Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id MAA13317 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:25:31 GMT From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 06:28:54 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: RE: Evolution of ontogeny Message-ID: <3A7F99A6.19323.211BE08@localhost> In-reply-to: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745C37@inchna.stir.ac.uk> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 6 Feb 2001, at 11:55, Vincent Campbell wrote:
> <Yes, 50,000 years may be too little to see biological evolution --
> but we do > know that homo sapiens evolved from earlier forms of homo.
> Are you > suggesting that that process has stopped, or simply that the
> last 50,000 > years don't reveal biological evolution? >
> <I can think of a lot of changes that have happened socially in the
> last > 50,000 years that I would call markers of social evolution: >
> sedentarization > and farming, empire, distance communication,
> technological 'symbiosis', > etc. > I am of course not suggesting that
> all of these are wholly 'good' -- only > that they are of evolutionary
> consequence, and certainly that they are > irreversible.> >
> There's also the issue of what changed between homo erectus and
> cro-magnon that led to the cambrian-like cultural explosion? Some
> argue that there must have been some subtle but significant changes in
> brain structure- something unrecoverable archeologically- and that
> would have been a biological change, and thus evolutionary.
>
The argument is found in UNIQUELY HUMAN by Philip Lieberman,
who claims that a meta-mutation allowed the neural hand-eye co-
ordination centers, which had become elaborated through millions
of years of natural selection for more dextrous tool users and
makers, to be hijecked by the mouth-ear nexus, permitting
production anf parsing of much more rapid speech utilizing many
more distinguishable sounds.
>
> Then of course, you're quite right to point out things like farming,
> extensive niche selection, that has led to distinct population
> characteristics like lactose tolerance in adulthood. Debates do
> currently rage as to whether human biological evolution has
> effectively stopped or not (at least in the developed world) due to
> low mortality rates etc. I think both of these have been mentioned
> before a couple of weeks ago though, so I won't go over old ground.
>
> Vincent
>
>
>
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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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