On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 12:17 PM, Charles Brown wrote: Dear Professor Brace, I'm a 1972 and 75 Univ of Michigan anthro grad , bachelors and masters in ethnology . I'm teaching anthro at Wayne County Community College after a career as an attorney . I've formed several speculative hypotheses . I hope they might be of some interest to you. Regards , Charles Brown Detroit 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 . With the invention of culture, symbols , naming, phylogenetic kinship (totemism) , humans select their environment; their environment doesn't elect them. With culture , Human evolution in the tool age is sexual selection a la Blackwell (and Darwin in part) 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