Beautifying the beast hypothesis of female sexual selection of human face :
Smaller teeth make more room in the skull for brain . So beautified face with smaller teeth allowed bigger brain . And a smaller face is not as rough a kisser.
Thus Genus homo beauties beautified the male "beasts ." We have a historical memory of this in the "Beauty and the Beast " myth, parable , story , in coded form of course, metaphor .( See anthropologust Claude Levi-Strauss ; "Structural Study of Myth)
Importantly , this is the positive feedback loop causing brain to evolve bigger from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens .
Bigger brained individuals are more adapt at culture/custom/tradition , especially courting culture . This is the main cause of selection/breeding for bigger and bigger brains. Bigger brains get more mating pass on more genes to the future generstions
Thus AntionetteBlackwell's ( _The Sexes Throughout Nature_) critique of Darwin and Spencer is correct. Cooperation ( especially between females and males ) and balance drive human evolution , not savage rivalry and competition . With humans its Survival of the Nice and Fertile ; not so much the rough and tough .
Already in Darwin's founding text of physical or biological or evolutionary anthropology , _The Descent of Man_, Darwin steers us away in subtitle from "adaption through struggle for exustence , for self-pteservation and to the environment" to "Sexual Selection !" For with culture-symbolic inheritance , humans select their environment rather than their environment selecting them. So, the predominant force in human selection is sexual selection as Darwin suggests
But Darwin still has a masculinist focus on competition between males for mates; rough and toughness .
Antoinette Blackwell's revolutionary critique of Darwin ( in correspondence with Darwin) is that in the Stone Age when most of human bodily evolution took place it was the _gentle_men who were selected for mating by females because they new how to be gentle and handsome; ATTACTIVE TO THF OPPOSITE SEX ; not the rough tough , beastly guys ! Human evolution is predominantly Beautifying of the Beast.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sexes_Throughout_Nature
Dear Maria, Preparing for class to discuss the conflict between the theory of inheritance of characteristics and the theory of random genetic mutation I thought : 1) Darwin had a) no theory of the cause of variety in a species b) no theory of _how_ characteristics are inherited, 2) Darwin had no conflict with LaMarck on inheritance because Darwin didn't have one . Actually, I don't know that LaMarck had much of one either. 3) Darwin had no variety theory either so no conflict with LaMarck's explanation of variety. 4) Furthermore, LaMarck's was a natural selection theory ! In his famous giraffe example, the giraffes that stretch their necks are selected for by their environment ; stretching the neck is an adaptation . Inheritance of acquired characteristics conflicts with random genetic mutation , discovered post Darwin. Culture as inheritance ( in brain cells, language and memory, instead of gamete cells) of acquired characteristics (not body cells , but extra-somatically , in objective reality) is more efficient adaptive process than genetic mutations that occur randomly relative to the adaptive problem they solve. Because, cultural inventions (acquired by one generation and passed on to the next) are caused by the adaptive problem they solve and do not arise randomly relative to the adaptive problem they solve. Thus, there is the population expansion of homo erectus and then Homo sapiens out of Africa with the origin of culture in the Stone Age. Maybe ? Charles
As Preeminent Anthrpoligist Marshall Sahlins hypothesizes based on the ethnographic, ethnohistorical and archaelogical evidence , when some populations of hominins adopted symbolic communities with policies of gentility especially to women , human society originated :
" The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species." — Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87.
Dear Maria,
Preparing for class to discuss the conflict between the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics and the theory of random genetic mutation I thought :
1) Darwin had a) no theory of the cause of variety in a species b) no theory of _how_ characteristics are inherited,
2) Darwin had no conflict with LaMarck on inheritance because Darwin didn't have one . Actually, I don't know that LaMarck had much of one either.
3) Darwin had no variety theory either so no conflict with LaMarck's explanation of variety.
4) Furthermore, LaMarck's was a natural selection theory ! In his famous giraffe example, the giraffes that stretch their necks are selected for by their environment ; stretching the neck is an adaptation .
Inheritance of acquired characteristics conflicts with random genetic mutation , discovered post Darwin.
Culture as inheritance ( in brain cells, language and memory, instead of gamete cells) of acquired characteristics (not body cells , but extra-somatically , in objective reality) is more efficient adaptive process than genetic mutations that occur randomly relative to the adaptive problem they solve. Because, cultural inventions (acquired by one generation and passed on to the next) are caused by the adaptive problem they solve and do not arise randomly relative to the adaptive problem they solve.
Thus, there is the population expansion of homo erectus and then Homo sapiens out of Africa with the origin of culture in the Stone Age.
Maybe ? Charles
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