Indiana Jones was here…

So there are no ruins of the labyrinth. It’s like the Greek myths are trumped up stories or something!

At least some of them have emotional ties to real events, and nobody still clings to them like a religion, so we can talk about them openly. =)

So the Knossos palace was so huge and labyrinthine, especially for visitors who had never seen more than a two-room structure before, that the retelling became embellished. It’s like a game of telephone in pre-literate society. The Minotaur was simply King Minos, who exacted quite a tax on the people, such that their payments felt like sacrifices.

Knossos is the oldest palace in Europe, dating back to 1900 B.C. with perhaps the earliest settlement in 7000 B.C.

As I was hiking in Greece today I was thinking about how much culture has changed since then. Human nature (and genetics) is fundamentally the same, but we have changed so much as a culture. For example, most people regard rape, genocide and slavery as a bad idea today. They were common practice and enshrined in religious texts 2000 years after Knossos. Now think how much progress has been made in the past 50 years (minority rights, women’s rights). In both cases, the progress was uneven around the globe, and by no means complete.

Cultural evolution is the latest layer in the long arc of the evolutionary hierarchy (from DNA to cells to body plans to neural networks to culture), with the vector of progress accelerating so dramatically with each new layer, that the predecessors seem glacial in comparison.

And the pace of cultural evolution itself is accelerating. With tribal societies, advances in culture and norms propagated locally at best. Everyone had to learn the tough lessons of life within their own family tree. With religion, some common sense could be codified and propagated. …as well as a whole lot of nonsense, but it kept people intrigued. =)

Societal concepts, like the rule of law and government, brought more peace and a general decrease in violence of all forms over time. Arguably, the long arc of human history has been to raise the average of human happiness. Perhaps that is the unspoken objective function to which we strive.

But again, it has been uneven. Good ideas for societal organization propagated unevenly, and some islands persisted in internecine conflict and even cannibalism (e.g., Papua New Guinea and Fiji) well into the “modern era”. With the Internet, we are seeing a propagation globally of cultural memes like never before. This presents a challenge of course to the despots who want to preserve medieval structures that do not maximize human happiness. No surprise when flickr was blocked in the Kingdom.

But it will be interesting to see how it goes.

P.S. I do not mean to imply some kind of neo cultural imperialism. If we think of cultures like plants and animals, we can value biodiversity while still seeing that some cultures are much more adapted for certain niches. Some would thrive much more readily in an urban environment than the agricultural plains for example.