Re: No distinction between artificial and natural selection - John

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Wilkins wrote:

I reiterate my belief that cultural evolution is exactly the same set of
processes as biological evolution, only on a different physical
substrate.

On the one hand we have people who think cultural evolution is not really
any different from the old kind that preceded it. On the other we have
people who claim the differences are enormous:

``What you say are 'deep' similarities and 'superficial' differences are
so strong as to completely alter the dynamics of change. That is, the
processes proceed very differently; differently enough to warrant separate
treatment.''

Who's that a quote from? Richard?

How about some middle ground? Yes, the underlying process consits of some
heritable information gradually changing - but there are differences in
/how/ it changes.

There are differences in that respect between evolutionary processes
*within* biology, too. Does that warrant a separate treatment for them?

Many of these stem from the closing of the loop between minds and the
heritable information.

Minds are overrated - they are just another way that evolution produces
individual adaptations. Consider them a kind of neural callosity. Like
calluses, they do nothing until the environment intervenes.

In nucleic-evolution, selection can't "see" the genes. Instead it works
on the phenotype, which is often time-consuming to grow.

Since selection is multigenerational by definition, the development of
individual phenotypes is the *fastest* part of the process.

In the new kind of evolution, the heritable information has become
exposed. It is writable. It can be copy-and-pasted about between what
would otherwise be different lineages. It can be analysed with
inferential methods. Knowledge can refer to other knowledge in ways which
traditional organisms cannot - so there is meta-information. Bad ideas
can be kept around as warnings about what not to try - whereas traditional
organisms only record what works - and so on.

And so, just like bacterial infections, which also meet these criteria,
it evolves (in a perfectly ordinary manner) when seen from its own
perspective, even though it looks like acquired characters from the
perspective of the host organism.

That leads to a whole bunch of new processes - which I regard as broadly
comparable with the evolution of sex. Sex also left the basic
fundamentals of evolution unmodified. But it made quite a difference to
the dynamics of evolutionary change.

Sex did (but I'm not getting into *that* again or Richard will do me a
harm), but I think that cultural evolution is not so significant in
itself, in that it - as an evolutionary process - is pretty much the
same sort of thing that happens with DNA-based evolution.

Of course - from the DNA-based perspective, yes, cultural evolution is
faster, but it doesn't predict the future, it isn't agent guided despite
what we agents think, and it has no special powers that ordinary
Darwinian evolution doesn't have.

What we are seeing now is another, similar refinement to the evolutionary
process.

And that change is the main underlying reason why, when you look at the
world outside, it seems to be in "free fall" - with exponential growth
processes all over the place.

What exponential processes? When did the carrying capacity become
infinite?

There's a law called (I believe) the Monkey Law: Whenever someone
asserts the uniqueness of humans based on some ability, a monkey (or
some other organism) will come along and show that it can do it too.
This has happened for problem solving, tool use, language use, symbolic
reasoning, and so on. Yes we have it in spades, but that is not a
qualitative difference - it's a quantitative one. [...]

Right. I think there are /some/ qualitative differences - but there are
certainly plenty of quantitative ones.

...but it's often like something suddenly going from 1 to 1000. For all
intents and purposes, that's a pretty dramatic change.

Terms like "dramatic", "rapid", "sudden" and so on are all observer
relative. What is rapid to a geologist is markedly not so to a
sociologist.

Look at what happened with the human brain. That's a quantitative change
- and it's only a factor of three - but it seems to have made quite a
difference.

Sure it has. Tripling the number of neurons means a much larger number
of connections in the brain (10000^3? I don't do numbers well)

It seems to me that the differences have been minimised in order to
support the thesis that cultural evolution is a Darwinian process. The
greater the differences are, the more challenging that thesis is to make.

It seems to me that people want to exaggerate the differences between
cultural evolution and biological evolution. The greater the difference
the more special we can all feel about ourselves.

The rejection of Lamarckian evolution by those concerned is a case in
point. Even textbooks agree that cultural evolution can have Lamarckian
properties - but Hull, Cziko, Wilkins, etc will have none of it - no!
cultural evolution must stay firmly Darwinian. If someone uses gene
therapy to acquire a trait, and then germ line engineering to pass it on,
that's not the inhertance of an acquired characteristic, that's <insert
convoluted Darwininan explanation here>.

Cultural agents do not inherit characters acquired in their "ontogeny".
Biological objects acquire cultural items, and that isn't Lamarckian (as
the very link you gave before - the Mesoudi paper - points out.

IMO, enough is enough, already. The changes /are/ important - as a simple
glance out of the window ought to clearly indicate.

I'm afraid that what is obvious is often wrong. Odd that - the whole of
science is based on not taking things that are obvious for granted.

--
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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