On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 12:36:27PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 7:14 AM, Russell Standish > <[email protected]>wrote: > > > Re Larmarkian evolution, cultural evolution is usually considered to be > > an examplar of Lamarkian evolution. Knowledge accumulated in one life is > > passed onto the next via books, or in the very olden day oral stories. > > > > Yes but even there Darwinian natural selection is at work. Some ideas are > good at infecting other minds and getting reproduce and thus can survive > for thousands of generations, while other ideas are not good at that and > vanish after a single generation. Of course minds work a lot faster than > embryology so cultural evolution is vastly faster than biological evolution. >
I never said otherwise. What is missing from cultural evolution is an equivalent of the central dogma. All evolutionary processes have variation, selection and heredity. Lewontin said so. Not all evolutionary processes have the central dogma - and even in biological evolution, epigenetic changes violate the central dogma. The central dogma and Lamarkianism is in contradiction. Whether the central dogma is required for the label "Darwinian" to be applied seems to be a matter of scholar's taste. I usually avoid the label, unless I happen to be talking about biological evolution, just to avoid confusion. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
