From: John Wilkins (j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed 26 Oct 2005 - 09:18:52 GMT
Be careful. Darwin's "Lamarckism" is only "neo-Lamarckian" and not
even that. He actually says that a trait that varies by chance is
inherited more often or more strongly if it is used (the principle of
Use and Disuse that he constantly refers to).
And I dispute the claim that "it's all about superior mental
faculties" - rather, I think Darwin failed, as many did then and many
still do, to distinguish between culture and biology. When he is
talking about the "British race" or the "Turkish race", he clearly
could not mean what we would mean in biological terms that the former
had better genes than the latter. I think that it is somewhat
Whiggish to interpret him anachronistically as thinking that cultural
attributes were biological; the distinction wasn't clearly made at
that time, and probably not until the turn of the century.
Can you point me to the statement that primitive culture was
independently invented?
On 26/10/2005, at 6:49 PM, Derek Gatherer wrote:
> At 09:31 26/10/2005, John Wilkins wrote:
>
>
>> But of course most speciation now is in fact thought to occur through
>> random variation and random fixation rather than by selection as
>> Darwin thought. There's good reason to think that some speciation is
>> due to selection, but not much. I worry that we think only that
>> Darwinian evolution is about selection (natural or sexual), when in
>> fact another really deep aspect of his view is common descent, and
>> this is not tied now to selection.
>>
>
> At the moment I'm re-reading "Descent of Man", having dug up a
> first edition in the university library. One thing that really
> sticks out is how Lamarckian Darwin had become by the 1870s
> (there's repeated reference to habits becoming hereditary), and how
> group selectionist he was as well (regarding tribes "supplanting"
> each other). He's also quite eugenical in places, but he makes it
> clear that he is not advocating culling of the inadequate, merely
> restrictions on their breeding. From a memetical point of view,
> the interesting thing is that despite a few analogies drawn between
> species and languages, there is no indication of any belief that
> culture has a separate evolutionary dynamic - it's all about
> superior mental faculties allowing better inventions. He
> underlines this with an anti-diffusionist statement that most
> aspects of primitive culture were probably separately invented
> within each culture. It's all quite similar to what Pinker has
> said recently about the brain "secreting" culture like the stomach
> secretes acid.
>
>
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>
-- John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com "Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122 =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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