>>> "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 08/21 7:54 PM >>>
I hate to be hortatory, but I hope you folks are getting
your heads around
the paper by Lalande et al, on Niche construction,
gene-culture coevolution,
altruism etc, which I just posted, because it's relevant.
Mark, it's certainly interesting, but I'm not sure how
relevant to the actual debate that was happening. Take the
following quote as a summation of the parts of the paper
that are apparently most relevant:
Culture works on the basis of various kinds of transmission
systems
(Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Boyd & Richerson, 1985)
which collectively
provide humans with a second, non-genetic
"knowledge-carrying" inheritance
system. If the cultural inheritance of an
environment-modifying human
activity persists for enough generations to generate a
stable selection
pressure, it will be able to co-direct human genetic
evolution. The
culturally inherited traditions of pastoralism provide a
case in point.
Apparently, the persistent domestication of cattle, and the
associated
dairying activities, did alter the selective environments of
some human
populations for sufficient generations to select for genes
which today
confer greater adult lactose tolerance (Feldman & Cavalli
Sforza, 1989;
Durham, 1991).
This suggests that over long periods of historical time the
human species may still be evolving to a discernible extent.
Sure. But over how much historical time would it have to
evolve to become a different species, for example with
"significantly" (to quote the debate) different cognitive
faculties? I would guess that a period of say 10 000 years,
which more or less takes humanity from primitive society to
capitalism is not nearly enough for a change of that
magnitude. How long did it take for the various strands of
hominid evolution to produce a human being, by contrast?
Maybe our evolutionary anthropologists could comment on
this. But I think that attempts to conflate historical
processes, which to me are more about the actualisation of
potentials of the species being of humanity over a given
period, with biological evolution per se, are highly
suspect. Specifically I suspect that they belong more to the
domain of ideology than to that of science.
Tahir
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