N.J. Enfield’s target article, How to Evolve an Iron Cage, reviews the social science and evolutionary literatures on how human cultures function as adaptive units through their symbolic meaning systems. This is such a fundamental topic that it lies at the heart of most branches of human-related knowledge, stretching back to antiquity. Hence, This View of Life magazine is pleased to feature a number of commentaries to further round out Enfield’s already impressive synthesis.
In my commentary, I will first reinforce some of Enfield’s most important points and then stress that iron cages can evolve to be highly evolvable, similar to the evolution of evolvability in genetic inheritance systems.
Separating the baby from the bathwater of the early human social sciences. Most European thinkers in the 19th century were dismissive of other cultures as inferior and less rational than their own. This includes Max Weber and his invocation of the iron cage metaphor, which in his mind referred to newly evolving capitalist societies and not to all human cultures. Enfield does a fine job of rejecting this bias and establishing that all enduring human cultures are impressively well adapted to their environments and are rational (although culturally inflected) in the same senses that Weber described for modernity. Thus, the iron cage concept, in both its constraining and enabling forms, is a human cultural universal.
A good example is Boehm’s (1996) analysis of three case studies in which tribal cultures were faced with an emergency situation and an anthropologist was present to describe what happened in detail. Two were warfare emergencies, and the third was an environmental disaster (a hurricane). In all three cases, what happened was a model of a group-level decision-making process.
Despite its shortcomings, there is a very healthy “baby” in the “bathwater” of the early human social science literature—a widespread recognition that human cultures are holistic entities and that symbolic thought is inherent to their structure and function. As Emile Durkheim put it ([1912]1995, p 233): “in all its aspects and at every moment of history, social life is only possible thanks to a vast symbolism.” According to Wegner (1986), most of the founders of the human social sciences talked unabashedly about societal organisms, complete with group minds. The philosophical tradition of pragmatism was founded on the insight that our mental and social constructions are winnowed from an infinitude of possibilities (Menand 2001). One of the strengths of Enfield’s article, thanks to his primary training in linguistic anthropology, is to ground his contemporary argument for the iron cage concept in the best of the early human social sciences literature.
Recovering from individualism and reductionism. Why does the iron cage concept, with its emphasis on group-level adaptation mediated by symbolic thought, appear so new, despite its deep roots? Largely, because of the advent of reductionistic and individualistic thinking during most of the 20th century (Hodgson 2007), which was described by Campbell (1994, p23) as “the dogma that all human social group processes are to be explained by laws of individual behavior—that groups and social organizations have no ontological reality—that where used, references to organizations, etc. are but convenient summaries of individual behavior.” In the rational actor model of economics, for example, the macro system is derived from individual preferences that do not depend on the preferences of other individuals. This is about as far away from anything relational or reliant upon symbolic thought as one can get!
I attribute individualism in part to the privileging of mathematical formalisms, which, despite their power, are incapable of modeling more than a few variables that interact in a nonlinear fashion, amounting to a de facto denial of complex systems. For example, the rational actor model cannot incorporate something as basic to human sociality as norms because it complicates the math (Akerlof 2007).
Computer simulation modeling makes it possible to go beyond verbal reasoning and mathematical proofs in the study of complex systems, making something as holistic and relational as the iron cage concept more scientifically tractable. I predict that individualism and reductionism will appear increasingly antiquated as we proceed through the 21st century.
Generalized Darwinism as the new kid on the block. Enfield does an admirable job of integrating the social science literature with relevant evolutionary literature, but it is important to appreciate the history of evolutionary science alongside the history of the human social sciences. For most of the 20th century, the study of evolution was confined largely to genetic evolution, ceding the study of cultural change to other disciplines. The first efforts to model human cultural evolution by authors such as Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) emulated population genetics models and had little to say about language or symbolic thought. The newly minted disciplines of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology were highly individualistic in their thinking; after all, this was the era of the selfish gene (Dawkins 1976). Only with works such as The Symbolic Species (Deacon 1998) did the formal study of human cultural evolution start to gravitate toward Durkheim’s insight that human society is only possible thanks to a vast symbolism.
Fortunately, the evolutionary literature during the last 30 years is making up for lost time and is beginning to provide a proper foundation for understanding the iron cage concept as developed by Enfield.
The concept of an evolvable cage. As Enfield appreciates, the metaphor of an iron cage is deeply problematic by emphasizing the constraining aspects of a given symbolic system while obscuring its enabling aspects. A well-adapted symbolic system is not like a prison--instead, it is like a sturdy ship upon a stormy sea! That said, a sturdy ship is designed differently than an automobile designed to move over land or an airplane designed to move through the air. For genetic and cultural inheritance systems alike, becoming well-adapted to a given environment requires becoming maladapted to other environments.
Genetic and cultural inheritance systems can also evolve to be evolvable—in other words, to be well-designed for adapting to new environments in addition to being well-adapted to their current environments. The evolution of evolvability is a lively topic in the study of genetic evolution (e.g., Wagner and Altenberg 1996; Petak et al. 2025) and deserves to be for the study of cultural evolution as well (e.g., Creanza et al. 2017; Mesoudi 2017; Watson and Szathmary 2016). Imagine a culture that explicitly formulates targets of selection, systematically searches for alternative means to reach the target, retains and replicates the best alternatives, and repeats the cycle again and again. This explicit variation/selection/replication process does not stop being evolutionary just because it is well designed and consciously understood for what it is. And it falls within the iron cage concept because it requires the same panoply of norms, protections, and coordination mechanisms as other symbolic systems that are merely well-adapted and not necessarily adaptable.
The concept of evolvable iron cages points us toward a voluminous applied behavioral science literature that is oriented toward helping individuals and groups improve their performance—in evolutionary terms, to become more adaptable. In particular, a conscious change method called ACT (pronounced as one word and standing for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or Training) has developed its own theory of symbolic thought called Relational Frame Theory, which has deep evolutionary roots stretching back the philosophical tradition of Pragmatism and more recently is becoming integrated with modern evolutionary science (Hayes et al. 2001; Hayes and Sanford 2014; Wilson and Hayes 2018). Some of the commentaries will elaborate on this literature.
In summary, there are three major literatures that need to become integrated for the future study of symbolic meaning systems: Evolutionary science, the basic human behavioral and social sciences, and the applied human behavioral and social sciences. Enfield’s target article and the commentaries reflect all three major literatures. The more integrated they become, the better we will be at adapting to our current social and environmental challenges.
References:
Akerlof, G. A. (2007). The missing motivation in macroeconomics. American Economic Review, 97, 3–36.
Boehm, C. (1996). Emergency decisions, cultural selection mechanics and group selection. Current Anthropology, 37, 763–793.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. University of Chicago Press.
Campbell, D. T. (1994). How individual and face-to-face-group selection undermine firm selection in organizational evolution. In J. A. C. Baum & J. V. Singh (Eds.), Evolutionary dynamics of organizations (pp. 23–38). Oxford University Press.
Creanza, N., Kolodny, O., & Feldman, M. (2017). Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114, 7782–7789. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620732114
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.
Deacon, T. W. (1998). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. W. W. Norton & Company.
Durkheim, E., & Fields, K. E. (1912/1995). The elementary forms of religious life. The Free Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution. Princeton University Press.
Hayes, S. C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (2001). Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition.
Hodgson, G. M. (2007). Meanings of methodological individualism. Journal of Economic Methodology, 14(2), 211–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501780701394094
Menand, L. (2001). The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Mesoudi, A. (2017). Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114, 7853–7860. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620741114
Petak, C., Frati, L., Vroomans, R., Pespeni, M., & Cheney, N. (2025). The variability of evolvability: Properties of dynamic fitness landscapes determine how phenotypic variability evolves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 122. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.07.02.662714
Wagner, G., & Altenberg, L. (1996). Perspective: Complex Adaptations And The Evolution Of Evolvability. Evolution, 50. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1996.tb02339.x
Watson, R., & Szathmáry, E. (2016). How Can Evolution Learn? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 31 2, 147–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2015.11.009
Wegner, D. M. (1986). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R. Goethals (Eds.), Theories of group behavior. Springer-Verlag.
Wilson, D. S., & Hayes, S. C. (2018). Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Behavior. New Harbinger Press.
