Friday, January 6, 2017

Blackwellian critique; abstract , not individually sensed , symboling



Dear Prof. Rowe,

I

1) I'm thinking of our culture bearing species as having a LaMarckian-LIKE adaptive ability in that culture allows inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics by one generation from parent , grandparent and dead generations of the species; acquired by human invention.

2) This creates a Darwinian neo-teleology for Natural History ( replacing the theological teleology with "Man" as the direction toward which natural history tends that Darwin's theory negated); because culture as a LaMarckian-like adaptive process does not depend on a random and coincidental fit between the survival problem posed by the environment and the genetic solution to the problem . What is inherited , extrasomatically, is designed to solve a survival problem posed by the environment .

///

On the origin of culture and humanity: Perhaps upright-bipedalism/ ORIGIN OF HANDS was selected for because , NOT BECAUSE HANDS ALLOWED THE INVENTION OF TOOLS FOR HUNTING OR PROCESSING MEAT  BUT AS THE FIRST INSTRUMENTS OF LANGUAGE, SOUND MAKERS -MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.  So, Ardipithecus , Australopethecus and Paranthropus had language as music. Also, dancing or body language . Culture ! Culture as communicating symbolically with music was one selective advantage of hands.  No stone tools until Homo Habilis because no use for production . But culture originates with hands as sound communication-music.

More importantly music conferred mating -courting advantage on the musician . Especially music and dancing.  In general , culture bestows all around superior courting skills, manners. They are the original manners.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly , erect posture exposes genitalia of both sexes to sight more than on all fours. It is sexier .   So, erect posture gives the ultimate selective advantage compared to on all fours: superior differential fertility !

Beautifying the Beast theory of prettifying trend in morphology among hominins ( hominids with hands):

Why this trend of reduction of sexual dimorphism , rough and big and protruding faces ? Because human females were the first scientists of genealogical and reproductive  physiology ; noticing a correlation between appearance of their children and which male they let fertilize them .  Mother Nature selection or Mother as natural selector .

This derives theoretically from Antoinette Blackwell's feminist critique of Darwin's masculinism, validated by modern Darwinisms recognition that differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining fitness

There are a couple of other "lemmas," .

Do you have any criticisms ?


Charles Brown



Rudi 
Thanks for sharing. I am also dealing with lamarkian adaptation, but mostly in social evolution, even social behaviour as a cause of biological changes. Lamarkian prosesses probably exist in biological adaptations as well, but valid confirmation is needed. Different use of terms is a problem in biology, like the almost random use of epigenetics instead of genetic plasticity or lamarkian changes. Additionally, conclusions by male researchers only, must be triple checked in as much detail as possible. Anthropologisers had to learn it the hard way, other social sciences are still behind


Thank you, Rudi Sherban

I'd  say social evolution or cultural evolution is definitely LaMarckian in that institutions acquired by invention are inherited.

Since these inherited acquired characteristics are adaptive in the Darwinian sense they are a LaMarckian-like process .  Just not in the cells or DNA mutation .





Subject: Sexes throughout nature
http://biosex.univ-paris1.fr/fileadmin/Axe_de_recherche_BIOSEX/Blackwell-1.pdf


We have two kinds of knowledge: 1)Knowledge of  matters of fact 2)Knowledge of relations of ideas as in the formal,abstract statements of math and logic.

///

Human's have sense data knowledge of objective reality and knowledge of symbols/metaphor/high abstraction; we know trees and we know forests. Other species only know trees, concrete abstractions.


Sean Sorrell monkeys have group styles in washing sand off of fruit in Japan. I finally figured out how to distinguish this from full human culture in a very essential way 

First , you have to focus on the communication between the monkeys not the fact that it's a "tool." Hell birds' nests are a pretty nifty tool, niftier than digging up bugs with twig. Birds aren't even mammals ! 

Monkeys and apes can only symbol very concretely , about what they can apprehend by their individual senses  . Human language/culture symbols abstractly about things that _an individual _ cannot apprehend through her senses alone , but only through words witness through the senses of many other human beings including many from dead generations of our species. Chimps, monkeys can symbolize  a few individual trees; humans can symbolize individual trees and forests of trees , whole species of trees.


Iris : "
Yeah but I think that the textbooks eould say that the issue of culture is more how the tool came to be made (instinct or learned and shared experience).


CB: Yes, that's why I said focus on the communication between the monkeys, not on the "tool."

I'm not even sure the monkeys learn to clean the fruit or the chimp learns to use the stick through symbols . They could just imitate : monkey see , monkey do.  In that case , the fruit cleaning or stick for digging bugs wouldn't be culture.  It would be learned , but not culturally learned, not learned from communicating through symbols. I'm one who does not think chimps have culture, contra some of the anthropologists . I'm just assuming the other sides example of the monkeys washing fruit is culture for the sake of argument. I then distinguish monkey "culture " from human culture by the above trees-forest logic. Human individuals can symbolize more than what they can sense because through words they can symbolize what thousands of individuals have sensed; chimps can only symbolize something an individual can sense.

Iris : So what we need is a different (more sophisticated) definition of culture. 


CB: Yes, though I'm getting the symboling and imitating symboling from the standard anthropology .  I think maybe I can take credit for my emphasis on what an individual can sense; and my emphasis on sharing other individual's sensing or experience through words ; I can especially take credit for my emphasis on sharing the experience of dead generations. 



Sent f


On your point, Tom Tom Edminster: 



Here's where Engels goes wrong. He thinks humans have been "productivists", not "appropriationists" for most of our species existence. By productivists I mean planting seeds, plowing, husbandring animals , heavy creative labor as opposed to hand-to-mouth appropriation of what Nature produces , gathering. Since Engels's day it has been discovered we have been productivists only for 6,000 out of 2.5 million years ( Stone Age begins 2.5 million years ago with Homo Habilis ).  We were appropriationists for most of our existence: 

(4) The essential difference between human and animal society is that animals are at most gatherers whilst men are producers. This single but cardinal distinction alone makes it impossible simply to transfer the laws of animal societies to human societies. It makes it possible that, as you justly remark, “Man waged a struggle not only for existence but for enjoyment and for the increase of his enjoyments ... he was ready to renounce the lower enjoyments for the sake of the higher.” Without contesting your further deductions from this, the further conclusions I should draw from my premises would be the following: – At a certain stage, therefore, human production reaches a level where not only essential necessities but also luxuries are produced, even if, for the time being, they are only produced for a minority. Hence the struggle for existence – if we allow this category as valid here for a moment – transforms itself into a struggle for enjoyments, a struggle no longer for the mere means of existence but for the means of development, socially produced means of development, and at this stage the categories of the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now come about, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater abundance of the means of existence and development than capitalist society can consume, because capitalist society keeps the great mass of the real producers artificially removed from the means of existence and development; if this society is forced, by the law of its own existence, continually to increase production already too great for it, and, therefore, periodically every ten years, reaches a point where it itself destroys a mass not only of products but of productive forces, what sense is there still left in the talk about the “struggle for existence?” The struggle for existence can then only consist in the producing class taking away the control of production and distribution from the class hitherto entrusted with it but now no longer capable of it; that, however, is the Socialist revolution."6

This is an important point . I teach it the first thing to my anthro class : 

"(6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the war of every man against every man was the first phase of human development. In my opinion the social instinct was one of the most essential levers in the development of man from the ape. The first men must have lived gregariously and so far back as we can see we find that this was the case."
* * *


Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:
From: Charles Brown <cb31450@gmail.com>
Date: December 14, 2016 at 6:42:35 PM EST
To: ParkM@ccsu.edu
Subject: Few ideas I have

Dear Prof. Park,

I am teaching anthropology at Wayne County Community College in Detroit, Michigan


1) I'm thinking of our culture bearing species as having a LaMarckian-LIKE adaptive ability in that culture allows inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics by one generation from parent , grandparent and dead generations of the species; acquired by human invention.

2) This creates a Darwinian, neo-teleology for Natural History ( replacing the theological teleology with "Man" as the direction toward which natural history tends that Darwin's theory negated); because culture as a LaMarckian-like adaptive process does not depend on random and coincidental fit between the survival problem posed by the environment and the genetic solution to the problem . What is inherited , extrasomatically, is designed to solve a survival problem posed by the environment .

///


On the origin of culture and humanity: Perhaps upright-bipedalism/ ORIGIN OF HANDS was selected for because , NOT BECAUSE HANDS ALLOWED THE INVENTION OF TOOLS FOR HUNTING OR PROCESSING MEET BUT AS THE FIRST INSTRUMENTS OF LANGUAGE, SOUND MAKERS -MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.  So, Ardipithecus , Australopethecus and Paranthropus had language as music. Also, dancing or body language . Culture ! Culture as communicating symbolically with music was one selective advantage of hands.  No stone tools until Homo Habilis because no use for production . But culture originates with hands.










More importantly music preferred mating courting advantage on the musician . Especially music and dancing.  In general , culture bestows all around superior courting skills, manners. They are the original manners.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly , erect posture exposes genitalia of both sexes to sight more than on all fours. It is sexier .   So, erect posture gives the ultimate selective advantage compared to on all fours: superior differential fertility !

Beautifying the Beast theory of prettifying trend in morphology among hominins ( hominids with hands):

Why this trend of reduction of sexual dimorphism , rough and big and protruding faces ? Because human females were the first scientists of genealogical and reproductive  physiology ; noticing a correlation between appearance of their children and which male they let fertilize them .  Mother Nature selection or Mother as natural selector .

This derives theoretically from Antoinette Blackwell's feminist critique of Darwin's masculinism, validated by modern Darwinisms recognition that differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining fitness

There are a couple of other "lemmas," .

Do you have any criticisms ?


Charles Brown
313-205-9086





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