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Saffron 
Senior
Joined: 01 Apr 2008
Posts: 370
Gender: 
Location: Northern Virginia
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 Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 6:41 am Post subject:
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Robert, I am sorry I don't have the time right now to give your last post a full response. I am about to be late for work! I wonder if you might, step by step, walk me through an example of the evolution of a cultural trait, in the same way as Shubin does when explaining the evolution of the ear bones in humans? I think this would go a long way toward helping me understand how it is you understand evolution to occur in culture.
Thanks for your efforts in making this a very interesting discussion!
Saffron |
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Robert Tulip
Sophomore
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
Posts: 251
Gender: 
Location: Canberra
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| Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 4:49 pm Post subject:
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| DWill wrote: |
| Robert Tulip wrote: |
| I am pleased to get this response as it opens up a theme in which I believe there is a widely held error. You are saying that human culture is not subject to the forces of natural evolution, where the implication of the work of Shubin, Dawkins and Darwin is that we are subject to these forces. |
No, I'm saying that human culture is not subject to the law of "descent with modification through natural selection." It may seem to you to be merely a technical point, but I think it is important to say. I don't know about Dawkins, but where do Shubin and Darwin say that nature selects which format of videocassette will dominate, which writer will be held as the best in a language, or whether women will be required to wear burkas? |
Hi DWill, I think the VCR-Betamax videotape format war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war was a perfect example of cultural descent with modification through natural selection. The keys to adaptivity in this case included market dominance, recording time and price. We have since seen ongoing rapid technological evolution with emergence of DVDs, as the new ‘451’ niche of home entertainment provides fertile soil for adaptation. My view on writers is that those held as best are able to tap a nerve or vein with deep insight into reality, and that this is how they are assessed as classics, so insight is the natural selecting factor. On burkas, that opens the issue of how the origins of Islam can be interpreted as an evolutionary event. My view is that European Christianity had corrupted the teachings of Christ by placing it in service to the successors of Roman imperialism, and Islam emerged as a natural reaction from the large adjacent part of the world where natural piety was a stronger factor than the swords of the crusaders. The context of Islam, with its medieval views on women and science, provides the cultural framework in which burkas have been imposed as an adaptive strategy to deal with the extreme misogynist violence besetting some Muslim countries.
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| I completely disagree with your comment that there is nothing like natural selection going on here. In the case of Australian or USA indigenous response to European invasion, my point is that some strategies are adaptive while others are not. |
Don't you contradict yourself here? A strategy has to be in some way consciously chosen. It then couldn't be selected by nature. Not to sound like a broken record, but the fact that people adapt has nothing to do with how Darwin thought change in species came about. |
No, a strategy does not have to be consciously chosen. Nihilistic despair is a force of its own, using alcohol, prison, violence and other destructive tools. The options here are whether to go with the maladaptive flow (a default strategy) or to consciously choose a superior alternative. Human reason is an adaptive mechanism which needs to be applied in order to save people from death and poverty. My view is that the short run cultural evolution which selects for adaptive traits is part of a much longer term evolutionary process in which adaptive traits out-compete the maladaptive.
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| You seem to be assuming the old Christian idea that there is a difference in kind between spirit and nature, with spirit somehow transcending the laws which govern nature. |
I might have given you this idea, but I don't hold any beliefs about spirit and no firm ones about nature. (And yet, I don't feel I have a nihilistic bone in my body.) |
This was in response to your comment that ‘
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| the culture responds; it itself adopts a complex strategy as only humans could. There is certainly nothing like natural selection going on here (and I would also say that God is not controlling this). There is only a human product, culture, consisting of both the material and nonmaterial. To say that the culture responds to pressures, adapts, etc. is to say something true, but we shouldn't be fooled by the way this sounds--as if the agency is somehow external to the culture itself. It's all something that we do. |
My reading of this comment is that your denial of external agency in the determination of cultural choice makes too high an assessment of rational freedom. “Something that we do” is not all consciously decided, but our mind/spirit operates within a broader determining context that can be called nature and god.
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| Following Spinoza’s view that God is nature, I do think we can say nature is controlling what happens, as long as we extend our concept of nature to include human free will as a small determining factor. Culture is the agency, just in the same way procreation is the agency of natural selection |
We have a basic difference here. I can't see at all that nature is controlling what happens in any culture-specific way. I would also enlarge the space you give to human free will in the pie chart. Thanks, it's nice to be able to discuss these points with you. DWill |
I agree with you that nature does not control human decisions, but with the important qualification that if a group of people make a decision which proves maladaptive then we can assign nature a role in the subsequent demise of that strategy. Only adaptive strategies survive through natural selection. Our cultural decisions may be like fish hands which enable us to grapple the next rung on the ladder of evolution. |
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Robert Tulip
Sophomore
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
Posts: 251
Gender:
Location: Canberra
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| Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 4:50 pm Post subject:
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| DWill wrote: |
| Robert Tulip wrote: |
| I am pleased to get this response as it opens up a theme in which I believe there is a widely held error. You are saying that human culture is not subject to the forces of natural evolution, where the implication of the work of Shubin, Dawkins and Darwin is that we are subject to these forces. |
No, I'm saying that human culture is not subject to the law of "descent with modification through natural selection." It may seem to you to be merely a technical point, but I think it is important to say. I don't know about Dawkins, but where do Shubin and Darwin say that nature selects which format of videocassette will dominate, which writer will be held as the best in a language, or whether women will be required to wear burkas? |
Hi DWill, I think the VHS-Betamax videotape format war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war was a perfect example of cultural descent with modification through natural selection. The keys to adaptivity in this case included market dominance, recording time and price. We have since seen ongoing rapid technological evolution with emergence of DVDs, as the new ‘451’ niche of home entertainment provides fertile soil for adaptation. My view on writers is that those held as best are able to tap a nerve or vein with deep insight into reality, and that this is how they are assessed as classics, so insight is the natural selecting factor. On burkas, that opens the issue of how the origins of Islam can be interpreted as an evolutionary event. My view is that European Christianity had corrupted the teachings of Christ by placing it in service to the successors of Roman imperialism, and Islam emerged as a natural reaction from the large adjacent part of the world where natural piety was a stronger factor than the swords of the crusaders. The context of Islam, with its medieval views on women and science, provides the cultural framework in which burkas have been imposed as an adaptive strategy to deal with the extreme misogynist violence besetting some Muslim countries.
| Quote: |
| Quote: |
| I completely disagree with your comment that there is nothing like natural selection going on here. In the case of Australian or USA indigenous response to European invasion, my point is that some strategies are adaptive while others are not. |
Don't you contradict yourself here? A strategy has to be in some way consciously chosen. It then couldn't be selected by nature. Not to sound like a broken record, but the fact that people adapt has nothing to do with how Darwin thought change in species came about. |
No, a strategy does not have to be consciously chosen. Nihilistic despair is a force of its own, using alcohol, prison, violence and other destructive tools. The options here are whether to go with the maladaptive flow (a default strategy) or to consciously choose a superior alternative. Human reason is an adaptive mechanism which needs to be applied in order to save people from death and poverty. My view is that the short run cultural evolution which selects for adaptive traits is part of a much longer term evolutionary process in which adaptive traits out-compete the maladaptive.
| Quote: |
| Quote: |
| You seem to be assuming the old Christian idea that there is a difference in kind between spirit and nature, with spirit somehow transcending the laws which govern nature. |
I might have given you this idea, but I don't hold any beliefs about spirit and no firm ones about nature. (And yet, I don't feel I have a nihilistic bone in my body.) |
This was in response to your comment that ‘
| Quote: |
| the culture responds; it itself adopts a complex strategy as only humans could. There is certainly nothing like natural selection going on here (and I would also say that God is not controlling this). There is only a human product, culture, consisting of both the material and nonmaterial. To say that the culture responds to pressures, adapts, etc. is to say something true, but we shouldn't be fooled by the way this sounds--as if the agency is somehow external to the culture itself. It's all something that we do. |
My reading of this comment is that your denial of external agency in the determination of cultural choice makes too high an assessment of rational freedom. “Something that we do” is not all consciously decided, but our mind/spirit operates within a broader determining context that can be called nature and god.
| Quote: |
| Quote: |
| Following Spinoza’s view that God is nature, I do think we can say nature is controlling what happens, as long as we extend our concept of nature to include human free will as a small determining factor. Culture is the agency, just in the same way procreation is the agency of natural selection |
We have a basic difference here. I can't see at all that nature is controlling what happens in any culture-specific way. I would also enlarge the space you give to human free will in the pie chart. Thanks, it's nice to be able to discuss these points with you. DWill |
I agree with you that nature does not control human decisions, but with the important qualification that if a group of people make a decision which proves maladaptive then we can assign nature a role in the subsequent demise of that strategy. Only adaptive strategies survive through natural selection. Our cultural decisions may be like fish hands which enable us to grapple the next rung on the ladder of evolution. |
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Robert Tulip
Sophomore
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
Posts: 251
Gender:
Location: Canberra
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| Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 5:12 pm Post subject:
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| Saffron wrote: |
| Robert, I am sorry I don't have the time right now to give your last post a full response. I am about to be late for work! I wonder if you might, step by step, walk me through an example of the evolution of a cultural trait, in the same way as Shubin does when explaining the evolution of the ear bones in humans? I think this would go a long way toward helping me understand how it is you understand evolution to occur in culture. Thanks for your efforts in making this a very interesting discussion! Saffron |
An underlying question here is whether the tree of life as it appeared in Darwin’s Origin of Species – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_%28science%29 – is a model which can explain cultural evolution. Darwin explained it as follows
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| The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life. |
Taking the example of music, each genre can be considered as analogous to a bough of the tree of life. Of course, there is much more cross-fertilisation between genres than between phyla, but there is also an internal evolutionary process whereby each genre (eg jazz, classical, rock, pop, folk, etc) has its own internal development, with successive artists building on the precedent of those before them within the genre. Musical mutation is much faster than in genetics, but mutant musical memes operate on the same principle as genes, with most failing and a small number proving fecund. Where one tradition invades another’s territory, as in the rise of jazz displacing classical music, we can see combination and reaction as successive artists seek to interpolate the new memes in their work. The artists adapt while their genres evolve. This could be looked at more closely in the example of jazz - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz |
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Saffron
Senior
Joined: 01 Apr 2008
Posts: 370
Gender:
Location: Northern Virginia
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| Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 8:14 pm Post subject:
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Robert Tulip wrote:
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| Islam emerged as a natural reaction from the large adjacent part of the world where natural piety was a stronger factor than the swords of the crusaders. The context of Islam, with its medieval views on women and science, provides the cultural framework in which.... |
You use the phrase "natural reaction" to describe the emergence of Islam. There is nothing natural about the emergence of Islam. Couldn't some other flavor of religion have developed instead?
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| ....burkas have been imposed as an adaptive strategy to deal with the extreme misogynist violence besetting some Muslim countries. |
Imposing burkas is misogynistic!!! The burka is a mechanism to control the lives and sexuality of women. Nothing adaptive about it. It is a pure and simple issue of who has power; men do and women do not. |
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Robert Tulip
Sophomore
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
Posts: 251
Gender:
Location: Canberra
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| Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 1:49 am Post subject:
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| Saffron wrote: |
You use the phrase "natural reaction" to describe the emergence of Islam. There is nothing natural about the emergence of Islam. Couldn't some other flavor of religion have developed instead?
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That Islam emerged is an accident of history, and that the Koran spread so rapidly showed how it met what I would call a natural human need - no less natural for the fact that the medium of its spread was human society and language and sword. People are after all part of nature.
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| RT"....burkas have been imposed as an adaptive strategy to deal with the extreme misogynist violence besetting some Muslim countries." S:Imposing burkas is misogynistic!!! The burka is a mechanism to control the lives and sexuality of women. Nothing adaptive about it. It is a pure and simple issue of who has power; men do and women do not. |
I agree with you, except that on principle anything that survives is ipso facto adaptive. I was suggesting the imposition of burkas had been enforced by Islamic men as part of a view of women as chattels. Hence the adaptive strategy is primarily decided by men who control women in a misogynist way - giving the women little chance to decide for themselves. Maybe burkas will become less adaptive in future. |
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Saffron
Senior
Joined: 01 Apr 2008
Posts: 370
Gender:
Location: Northern Virginia
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| Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 6:33 am Post subject:
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Robert Tulip wrote:
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| I agree with you, except that on principle anything that survives is ipso facto adaptive. I was suggesting the imposition of burkas had been enforced by Islamic men as part of a view of women as chattels. |
I think you are misusing the the terms adaptive and adaptation. When adaptive is used in the context of evolution the implication is that the new trait improves survival and hence increase the ability to procreate. Improvement in survival and increased progeny is the very criteria for how that trait was selected or another way to say this it, the mechanism for how the trait came to be prevalent in a population.
Burkas survive because men enforce them. I believe (I could be mistaken) that if the enforcement of burkas stopped today, most, if not all women would stop wearing them immediately. Is that really an evolutionary adaptation? What you have said in your quote is that burkas maintain the status quo. Maintaining the status quo is not adapting. |
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DWill
Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2008
Posts: 383
Gender:
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| Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 11:18 am Post subject:
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| Robert, you are well prepared to argue your position. I find that what is hanging me up is the possible conflation of natural and human in your reasoning. Yes, humans are part of nature, and that could make their actions natural in some sense, but to me this evacuates the discussion of much of its meaning. My view is that human actions, human history, are significantly beyond determination by nature or the environment. Not uninfluenced by by these, of course, but not reducible in the end to what we call natural or physical law. The VHS/Betamax battle turned out the way it did because of what emerged, and this could not have been predicted before events happened. But scientific laws give us the ability of prediction. This is why I, and I think Saffron, do not want to apply the scientific principle of neo-Darwinism to human society and history. It is a reductionism that I/we would like to avoid. It also seems to lead to a view of what happened as inevitable in some sense. |
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Robert Tulip
Sophomore
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
Posts: 251
Gender:
Location: Canberra
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| Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 8:15 pm Post subject:
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This discussion opens what we mean by adaptation and nature. In these themes I am influenced by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations are a classic text of Stoicism. The stoic is fatalist, in the belief that everything that happens is caused by nature. Hence even human life is a part of nature. I agree with DWill that fate must be tempered by freedom, but the message I get from scientists such as Shubin is that we can learn much by exploring life through the lens of fate. The oxygen the plants put in the air created the opportunity for handy fish to move to land – a sort of manifest destiny.
When we look at apparently dysfunctional practices such as the wearing of burkas, or even the adoration of the Virgin Mary, the fact that they are dysfunctional does not make them less adaptive, unless and until these dysfunctions become so problematic that the practice ceases. Adaptation is a scientific term describing how an organism changes to suit its niche.
Part of the niche of the burka is a territory where women who defy custom are killed. Changing this customary practice of murder is required in order to make the burka less adaptive. This would require deep-seated changes to the Islamic belief systems that have emerged in those societies. It is difficult for Westerners to preach to these societies when there is a perception that Western values are deeply corrupt and self-interested. So, there needs to be dialogue, with respect, about questions such as the status of women and the path of development. Islam tends to belittle Western ideas about women’s equality, seeing them as a stalking horse for atheist capitalism. It is hard to disentangle the set of beliefs that enter this debate – just focusing on asking women to remove their burkas is asking them to be martyrs. Do those suggesting this martyrdom have a clear picture of the impact of such a step?
Comparing to the VHS-Beta case, with hindsight we can say that in a two horse race the video system that focused most strongly on building market share, as an early entrant, would be likely to become a market standard. Marketers use this observation to plan future assaults on consumers.
Considering the impact of efforts to improve the rights of women under Islam, this video case can help us ask about the impact of addressing single issues such as burkas in isolation, on the model of evolution. I just think that there are objective factors, like the objective market share factor for videos, which continue to make burkas adaptive for women in some countries. Until there is a compelling alternative, many Islamic women will not be convinced that changing their habit is in their interest, and overall, the burka will remain adaptive for some time. This does not make it good, but many adaptive things, eg viruses, are not good. |
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Saffron
Senior
Joined: 01 Apr 2008
Posts: 370
Gender:
Location: Northern Virginia
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| Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 8:54 pm Post subject:
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Maladaptive does not really exist in the biological sense. There are not organs or body parts of any creature that is maladaptive. My understanding of Darwinian evolution the changes come because a trait is more adaptive, not because a trait is or becomes maladaptive. I also feel safe in saying that in the world of biology, traits are not good or bad. They just are.
The fact that cultures/societies have aspects that are maladaptive and even destructive make it difficult, if not impossible to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution. |
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