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Natural Selection Can Act on Human Culture
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 17, 2008 06:46 AM
from the people-are-people-so-why-should-it-be dept.
from the people-are-people-so-why-should-it-be dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that the process of natural selection can act on human cultures as well as on genes. The team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures, evaluating 96 functional features that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the vessels. Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems. 'People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term,' said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford."
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Memetics? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Memetics? (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, whether the researchers' results can support their wild speculation at the end of TFA (connecting their research to global warming, religious fundamentalism, and what have you) is another thing. Such speculation is silly.
Parent
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Memetics is a fun term. As a qualitative notion, it makes some intuitive sense. But what the article mentions is work that was quantitative (it compared functional vs. decorative features and their rate of change), and hence actually scientific.
With all respect, what in the hell are you talking about? To paraphrase the Wikipedia entry, Memetics is an approach to creating models for cultural information transfer. You know, just like natural selection is an approach to creating models for evolution. Of course it's not "quantitative"; it's a model for understanding the quantitative data.
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Memetics is a fun term. As a qualitative notion, it makes some intuitive sense. But what the article mentions is work that was quantitative (it compared functional vs. decorative features and their rate of change), and hence actually scientific.
With all respect, what in the hell are you talking about? To paraphrase the Wikipedia entry, Memetics is an approach to creating models for cultural information transfer. You know, just like natural selection is an approach to creating models for evolution. Of course it's not "quantitative"; it's a model for understanding the quantitative data.
The point is that memetics is not amenable to quantitative analysis. In other words, you can't derive hypotheses that you can test, unlike genetic evolution, which has been proven many times over. By studying cultural/mental content, memetics has a far more elusive target.
But it's not impossible. The research we are told about in TFA in fact does that, it (finally) does a serious quantitative study of cultural evolution, a field that until now has been almost entirely about qualitative claims, e.g., "re
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You do you realise you can make qualitative predictions, don't you? If I burn calcium, I can predict it will burn red, even if I don't know what wavelength it will be. More relevant, Tiktaalik was a qualitative prediction, as was the appearance of human chromosome 2 - two qualitative predictions very important in the field of evolution.
Of course. I was focusing on qualitative vs. quantitative because it seemed most relevant. But if you want to be more accurate, then the issue is that memetics is hard to subject to empirical testing, unlike genetics. And that TFA does manage to empirically test a hypothesis about cultural evolution.
Fair enough?
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Here's the problem: You were lambasting memetics as fundamentally unscientific because it can't be used to make "quantitiative" predictions about reality, but here we have what is essentially a study in memetics doing just that... which you yourself admit is the case. Your objection seems to fall along the lines of (1) memetics has little empirical research behind it so far, but (2) this research is scientific, therefore (3) this research must not be memetics. It's an absolute non sequitur.
The point is that memetics is not amenable to quantitative analysis. [...] But it's not impossible. The research we are told about in TFA in fact does that
Well, which
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What I was saying is this. The simple fact is that cultural evolution has not been empirically tested, so far. This is, among other reasons, because it is hard to quantify. Now, very nicely, TFA shows how this can in fact be done and we can get nice results.
I hope that is better.
Not quite (Score:2)
It's scientific from that point of view, yes, but it still falls short of other criteria for defining what's scientific or not.
In the first paragraph they make the somewhat tautologic affirmation that "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate th
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You also don't have to look far to see people are cautious about change when lives are at stake, just ask any bridge builder.
Your political argument is OT and even if were relevant it falls flat when you compare modern China with Mao's cultural revolution.
Finally I don't think tautologic [princeton.edu] means what you think it does.
BTW: Your criticisim that 'it's just an example' is valid but it
why we invented religion, monogamy... (Score:2, Interesting)
and what better way to ensure compliance than to tap into the natural human spirituality circuits, invoking the authority of the deit[y|ies] spinning tales of eternal damnation for transgressors...hey,
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Japan has a law forbidding showing of genitals in art; consequently, the local porn is usually censored. However, Japan also has a thriwing industry for drawn (cartoon) porn; this combined with a pre-existing disposal towards octopuses and the tentacled horror from beyond -concept of Lovecraft and formed the modern-day Japanse tentacle porn scene.
Anyone care to make a doctorate thesis about memetics using this as an example ?-)
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There are many definitions for irony [google.com.au], I was thinking along the lines of "the difference between how you might expect something to be and how it actually is". The fact that this is a nerd site enhances the irony.
Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'll disagree about the returning to nature part, but systems which have some type of natural selection are usually the ones that end up being more efficient in the real world than on paper. Take planned economy versus a free economy. There are just too many variables to economics to simply plan it out and force it to work. But when you have it setup in a way that businesses sink or swim simply but "natural" process then only the strongest o
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In the Windoze world (Score:3, Funny)
Or we just put separate M$ design teams on a deserted islands on the Pacific and whoever can build a canoe to get them back to society wins?
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This means that it's only over a long time that survivability and evolutionary changes can play a role. OK, in the software world a long time is measured in the scale of minutes to a few years - but in the matter of
Long-term (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think you misunderstood the quoted researcher.
(Emphasis mine). The researcher is saying that European/North-American/etc. culture is currently operating in an unsustainable way, and that this works in the short-term (i.e. we are "developing" and "improving" our lives), but that in the long-haul, any c
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(Emphasis mine). The researcher is saying that European/North-American/etc. culture is currently operating in an unsustainable way, and that this works in the short-term (i.e. we are "developing" and "improving" our lives), but that in the long-haul, any culture that hopes to survive must operate in a sustainable way. If they don't, they will consume all available resources until their way-of-life disintegrates around them.
Aikon-
That very quote calls into question the researcher in question as a scientist. There is no evidence that Western Civilization is unsustainable. Intuitively, it seems like it must be. However, Julian Simon made a bet with Paul Ehrlich that resources were becoming less expensive. Paul Ehrlich and several colleagues selected five metals in 1980 that they felt would rise in price over the next decoade. Julian Simon bet them that they would fall or stay the same. Julian SImon won the bet, all five metals fell i
Re:Long-term (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you taken a look at Western Civilization's fossil-fuel consumption? These are resources that by their very definition are not replenishable. And, quite frankly, all the metals in the world won't do you squat if you don't have the energy to drive them around or build anything with them. Beyond fossil fuels, there are other important resources, such a food. Notice how the deserts (in North America, sure, but in China in particular) are growing? They are losing arable soil at an alarming rate, and yet their population is increasing all the same. Food doesn't grow on trees, you know ;) In all seriousness, what happens when you go to the market to buy food for your family and find that vegetables have gone up in price 10-fold because China has started importing en masse?
These are just two particular examples, but there are many more.. do some research on the renewable water table levels in Asia; you might be surprised how dry some of their mega-aquifers are. There's no point in trying to defend the "sustainability" of a fossil-fuel based society/economy. Even if the space program takes off and we fly to Titan to rape her resources [slashdot.org], we're just prolonging the same situation: a dependence on a resource that is fundamentally limited in quantity.
----- Note that the above is the end of my point, and what follows is just additional ranting; do not make reference to it when defending the discussion at hand, as I am well aware that I am now talking about time-scales on the thousands or tens-of-thousands of years. -----
When you get down to it, nuclear power; there is a finite amount of suitable radioactive material in this world that, assuming our use of nuclear power continues to rise, will one day run out (of course this is much longer-span than fossil-fuels, but the time it takes is the only difference).
North-America (which I can speak to directly since I live there) lives in a wasteful, consumerist society. We are wasteful of our environment, we are wasteful of our resources, of our energy, of our food... In the "long term", unless we leave this planet, our energy consumption must be limited to a "solar quota", i.e. the amount of sunlight the Earth receives, as that is the only "input" energy this world has. Everything else is simply consuming solar energy that was stored a long time ago.
----- And now for some wild hyperbole, simply because its fun. -----
Actually, if you really get down to it, there's no point in anything since anything we do contributes to the eventual heat death of the Universe, and there is only a finite amount of energy (assuming a finite Universe) that we can consume even if we had ideal means of obtaining it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Rome was totally different. Rome used to assimilate other people.
Rome used to be stronger : culturally, economically and even military for hundreds of years. Empires raise and die that's a natural process in human history. Rome was different from most Empires. Their main tool was diplomacy, especially during the gauls conquest or in Greece. They used their alliances with local kings or cit
"Natural" Selection (Score:2, Insightful)
But seriously, this approach on first glance says to me that these scientists don't understand the word natural in the term Natural Selection, and probably don't understand scientific method very well either. I mean for fuck sake, human beings have time and time again built bigger and better designs over time in many areas. Anything that can be engineered. Boats, Bridges, Buildings. You name it. That's nothing new. Misapplying statistical analysis
Re:"Natural" Selection (Score:4, Informative)
Based on my understanding of the biological process of natural selection, natural selection would roughly translate in this instance to the boats which are most well-suited for thir environment surviving long enough to reproduce while those less well-suited dying off before they can breed.
I agree: the observations would seem to be better explained by good design practices than by some form of natural selection.
Parent
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The "natural selection" they are talking about is exactly the same for cultural traits as for genetic traits. Good traits => higher chance of host surviving and passing on said traits. Bad traits => lower chance of host surviving and passing on said traits. This clearly applies to canoe design, regardless of whether other factors are involved because of actual engineering work. It's inescapable that if you do something that kills you then you won't be around to teach others to do it.
The important pa
this "research" is just a circular argument (Score:2)
So they start off looking at canoes and then make the seemingly unconnected statement that "unsustainable approaches ... won't work in the long term" and are therefore (wait for it, this is good) unsustainable!
I don't know anything about canoe design, nor about sociology - if that's what this is, but from the quality
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Maybe I need to research this. I need a good sail boat, a bit of
Natural selection avoidance? Nice trick (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. People haven't "learned to avoid natural selection", they've been subject to it. In the short term natural selection has favoured these "unsustainable approaches" which have helped in providing decent life expectancy and thus breeding opportunities for billions of people, in the long term natural selection may not favour this approach (by definition, it won't if they are in fact unsustainable). That's natural selection at work. There is no avoiding it.
Of course (Score:2)
Obviously he's not familiar with the Darwin Awards (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad Science or Bad Reporting? (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I get this right... the outcome of their research is that over time, pacific islanders tried to make better and better boats?
By not changing features that worked well and changing features that failed?
Doesn't natural selection have to be done by nature for it to be natural?
Isn't this just selection?
For what it's worth, I suspect that the original paper had to do with the applicability of the mathematical models for predicting the rate of change, or something. To imply that divergence was shaped by a winnowing process during migration from island to island, they would have demonstrate that the alterations under consideration actually had improved seaworthiness. Otherwise, the divergence is just random drift, and it's just a demonstration that the pacific islanders knew what the critical elements of outrigger design were, and didn't mess with them too much. Saying that "natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs" is just saying "shucks, we didn't disprove our hypothesis."
[previously on the 'firehose' thingy by accident, whatever that is]It's called "The Market", dummies. (Score:3, Insightful)
The study itself is an interesting confirmation that market forces would lead to the same results over a long enough time period even when the available communication channels are biologically slow. But the conclusion that this is some kind of new revelation indicates to me that the communication channels between Stanford and the real world may also be biologically slow.
humbug (Score:4, Insightful)
In 99% of instances, cultural schemas do not need to be 'fit' in a darwinian sense to spread through diffusion or other processes - they can be spread due to power imbalance or just because whatever new widgets one makes once they follow the ways of whatever look cool.
I suppose that "cultural evolution" is somewhat shorter than "culture change over time", but that does not mean that when using the former term we should try and treat it like biological evolution - it just doesn't follow. Assuming that getting to the island they can't see over the horizon but know are there is an urgent crisis, then yes, they will probably have a somewhat linear progression of canoe design, keeping the innovations that worked around longer. To assume otherwise is to assume the early Polynesians were idiots. Why this becomes a problem is it is difficult if not impossible to determine what the urgent issues are for past cultures, and you'll need a few more examples to make a stronger case.
Even then, you may have an interesting theory about efficiency of design when under long-term pressure, but how the heck do you apply it to more ephemeral cultural components like religion or etiquette?
Humbug yourself. (Score:2)
That's all "fit" in the Darwinian sense means: the idea that Darwinian "fitness" means anything but "this is what propogates". A peacock's tail is all about looking cool. Looking cool happened to be evolutionarily selected for in peacocks.
Turn
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I think this is a clear indication of cultures evolving.
Except (Score:3, Informative)
But only if you ignore the fields of evolutionary anthropology, sociocultural evolution and human sociobiology.
Re:Evolution/design (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody's saying evolution necessarily implies a lack of a designer.
In the case of the evolution of life, we're saying a designer is not necessary at all to explain what we're seeing, and in fact introducing a designer creates a whole host of new problems that need answering without adding any value.
If you want to imply a designer, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence. Until someone can point to something that couldn't have arisen without intervention from a designer (irreducible complexity in a real sense, I suppose; the examples the ID movement has brought on have all been debunked, though), invoking one is just bad science.
Parent
More correctly (Score:3, Insightful)
This means that the existance of a designer or lack thereof doesn't really have to do with the question of evolution. There may be a designer or not, but one cannot scientifically postulate one way or the other.
ID states that an intelligent designer *is necessary* to explain certain things.
Mainstream evolutionary theory states that an intelligent designer *is not necessary* to explain things. It does
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore parsimony only says that one cannot postulate an intelligent designer without need. It does *not* state that one cannot exist simply because current data doesn't require one to explain. Hence it does not suggest that the matter is closed, just that it is not necessary based on what information we have at present.
Invoking parsimony to attempt to prove the lack of existance of an intelligent designer would be like stating that various quantum particles didn't
Re:More correctly (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that you can't be absolutely certain that it's true is a reflection of the fact that our scientific knowledge is always an approximation at best.
The fact that something might be wrong does not make it unscientific; in fact, every single scientific hypothesis might be wrong. That's just the nature of things. It's not possible to know anything for sure.
This emphatically does not mean that all hypotheses are equally valid or likely, though.
Parent
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Um, no. Fat is stored energy. The whole reason we get fat is that our bodies are adapted to make do with as little energy as possible; and the way to do that is to make sure that any extra gets stored for later consumption. Consequently, as we adapt to li
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no :p.
Natural selection. People who stay in good shape even when eating mainly junk food are more likely to find a mate and pass their genes on than the ones who turn into human balloons while their arteries jam.
Because we aren't getting much excercise nowadays, so requiring less of it is an advantageus feature.
The gp suggested that we'd evolve to tolerate the effects of being fat; I suggest it more likely that we evolve to not get fat in the first place, since that would require much less changes to our biochemistry (fine-tuning) than the ones required to support useless (in a post-industrial civilization) fat.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides we didn't even get ridden of the old useless ones yet... (e.g. the fifth toe)
Ah, that's an important fallacy about evolution. Why would we get rid of "useless" features like the 5th toe? It doesn't cost us anything to keep it (unless you account for some women's shoe fashions over the decades...).
Something that's not selected against or selected for will just get carried along (or not) by the more important mutations.
If some other mutation that actually helps us has the side-effect of fusing in the 5th toe, then it'll happen -- but if not, it's probably not going anywhere for a l