Re: Evolution of ontogeny

From: Mark Mills (mmills@htcomp.net)
Date: Tue Feb 06 2001 - 04:50:44 GMT

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    Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 22:50:44 -0600
    To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    From: Mark Mills <mmills@htcomp.net>
    Subject: Re: Evolution of ontogeny
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    Wade,

    At 08:38 PM 2/4/01 -0500, you wrote:
    > >Memetics hopes to provide a framework for cultural evolution, so is it fair
    > >to say most here think the environment evolves?
    >
    >The environment changes. All change is not evolution, although evolution
    >is always change. So, no, from this particular corpus of molecules, it is
    >not thought that the environment evolves. Life needs to evolve to survive
    >in changing environments.

    What do you think of the G-meme, artifact memes. Are you saying they don't
    evolve? They are 'in the environment.'

    > >What about ontogeny (the development cycle)? Does it evolve? The
    > >neural-meme may be an ontogenetic feature or developmental structure. Do
    > >these evolve?
    >
    >The developmental cycle may indeed evolve, although we have had no
    >evidence that it has.

    Have you read about people working with hominid fossils? They can trace an
    extension of the maturing process over the last 3 million years.

    Here is a quote from Leakey's 'Origins Reconsidered':

    [After details of CAT scanning hominid fossils].. 'We therefore have to
    think of the earliest hominids as bipedal apes, with apelike life histories
    [ontogeny] and apelike facial and dental developments. Only with the
    evolution of the genus Homo... did patterns begin to change. According to
    the pattern of dental development, the period of childhood was beginning to
    be prolonged in Homo."

    >And we have had no evidence so far that the human being has evolved over
    >the last 50 or so millennia....

    I guess the standard reply would be:
    a) 50,000 years is too short to see evolutionary change
    b) If a changing gene pool is 'the evolutionary' gage, then we know we can
    track DNA changes from parent to child. Thus, we have evidence of
    evolution (changing gene pool) in a microscopic manner.

    Mark

    http://www.htcomp.net/markmills

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