Re: The evolution of "evolution"

From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Fri 07 Oct 2005 - 20:11:32 GMT

  • Next message: Dace: "Re: The evolution of "evolution""

    --- Derek Gatherer <d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

    snip (reply to Joel)

    > Look at this recent review:
    >
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15788537&query_hl=6
    >
    > It's by Eric Davidson, one of the founding fathers
    of modern dev.
    > biol. and Mike Levine, one of the team who
    > discovered homeoboxes - the genes (nuclear genes)
    that control axial
    > development and positional specification, and many
    aspects of limb
    > development, in everything from flies to mammals.
    The link will
    > give you free access to an entire issue of PNAS,
    filled with more reviews
    > explaining the current state of our molecular
    understanding of
    > developmental programming (by _nuclear_ genes).
    >
    > In the face of this avalanche of evidence, how can
    you, or anyone,
    > still believe otherwise?

    That's actually an excellent question to ask in a memetics group.

    Rather than argue about the subject (which is in my opinion solidly as Derek states) the memetics meta question is why people believe in things that are clearly just not so?

    Joel provides an example here. I can think of hundreds of other examples.

    What do they have in common? What evolutionary forces caused human minds to exhibit this psychological trait?

    I don't know the answers, but I do know the kind of biological/evolutionary analysis it would take to get them.

    Keith Henson

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