Natural Selection Can Act on Human Culture 239
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."
Memetics? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Memetics? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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., "religion is a virus". That might be true, but it isn't testable, hence it isn't scientific in the way that genetic evolution is. (If you believe I am wrong, please supply a reference to a rigorous scientific investigation of memetics, i.e., a quantitative one; thanks in advance.)
I hope this helps.
Re:Memetics? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Evolution/design (Score:2, Informative)
Evolution was scary at first because it introduced a process that could lead to specialization, and speciation, without every organism having to have been created from whole cloth. Now, even the creationists and ID people believe that tall parents will have tall children, and the scary part of evolution is the lie that your great grandmother was a rhesus monkey.
Saying that the preservation of "good traits" canoes is evolution of canoes is silly because it's not the canoes that are evolving. Canoes pass no traits on to their progeny because they don't have progeny. The preservation of canoe traits is evidence of evolution in the creator of the canoe. "Evolution" in this sense is a metaphor.
Except (Score:3, Informative)
But only if you ignore the fields of evolutionary anthropology, sociocultural evolution and human sociobiology.