Re: Lousy design

dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Wilkins wrote:
....
Then we're agreed. Biology acts as a context for cultural evolution,

Yep, provided you allow that cultural evolution can go *contra*
biological evolution. That's what I meant by "[cultural evolution] is
not necessarily tightly coupled to our past biological evolution."

I think it is rather more complex than that. Biological dispositions can
act as the selective environment for cultural evolution, which can brake
cultural change (for example, if you needed to spend 60 years to learn a
discipline, that would stop that discipline from evolving, unless you
divided it into specialities that were tractable), and culture cannot
evolve too far from a viable biological developmental cycle. But I do
agree that culture and biology are not tightly coupled, as Toulmin once
noted.

I use the following metaphor - a river that is deep can have a number of
laminar currents, each flowing at its own rate. Each flow is more or
less decoupled from the substrate flow, but it can affect its
neighbouring currents. Biology is mediated to culture by a series of
layers of laminar flows, but there can be perturbations of biology by
culture, and culture by biology.

Example: biological evolution could not evolve a species that had a
propensity toward self-destruction, where every individual was driven to
suicide before reproducing. But our cultural evolution has brought our
species to the edge of self-destruction. I'm thinking primarily of
nuclear weapons here.

Biological evolution can indeed evolve "suicide species" - a variant
that is relatively fitter than another in, say, resource acquisition and
use, can exceed the resource renewal and drive, through natural
selection, the population extinct. It's a reason why laissez faire
economics is not always optimal...

and
culture acts as a context for biological evolution. All the rest is
about relative rates. As Shaw said, now we are haggling over the
price...


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx


--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

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