The Morphospace of Culture

This paper proposes a research programme for the mathematical characterisation of culturally specific aesthetic signatures. It is not an empirical study and does not claim to have performed the formalisation it describes. Its claim is narrower and, I argue, more defensible: that such a formalisation is plausibly tractable, that the structure required to attempt it can be specified now, and that the hypothesis motivating it is more than a stray observation. Drawing on perceptual neuroscience, computational morphometrics, cultural evolution theory, and ecological psychology, I argue that the visual design traditions of distinct cultures can be modelled as probability distributions over a multi-dimensional morphospace whose dimensions include curvature statistics, fractal dimension, symmetry properties, and surface continuity measures. The framework identifies four coupled layers that generate and sustain cultural aesthetic signatures: the ecological prior, material affordance, cultural selection, and perceptual calibration. The four layers are separated by orders of magnitude in their characteristic timescales, and I argue that this separation is the property that makes the formalisation tractable: it collapses a four-body coupled problem into a small fast subsystem evolving against a quasi-frozen background. The paper derives testable predictions, specifies an empirical programme centred on cross-cultural gold-jewellery morphometrics as a natural experiment that controls for material affordance, names the result that would falsify its central claim, and confronts the phylogenetic confound that any cross-cultural correlational design must address.