Re: No distinction between artificial and natural selection - John
- From: Woland <jerrydeon@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 04:56:24 -0700 (PDT)
On Apr 6, 6:35 pm, Tim Tyler <seemy...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 6, 10:04 pm, Woland <jerryd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote or quoted:
Oh, it's worse than that. Check out the textbooks:
Evolution, Mark Ridley, and Evolution, Mark Ridley, and
Evolutionary Biology, Douglas Futuyma.
Not only is there no mention of plays and art museums,
but there is no mention of genetic engineering or other
forms of scientific/technological progress.
Except for these four sentences from Ridley:
``Changes that take place in human politics, economics,
history and technology and even scientific theories are
sometimes loosely described as "evolutionary".
In this sense, evolutionary means mainly that there has
been change through time and perhaps not in a preordained
direction.
Human ideas and institutions can sometimes split during
their history but their history does not have such a
clear-cut, branching, tree-like like structure as does the
history of life. Change and spitting provide two of the
main themes of evolutionary theory.''
It's like they don't even /realise/ that culture varies,
is inherited, and the variations affect their persistence -
and so culture is thus part of evolution, by definition.
To quote Daniel Dennett:
``Many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy, would like
to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes.
It's all right, you know. Spider webs? Sure, they are
products of evolution. The World Wide Web? Not so sure.
Beaver dams, yes; Hoover Dam, no.''
-http://blog.ted.com/2007/07/dan_dennett_on_2.php
It is /absurd/ nucleic-acid centrism, that totally misses
what's been going on for the last few thousand years.
These guys are writing evolution textbooks that would
have been badly out of date if they had been published
before Darwin was born. They are badly in need of a
rude awakening.
All of your examples are studied under biocultural evolution (the
interplay between culture and evolution), which usually falls under
anthropology, and I assure you that it is mentioned in many textbooks.
Not textbooks on *evolution*. Probably the three main textbooks are
Ridley, Futuyma and Strickberger. Ridley and Futuyma have zero
coverage, while Strickberger manages a few cursory pages on
genetic engineering - a tiny subset of cultural evolution. Not one
of them has "biocultural" anything in the index. The /enormous/
acceleration of evolutionary change in modern times, isn't
even *mentioned*, let alone *explained*. You might think
that at least genetic engineering would be seen as being
relevant to evolution - but Ridley and Futuyma do not seem to think
so.
There aren't a whole lot of good links that I could find but here are
a few citations:
BRACE, C. Loring (1995) "Biocultural Interaction and the
Mechanism of Mosaic Evolution in the Emergence of 'Modern' Morphology"
American Anthropologist. Volume 97. Number 4. Pages 711-721.
LOPREATO, Joseph (1990) "From Social Evolutionism to Biocultural
Evolutionism" Sociological Forum. Volume 5. Number 2. Pages 187-212.
WILEY, Andrea S (1992) "Adaptation and the Biocultural Paradigm
in Medical Anthropology: A Critical Review" Medical Anthropology
Quarterly. Volume 6. Number 3. Pages 216-236
Uh, those are not textbooks on evolution. Rather that's a copy &
paste job
fromhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocultural_evolution
I am well aware that there *are* people who have studied these issues.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ t...@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to
reply.
Oh, I'm sorry I thought you were interested in learning, never mind.
.
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