Re: No distinction between artificial and natural selection - John

On Wed, 9 Apr 2008 14:05:44 +1000, j.wilkins1@xxxxxxxxx (John Wilkins)
wrote:

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...

The point is not at all whether it is evolution. There are all sorts
of evolution; cosmic, stellar, linguistic, ... The term is not even
limited to replicators and heritance; it applies to any 'unrolling' or
'unfolding' of an orderly sequence of change. I don't object to the
notion of cultural evolution and of course it interacts with
biological evolution. I just think it is a different subject and so
is inappropriate to include in a textbook of evolution -- that is,
biological evolution as the shorter term is generally understood to
mean. In that sense, the fact that journals of biological evolution
don't publish works on cultural evolution is significant. The fact
that journals of ethology don't publish works on cognitive development
in human infants doesn't mean that it isn't psychology; just that it
isn't ethology.

My perspective is that, once humans developed culture and a mechanism
to pass on patterns of behavior to the next generation, biological
evolution went to work to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce the
influence of) genetically programmed or instinctive behavior from the
human repertoire. Cultural inheritance is much quicker to adapt to
new environments than is biological inheritance; its a far superior
evolutionary trick in a sense. Superior at least until cultural
inheritance gave us the ability to destroy ourselves and the rest of
the natural world. That replacement is the most significant
interaction that I know of, far more significant in terms of the way
evolution works than the rather trivial fact that we have altered the
biological landscape with our domesticated plants and animals and the
physical landscape with by using our engineering gadgets. Other
organisms have invaded continents and driven local species to
extinction; other organisms have greatly altered the nature of the
physical environment; we are not unique in that sense. We are unique
in developing a culture than carries on a different type of evolution
with a different dynamic.

.

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