Dear Prof. Hrdy,
I am teaching anthropology at Wayne County Community College in Detroit, Michigan in my retirement from a career as an attorney.
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 .
/// 3. 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, , Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus had language as music. Also, dancing or body language . Culture ! Culture as communicating symbolically with music was one selective advantage of hands . 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. It is the original manners.
4. 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 !
5. 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
No comments:
Post a Comment