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Social evolutionary success

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I grew up learning from my father the rigors of rice farming, from field preparation up to harvesting, until I graduated high school and went to college at Silliman University. I was a working student to augment the little money my parents could afford to send me that time to sustain my schooling and other expenses away from home.

Farming was a hard experience for a frail child like me at an early age, and I thought I would be attached to the farm up to my old age.

But that hard experience had made me keen to overcome difficulties in life, and I knew at a young age that I would be doing more outside of the farm. Hardship was an inspiration to me, and I had made a choice.

The same experience is true to children of subsistence fishing households. Perhaps their fathers wanted them also to keep fishing as a livelihood because this what was available, affordable, and economically profitable at a particular time.

This situation was particularly true in the past when there were yet few fishers, and the catch was abundant even closer to the coastline.

And like me, children of fishing households had moved away from home for college education or other jobs with or without their parents’ blessings. But not all were successful.

Generally, parents, if they can only afford, would have wanted their children to succeed and have a better life when they find their current situation deplorable.

However, poverty is a challenge to overcome and not an obstacle to becoming socially and economically improved individuals.

Among humans, the evolutionary success of parents is measured by what their offspring have become, which, as far as I know, is not yet the case among non-humans.

Although both share biological survival and improvement in physical features as natural measures of evolutionary success, it is more than biology or genetics among humans because of the degree of our cultural sophistication.

Evolutionary success among humans is further associated with social and cultural evolution or the improvement in the social status of children measured by socioeconomic and behavioral indicators. And this could be appropriately called social evolutionary success.

The comparison between non-human and human beings illustrates what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls social reproduction or the handing down on children the social class status of parents along with the various forms of capitals they have acquired.

This description best described the vicious cycle argument that poor parents would most likely produce poor children–the same in the case of wealthy parents and their children. Sociologists term this process as social mobility, which could be either upward or downward, vertical or horizontal.

If, among humans, evolutionary success is only understood as a biological process, then we fail to recognize the fact that humans are not only physical but also social and cultural beings. They are endowed with the ability and capacity to plan, decide, and execute specific activities to meet desired goals.

Incidentally, humans have not equally developed these qualities because of variable opportunities–some become successful while others failed. This disparity is also evident among children of the same parents due to their variable attitudes toward life, in general, or the different ways they respond to assumed equal opportunities available in the family.

Economic success is recognized as not a given condition but a result of a process influenced by several factors including personal qualities. This contention would bring us back to how Bourdieu’s theory of capital explains the complexity of moving up or down the social strata.

Bourdieu classified capital into economic, cultural, and social, which are reinforcing each other. Poor economic capital results in poor cultural capital that ultimately ends with poor social capital. And the vicious cycle of poverty continues. Expectedly, other theorists of economic success may argue against this perspective.

The foregoing discussion connects to my previous column on personal behavior change. I first argued that the desire to improve is a matter of choice, and a consequence of adaptive decision-making process. The product determines our social evolutionary success.

And I think this is the question we have to ask ourselves to measure if we had succeeded or not when we reach the twilight of our life.

Have I (with my spouse) socially produced offsprings who not only duplicate either of us but are an improvement of who and what we are, and who contribute to the good of humanity and the environment?

In the next issue, I would examine the aspirations of parents of fishing households, municipal and commercial, for their children and how the government and non-government organizations may assist them.

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Author’s email: [email protected]

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