elitist games never become popular, they are nevertheless viable.

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human beings, and the environmental conditions in the United States do not differ substantially from those in Europe. As Richerson and Boyd (2005) put it: “people having different cultural and institutional histories behave differently in the same environment” (p. 27). Although this is largely a truism, it poses serious problems for an evolutionary theory of human behavior, problems that can only be solved by means of the integration of cultural and natural evolution. As we will discuss next, such integration must acknowledge (1) that specifics of the cultural environment in which an individual is situated provide determinants of behavior that may overrule the tendency towards biological optimality, and (2) that the evolved structure of the mind puts important constraints on patterns of social behavior (Dupré 1987). Evolved Biases May Override Adaptive Solutions

Boyd and Richerson believe that the maladaptive character of many cultural activities is due primarily to the adaptive benefits of the cognitive processes underlying cultural transmission. Cultural learning is generally adaptive because it allows individuals to respond more quickly and more accurately to moderate changes in the environment than hard-wired responses would allow (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Henrich and McElreath 2003). Cultural transmission allows individuals to profit from the adaptive knowledge gathered by the members of their culture. Much of our social learning is based on imitation, and the adaptive value of imitation is further increased by the existence of learning biases that help people to differentiate between adaptive and less adaptive behaviors to imitate. A hard-wired conformist bias leads people to copy the behaviors, strategies, and beliefs of the majority: “when in Rome. . . .” There are good evolutionary reasons for this conformist bias, because adaptive behaviors and convictions tend to be more common in a population than maladaptive ones (Coultas 2004). But there is also a downside to the conformist bias: if everyone simply imitates the majority, no new information is gathered, and cultural evolution comes to a halt almost immediately. Fortunately, individual learning and other evolved learning biases counterbalance the conformist bias. One especially interesting learning bias is the prestige bias: people not only imitate the most common behaviors, but they also tend to copy the behaviors of the most successful individuals.This prestige bias makes evolutionary sense, since individuals who have acquired the best behavior (in a particular environment) are on average the most successful individuals (in that environment). Although both the conformist and the prestige bias are psychological adaptations, it is easy to understand why and how they can lead to maladaptive beliefs, convictions, and behaviors. Natural selection has shaped our psychology so that it uses predictive cues—the transmission biases—as short-cuts to quickly generate adaptive behavior.Yet, these predictive cues are far from perfect. For instance, due to the conformist bias, common behavior may remain common in a population (nation, culture, subculture) simply because it already is common (Boyd winter 2009 • volume 52, number 1

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and Richerson 2005). Once a sport has the most players and attracts the largest audience, it may remain for a (very) long time the most successful sport, even though rival sports may have achieved a higher signaling value. Moreover, in Western societies sports are closely linked to the construction of group identities, which means that in-group members risk being ostracized if they play or watch another game, especially a game associated with an out-group (Bairner 2001; Morgan 1997).This suggests that the innate tendency to imitate the most common behavior of the group is often strengthened by our evolved tendency to avoid ostracism (Gruter and Masters 1986). We must not forget to mention that imitating successful people may also prove costly. Humans are reasonably good at identifying a successful individual, but less than perfect in hitting upon the recipe for success. For most people, determining “who is a success is much easier than determining how to be a success” (Richerson and Boyd 2005, p. 124). Because wealth is generally seen as the correlate of prestige and (Darwinian) fitness, people often try to imitate everything that wealthy people do, though it goes without saying that not everything wealthy people do contributes to their success (Henrich and Gil-White 2001). In short, imitating high-prestige individuals may mean that we end up with Donald Trump’s hairstyle reading Paris Hilton’s favorite books. Coming back to sports, we can observe a similar process at work. The codes of laws for cricket produced by the Marylebone Cricket Club were widely adopted on account of the social status of the Marylebone Cricket Club’s members, and not because these codes increased the game’s accuracy, transparency, or informativeness (Malcolm 2006). And although it was not golf that made Kevin Costner the successful individual he is, his “love for the game of golf ” may have contributed to the increasing popularity of golf in countries where golf was not popular, but Costner was. Other, mother content-related biases can be exploited in much the same way. Such exploitations steer the evolution of culture in maladaptive directions. For example, consider super-stimuli. Human culture is very prolific of super-stimuli: drugs, candy bars, makeup, and erotic movies all exploit evolved and once adaptive preferences and biases. Not surprisingly, sports and other human games are not lacking in super-stimuli. Most computer games, for instance, display extreme settings and provide the gamers with extraordinary powers. Moreover, feedback showing an ever-increasing score excessively stimulates our evolved reward system, thereby making the computer game addictive. Many so-called “postmodern sports” add super-stimuli on purpose.The referee in bossaball—a mix of volleyball, soccer, gymnastics, and capoeira—has a whistle, a microphone, a DJ set, and various percussion instruments, which compensates for the relatively low transparency and accuracy of the game. In the same way, by including superstimuli such as female cheerleaders with lots of makeup dancing and stunting during half-time shows, sports may address people’s evolved biases without providing benefits in the form of information. Super-stimuli may distort the fitness 10


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ranking of sports by artificially increasing or maintaining the sport’s entertainment value, and hence its popularity. This may increase a sport’s longevity by making it more robust than its competitors, or it may help a sport to survive an initial phase of unpopularity. Cultural Exaptations

Although learning and other psychological biases are the evolutionary foundations for much of our maladaptive cultural behavior, these biases are certainly not the only factors determining the persistent popularity of sports with a relatively poor signaling value—in other words, sports that are not the best available test of Darwinian fitness. Sports with relatively high signaling value may fail to replace sports with lower signaling value that have been culturally exapted. The concept of exaptation, introduced to evolutionary biology by Gould and Vrba (1982), usually denotes an organ’s function shift. A trait that has evolved to fulfill a specific function is exapted when it takes on a new role and gets a new function for which it was not originally designed by natural selection: feathers, for example, were originally selected for insulation, but were later (at least) partially exapted for flight. It is important to note that the mechanism of exaptation is not restricted to biology. Most of us, for instance, have artifacts at home that we purchased for reasons different than the reasons motivating us to continue to hold on to them.The cardboard tubes we once bought for mailing posters are now used by our children to construct marble races, and we keep an old deck of cards because it comes in handy when we need to stabilize a wobbly piece of furniture. Something of this sort may be behind the fact that a group cannot let go of sports with a relatively low signaling value. Or, as Richerson and Boyd (2005) put it: “cultural systems often evolve clever defenses against the action of our evolved psychology” (p. 165). At least three types of cultural exaptation apply to sports: prestige, survival, and purely cultural. Let us discuss prestige exaptation first. By definition, a successful sport attracts a large audience whose role is primarily to observe, evaluate, and support the players of the game. But members of the audience can also start doing other things: they may start betting on the games, or showing off their knowledge of statistics, or impressing others with their “Think Blue” credit card of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Some members of the audience might even compete with each other in hooliganism. In other words, several sport-like activities can, and often do, arise on the margins of a sport.The peripheral games usually test fitness relevant qualities (commitment, intelligence, etc.) different from those tested by the central game itself (speed, power, etc.). But despite the fact that the peripheral game tests other qualities, the fact remains that the prestige of the “peripheral player” largely depends on the popularity of the central game. What is the use—in terms of prestige—of having a “Think Blue” credit card, if nobody cares about baseball, let alone about the Dodgers? And chances are that a European university student who obsesses about lacrosse statistics will winter 2009 • volume 52, number 1

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be regarded as a freak, and not as a devoted follower of a noble and upper-class sport. Because the prestige interest of central and peripheral players often coincide, the peripheral games can stabilize the popularity of the central sport. In short, peripheral games may (at least partially) immunize the central game against popularity loss, thereby trumping the spread of sports that are intrinsically better fitness indicators. The second type of exaptation, survival, refers to the fact that sports sometimes have a survival value in a particular society. In Afghanistan, for instance, the national sport is buzkashi, an odd version of polo played with the headless carcass of a goat instead of a ball.This game is also very popular among Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, and other people from the Central Asian steppes (Azoy 2003). A person can become a highly regarded member of society (a chapandaz) by mastering the skills of the game. But the skills perfected by buzkashi prove also useful outside the domain of status and prestige. In many regions of Central Asia, horseback riding is still an important means of transport, hunting, and warfare; a skilled player of buzkashi will also be an excellent warrior and hunter. In Western societies, skills learned in shooting games may turn out very useful in becoming a law enforcement officer. In short, the relatively low signaling value of a particular game as a cultural form of sexual competition may be counterbalanced by such an indirect survival value. The last type of exaptation is a purely cultural one. Sports are often closely linked to other cultural practices. In Ancient Greece, winning the crown of olive leaves was good for the player’s status, but that was not the only reason people participated in the games: athletes also participated in the Olympic Games to honour Zeus. Likewise, the winner of the Mokayan ball game pokolpok was said to win a direct ticket to heaven (Leyenaar and Parsons 1988).5 If a sport serves such an important cultural function, it can withstand rival sports that lack a religious (or political) surplus value. In contemporary Western societies, athletes of popular sports are often regarded as moral exemplars for young people, with the implication that, for example, being a good tennis player requires not only diligence and disciple but other qualities, such as kindness and altruism, that are not necessarily tested by the game itself. In general, the addition of imaginary benefits may be due to the difference between cultural and natural functions (Richerson and Boyd 2005). While the latter are beneficial to the individual’s genes, the former are sometimes only beneficial to the cultural system itself.6 These cultural exaptations of sports show that culture may transcend nature. Although other evolutionary culture theories have argued that cultural fitness and Darwinian fitness will in the long term tend to coincide (Durham 1991), 5 The

Mokaya were the ancestors of the Maya and the Olmec.

6 See, for

example, the case of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing is not beneficial to the bomber’s genes, but it may be highly effective in communicating (parts of) the bomber’s belief system (Dawkins 1982).

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Boyd and Richerson convincingly argue why this may not be the case.Yet, as we hope to have shown, this (relative) autonomy of culture does not mean that Darwinian methods and theories are useless for the study of cultural practices (like sports).

Conclusion The view sketched in this article does not give a complete picture of the cultural evolution of sports. Several other biological and cultural factors are involved in the gene-culture coevolution of sports. However, in order to make the complexities of sport and its history easier to handle, we have made simplifying assumptions and used relatively crude methods.We believe that this approach can ultimately form the basis of a more sophisticated understanding of sports as a cultural phenomenon (Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland 2006), much in the same way as the so-called “piecemeal approach” has already proved fruitful in studying other aspects of human socio-ecological behavior (Smith 2000). Nevertheless, it is worthwhile concluding this paper with two issues that make the Darwinian study of sport even more complex than the body of our paper may have suggested. First, sports undoubtedly serve other (biological) functions besides mate selection and mate choice. Team sports, for instance, are not only about gaining prestige and attracting attention of the opposite sex; most likely, they are also culturally invented tests for assessing the ability of others to engage in teamwork and to exert leadership and followership.7 This explains why men are interested in men’s teams sports and women in women’s, whereas in a pure mate choice situation one would expect men to be interested primarily in women’s sports and vice versa. Second, different balances between the three core aspects of a sport’s signaling value (informativeness, accuracy, and transparency) may lead to different types of cultural exaptations. For instance, reducing the luck component to a minimum (i.e., high accuracy) may prevent the emergence of large audiences, and hence prestige exaptation, because reducing luck hampers the viability of a number of audience games (e.g., gambling). A similar reasoning may apply to transparency. High transparency may fail to trigger sufficient opportunity for showing off one’s knowledge, which is certainly one of the cultural courtship rituals we expect to emerge amidst larger audiences. In concert, and given the trade-off between the three aspects and the need for a high signaling value, these considerations suggest that prestige exaptation will be important only for sports that score high on informativeness but relatively low on transparency and accuracy.

7 Sports

are also partly about developing physical abilities, and not just exhibiting them for the opposite sex. The physical play of children in forms far short of what we would call sports still preserves this function (Bekoff 1995).The entertainment value of sports may in part be a cultural exaptation (or maladaptation) of this original function. winter 2009 • volume 52, number 1

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