Re: Is evolution accelerating?

dkomo wrote:
> r norman wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 28 Jan 2006 09:18:32 -0700, dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> John Harshman wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> dkomo wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Remember to use only steps
>>>>>
>>>>>> 1-6, since the rest are not evolution at all.
>>>>> Apparently, that's arguable, as the dialog between Wilkins and r norman
>>>>> illustrates.
>>>>
>>>> Anything is arguable. I don't think Wilkins' arguments are working.
>>>>
>>> Let me repeat something I wrote in another post. For animals with
>>> "culture", which are sets of learned group behaviors, we make no claims
>>> that such culture is separate and apart from their biological evolution.
>>> We view such culture as an integral part of their biological
>>> adaptation to their environment, which environment includes members of
>>> their own species.
>>>
>>> Then we come to humans and all of a sudden you start flapping about how
>>> technological evolution must be treated separately from human biological
>>> evolution. What is different here to warrant such a cleavage? Neither
>>> you nor r norman has supplied an answer to this question: what is sui
>>> generis about human cultural evolution?
>>>
>>
>> That I did not notice your other post or that I did not bother to
>> complain about it does not make it valid. Culture is culture.
>> Information transmitted from organism to organism outside the genetic
>> machinery is not biological evolution.
>>
>
> But it is subject to the same *general* process of variation and selection.
>
>> I have supplied over and over again answers to the question as to why
>> cultural evolution must be treated separate from biological. It just
>> seems that you are not interested in reading those answers.
>
> No, I read your long post of 1/26/2006 and agreed with a lot of it. But
> your description is at the wrong level. The interesting processes of
> cultural evolution happen at the next level up -- a different level of
> abstraction. This is, I think, the level Wilkins is describing. At the
> description level you chose, you found many differences, but these turn
> out to be irrelevant to the main dynamics of cultural evolution.

Dennett (He Who Shall Never Be Named... ooops!) has a phrase, the "white
picket fence" surrounding humanity when it comes to evolution. We tend to
think that somehow what we are or do is isolated from the broader natural
world. So we think that our cultural evolution is somehow sui generis.

I think that culture evolves not only in humans but in songbirds, cetaceans,
other primates, and so on, only in a smaller way. And this too is subject to
both biological and a "decoupled" cultural evolution. Culture is not entirely
free of biology, of course (I think you cited the excellent book by William
Durham, _Coevolution_) but as a first approximation we can treat it as an
independent form of evolution of entities that are not biological. We do it
par excellence, but we are no different except in amount.

>
> I also read Wilkins' reply to your post, and I have a bit of advice for
> you: you can't win. :-) This opinion is based on having followed a
> number of similar debates in the past involving Wilkins, including some
> in which I was involved.

I'm not sure if I should be offended or pleased... ;-)
>
> The fact
>> is that the different mechanism of transmission causes the dynamics of
>> the process, especially the rate of change (if there indeed does exist
>> even a way to measure change) to be very different between the two
>> processes.
>>
>
> Yes to different rate of change. But no to *very* different dynamics of
> the process. The dynamics of change are *exactly* the same as in
> biological evolution: variation, drift, selection, contingency.
>
> It's like the 2nd order differential equation that describes the damped
> oscillatory behavior of an RLC circuit and a spring-mass system. In
> your long post it's like you are saying "an electrical circuit is not
> the same physical thing as a spring-mass system!" But IMHO it's the 2nd
> order DE that is important, and the "abstract" behavior is the same in
> both cases. And incidentally, this same 2nd order DE is much used in
> control theory, where the systems may consist of sensors, operational
> amplifiers and servomotors.

Nice example. I'm reminded of Maynard Smith's story about how, when he was an
areonautical engineer in the days before computers, they built a physical
"model" of the equations governing drag and lift out of springs and levers.
The behaviour of the model allowed them to do "calculations" based on the
model by changing the pressures on the spring-loaded levers, and then
reinterpret that as the result. It worked, too.
>
>> The difference is not between technological evolution and non-human
>> cultural evolution. It is between all forms of cultural evolution,
>> human and non-human, and biological evolution. The introduction of
>> various technologies simply changes the mechanism of transmission and
>> therefor drastically changes the dynamics.
>>
>
> But, you see, it doesn't drastically change the dynamics at all, other
> than accelerating the rate of interchange of ideas. That's why I titled
> my original post "Is evolution accelerating?" And now that we are
> firmly in the era of cultural evolution, the answer is: Yes!

Relative to absolute time. Remember when Haldane, I think, defined a "darwin"
as a rate of evolutionary change (where 1 darwin equals character change by a
factor of e in 1 million years)? This fails because of the relativity of
change for fast-reproducing species versus slow ones. If a species has five or
six generations a day, as in bacteria, or one every 30 years, as in elephants,
the rates are correspondingly incommensurable using an absolute measure. But
if you do it on the basis of the generation time, then perhaps you *can*
compare rates.

My point is this: you can't ask if culture evolves more rapidly than biology
unless you can share a metric. Sure, it's faster in absolute terms, but
bacteria still beat culture hollow for speed.


--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
Servum tui ero, ipse vespera

.

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