Re: No distinction between artificial and natural selection - John

r norman <r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 9 Apr 2008 10:56:39 +1000, j.wilkins1@xxxxxxxxx (John Wilkins)
wrote:

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[On cultural evolution]
However, in this case, the recent nature of the relevant
work can also be invoked. Only in the 1970s was the topic
seriously raised, and several major works lie between then
and now. It is hard to imagine a modern synthesis involving
cultural evolution much before Hull(1988).

Well the mediate source for Hull is Dawkins, but cultural evolutionary
theories have been around since TH Huxley.

More recently some serious and mathematical work has been done by Pete
Richerson and Robert Boyd. I get the impression you think this is a
sideline or blind alley. I attach my cultural evolution bibliography as
evidence this is an ongoing field of study.

The textbooks probably don't have the information mostly
because it hasn't trickled down to them yet.

...and it has been a bit of a revolution - and it is one which is
not yet complete. Maybe the authors are waiting for the dust
to settle.
....

There seems no shortage of studies in this area. And just how many of
these are published in journals devoted to biological evolution?
Essentially zero, although there might have been a couple 25 years old
or more.

Yes, it is an interesting and possibly important area of study. It
just isn't biological evolution!

No, it isn't. It's evolution, in a non-biological domain. However
Durham's book discusses in detail the relation between biological and
cultural evolution, and the relation is not simple. There are cases of
evolution that affect culture from biology. The inverse is true. There
are cases that are both. And so on.

Culture is not isolated from biology. It must at the least work within
the boundaries that biology sets. But it can affect the selective
regimes under which those norms of reaction are determined, and so
change them.

The analogy I like is that culture is like the uppermost and most rapid
current in a laminar flow in the sea. The lowermost currents are slowest
and most stable, but the uppermost can affect them at the boundaries,
even inserting themselves across those boundaries. The notion that
biology sets the scene and culture acts within it is not true a lot of
the time, and I'd say it isn't even the case that (all) biological
evolution is slower than cultural evolution (consider antibiotic
resistance, lactose tolerance, sickle cell frequencies in North America,
etc.).

So for any singular evolutionary process, the other kinds act as the
external conditions for that process (although sometimes they are
ephemeral and insufficient to change frequencies all that much, or are
too slowly evolving to make much difference).

As to the non sequitur about whether they are published in journals on
biological evolution, one might say that human psychology is not
psychology because it isn't published in journals on animal ethology...
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
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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