Cultural Darwinian adaptations not _random_ , but caused by, the adaptive problem they solve

Cultural Darwinian adaptations not _random_ , but caused by, the adaptive problem they solve 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. Symbolic Inheritance By CHARLES BROWN For anthropology, culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is the unique species characteristic of _homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Greed, slavery, war, male supremacy, Egoism originate with Civilization ! It is better termed Savagery and Barbarism. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture-language-Symbolic Inheritance was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools made according to design , scientific knowledge in the stone age (!) standing on the shoulders of dead generations , raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now Africa to the other continents ( but not vacating Africa ) . Stone Age foraging and kinship organized , peaceful and sharing societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species 'existence, 99% or more. Symboling is identifying something with something that it is not CB: Symboling is ,as I like to explain it , using something to represent something it is not. Imaginary beings are using something ( words or drawing or sculpture ) to represent something that doesn't exist or nothing. Math is all that. Numbers don't exist except in the imagination . Lines in geometry are infinitely long, but there are no infinitely long lines in reality , only in imagination. Ancestor worship , original culture and language, are using things and words to represent people who no longer exist. In other words , the gods are symbols of many generations from the past, mortal beings who attain some immortality by the living generation having so many recorded memories in living individual brains of the experiences of the dead while they were still alive . The living individual brains get this by learning language and culture, custom and tradition , religion . Like the Sphinx rising from the Dead Culture as material, not mystical, "soul" transcending generationally the mortality of all individual Selves; cultural immortality, eternity , symbolized as gods. Kelly Smith: "Hmmmmmm I dig this concept. It reminds me of the a priori/a posteriori knowledge distinction, which I am a big fan of thinking about. In this vein, Stanford has a great philosophy site but this seems to be a pretty nice article too: http://www.iep.utm.edu/apriori/". Just for those who want more info cuz it's super fucking fascinating shit" CB: Yes , I have an interest in a priori / a posteriori knowledge since my philosophy 101 teacher had us thinking about it ; Kantian issues . Knowledge from ancestors is from experiences that are a priori to the living generation's experiences ; it is not spun out of thin air by the living individual. As far as scientific knowledge, Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. The Giants were his dead scientist ancestors . CB: For me , original human society (at least , 200,000 ya) is given qualitatively greater wisdom about the struggle for existence than any other species, even close species like chimps, because to a significant extent the living generation is able to share the experiences of many, many past dead generations. Instead of 50 living heads only , there are 1000 heads from the past inside the living 50 heads as language and culture. YESS!!!!!! I think about this constantly!!! And the internet is such a fantastic bridge to the past and the future even, like whaaaattt CB: Yes the Internet is a leap; as writing was a leap from the Stone Age. Todd : Relevant article talking about the universality of ancestor worship... Steadman, Lyle B., Craig T. Palmer, and Christopher F. Tilley. "The universality of ancestor worship." Ethnology 35.1 (1996): 63-76. Emotions don't exist except in the imagination, correct? Well, they often correspond to physiological changes. Changes in breathing, hormonal changes, and so forth. If someone hits your system with a lot of adrenaline or suppresses your thyroid hormone production, it will have consistent impacts on emotions for example. "Love" likewise corresponds to certain physiological responses. So, emotions are not completely imaginary, even if something like "love" exists in the mind. We can track "love" through chemical changes to different areas of the brain. As well as fear, anger, lust and a host of basic human emotions. Part of the emotion is memory, memory of a past sensation and accompanying memory then, no ? Emotions are not imaginary. They are sensations and memories , both of which exist in the brain; are material . Memories correspond to past sensations. They are "images", drawings , recordings of past sensations. They are semi-symbols of those past sensations, the way a drawing is semi-symbolling to represent what it depicts. A drawing is not what it represents , but it imitates, is not arbitrarily related to what it represents; not the way full symbols, like most words , do not imitate in anyway what they represent. A major proportion of human memories are of symbols , especially words. Many memories of emotions are of words or concepts of emotions. Ancestor piety , original culture and language, is using things and words to represent people who no longer exist. CB: Symboling is ,as I like to explain it , using something to represent something it is not. Imaginary beings are using something ( words or drawing or sculpture ) to represent something that doesn't exist or nothing. Math is all that. Numbers don't exist except in the imagination . Lines in geometry are infinitely long, but there are no infinitely long lines in reality , only in imagination. Ancestor worship , original culture and language, are using things and words to represent people who no longer exist. Kelly Smith: "Hmmmmmm I dig this concept. It reminds me of the a priori/a posteriori knowledge distinction, which I am a big fan of thinking about. In this vein, Stanford has a great philosophy site but this seems to be a pretty nice article too: http://www.iep.utm.edu/apriori/". Just for those who want more info cuz it's super fucking fascinating shit" CB: Yes , I have an interest in a priori / a posteriori knowledge since my philosophy 101 teacher had us thinking about it ; Kantian issues . Knowledge from ancestors is from experiences that are a priori to the living generation's experiences ; it is not spun out of thin air by the living individual. As far as scientific knowledge, Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. The Giants were his dead scientist ancestors . CB: For me , original human society (at least , 200,000 ya) is given qualitatively greater wisdom about the struggle for existence than any other species, even close species like chimps, because to a significant extent the living generation is able to share the experiences of many, many past dead generations. Instead of 50 living heads only , there are 1000 heads from the past inside the living 50 heads as language and culture. YESS!!!!!! I think about this constantly!!! And the internet is such a fantastic bridge to the past and the future even, like whaaaattt CB: Yes the Internet is a leap; as writing was a leap from the Stone Age. Todd L. VanPool: Relevant article talking about the universality of ancestor worship... Steadman, Lyle B., Craig T. Palmer, and Christopher F. Tilley. "The universality of ancestor worship." Ethnology 35.1 (1996): 63-76. Emotions don't exist except in the imagination, correct? Well, they often correspond to physiological changes. Changes in breathing, hormonal changes, and so forth. If someone hits your system with a lot of adrenaline or suppresses your thyroid hormone production, it will have consistent impacts on emotions for example. "Love" likewise corresponds to certain physiological responses. So, emotions are not completely imaginary, even if something like "love" exists in the mind. We can track "love" through chemical changes to different areas of the brain. As well as fear, anger, lust and a host of basic human emotions. Part of the emotion is memory, memory of a past sensation and accompanying memory then, no ? Emotions are not imaginary. They are sensations and memories , both of which exist in the brain; are material . Memories correspond to past sensations. They are "images", drawings , recordings of past sensations. They are semi-symbols of those past sensations, the way a drawing is semi-symbolling to represent what it depicts. A drawing is not what it represents , but it imitates, is not arbitrarily related to what it represents; not the way full symbols, like most words , do not imitate in anyway what they represent. A major proportion of human memories are of symbols , especially words. Many memories of Culture as material, not mystical, "soul" transcending generationally the mortality of all individual Selves; cultural immortality, eternity , symbolized as gods.emotions are of words or concepts of emotions. Since 6,000 years ago there is a lot of what you are talking about, Devin Boyd, I must agree with you completely on that. I'm trying to use science to get to how human society was 200,000 years ago when our 23 chromosome pairs were set : original human nature in our genes. I'm thinking it was super peaceful among everybody in the 25 to 50 person bands, and peaceful between bands . They were organized based on kinship , family relations connecting everybody. The kinship was organized based on ancestor worship , tradition to dead ancestors of family . 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: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_11_12.htm 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 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 Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ?