Re: Is evolution accelerating?

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 08:36:35 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>dkomo wrote:

>> Is there something sui generis about human culture that it must be
>> treated as separate from human biological evolution in general?
>
>No. Apart from the substrate differences (and of course *every* lineage that
>evolves in biology operates over different physical substrates, no matter what
>the similarities), cultural evolution cannot be substantially different in the
>principles of its evolution. It can't because there is nothing like a noetic
>ray that permits culture to predict what will work in the future, just as in
>biology there isn't.
>
>Culture is a *part* of biology, not a separate domain. Every instance of
>culture, human, chimp, cetacean, or avian, is a biological phenomenon. No
>exceptions.

I think you are losing it in your senility, John. There are distinct
parallels between cultural and biological evolution so that concepts
in one might be useful metaphors in the other. However the mechanisms
of transmission are so enormously distinct that your statement "cannot
be substantially different in the principles" is quite outrageous.

The transmission of genetic information is strictly from parent to
offspring. Further, the mechanism of change is mutation which, as is
so often argued here, is essentially random, or at least uncorrelated
with the circumstances (in direction, though not necessarily in
frequency). In cultural evolution, transmission is horizontal,
lateral, every which way and traits and characters can be freely mixed
and matched. Societies can, in fact, contemplate the consequences of
their social structure and analyze the situation they find themselves
in, let alone predict the situations that are likely to come in the
future., Societies can make changes "intelligently designed" to cope
with these circumstances. I am not saying that, historically,
societies have often done so. But this mechanism is certainly
available to cultural evolution and not to biological. Therefore, the
two are quite substantially different in the principles.

I could go on an on, but you no doubt get my drift. You are now going
to respond with a long list of parallels that do, in fact, hold
between the two. Nevertheless, I will no doubt answer that the
differences are so pervasive and fundamental that the two are
distinctly different.

I also happen to believe that cultural evolution is so superior to
biological in allowing populations to quickly adapt to changing and
heterogeneous environments that biological evolution has quite
"deliberately" moved control of human behavior from the genetic
(instinctive) side to the learned (cultural) side and thus take
advantage of that difference. That is my main objection to
evolutionary psychology -- we humans have specifically evolved to shed
our evolutionary past in terms of our cultural behavior.








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