The cultural animal as an evolving animal
Nicholas Wade has an article in The New York Times, Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force. One point to highlight:
By this criterion, many of the genes under selection seem to be responding to conventional pressures. Some are involved in the immune system, and presumably became more common because of the protection they provided against disease. Genes that cause paler skin in Europeans or Asians are probably a response to geography and climate.
But even in this case these non-cultural targets of selection have an ultimate cultural cause. The Eurasian pathogen environment is strongly shaped by the fact that humans have lived at high densities under nutritional stress for thousands of years. The uniqueness of the Eurasian adaptations are evident whenever these populations encounter hunter-gatherers. Adaptation to malaria is something which most biologists accept as a clear case of natural selection, but malaria has become ubiquitous only within the past 5-10,000 years in many regions because of ecological changes wrought by humans as they shifted their culture (clearing land for agriculture).
More distantly, even if you assume that light skin evolved due to the need to synthesize endogenous vitamin D at high latitudes, what were H. sapiens doing at very high latitudes anyhow? The push into Siberia within the past 30,000 years seems to have been a function of behavioral modernity, contingent upon cultural changes, which themselves may have been contingent upon biological endowments.
It’s a pretty tangled ball. But as a genuine takeaway I have begun to wonder whether the protean nature of human culture, and its relevance for changes in gene frequency, imply that models which posit adaptation driving genetic architectures toward equilibria may not be particularly helpful. In other words, the adaptive landscape may be too volatile for gene frequencies to ever attain a stable fitness peak.
I also don’t see why this is “human culture” when their motivating example is lactase tolerance. Surely creatures like ants, which colonize aphids, fungi, etc, have similar “cultural” evolution? In fact, there’s all sorts of culture throughout the animal kingdom (crows dropping nuts on streets, for instance). I’d be more interested in research into “culture” culture (do we adapt genetically to art?).
Of course, that’s probably just it being NYT science journalism ;)
If ants somehow transmit complex learned stuff to other ants, they have culture. Somehow I don’t think they do.
Humans have never been static, but the selective pressures they experienced have to have changed a lot more rapidly in recent millennia than they did 150k years ago.
Turbulence and braided streams: the new paradigm. Seriously. Equilibrium models have been enormously harmful in economics. One weird thing about economics equilibrium is that it was modeled on Newtonian equilibrium conserving matter and energy, but economic activity is historical and progressive and there’s no quantity that it conserves.
This point have been made in various ways by Mirowski (“More Heat Than Light”), Mandelbrot (“The Misbehavior of Markets”), Georgescu-Roegen (“The Entropy Law and the Economic Process “), and Hodgson (“How Economics Forgot History”). Even though these authors are fully competent, their conclusions have been essentially ignored. There have been attempts to patch in kludges, but as far as I know none of the present leaders of the field have done more than that, and some of them have done less.
John Emerson – The same point is made by Ludvig Von Mises and F.A.Hayek.
Everyone,
Has anyone read this http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?pagewanted=1&em
Which bits of it are accurate?
“economic activity is historical and progressive and there’s no quantity that it conserves.” Perhaps it conserves the sum of greed and fear.
Current: I agree with the Austrians about contingency and, to a degree, about the scientific status of economics. Others who somewhat shared these ideas include the Nobelist James Buchanan and his teacher F H Knight. Unfortunately I don’t agree with those guys otherwise.
Current again: Besides Darwin, William James, Max Weber, John Stuart Mill, and (of course) Nietzsche went through extended periods of debilitating depression. My theory is that their own enormous (socially-induced) ambition almost killed them, and that depression was a subconscious defense mechanism gaining them a little slack. Weber and Nietzsche in particular were workaholics.
Grain of salt, obviously.
I’m reading article mentioned by Current, and their profound discovery that “rumination might be a good thing” strikes me as a truism. The idea that a trait might be a good thing in some circumstances and not in others is not exactly genius caliber. They also started by giving a negative definition to rumination, which is why they were so surprised. But rumination is the way people think and solve difficult problems, and it tends to be painful.
Even more than economists, most psychologists seem to have been deformed by their professional training to the point of having no common sense at all, and incapable of noticing anything other than the specific thing that they’re studying in a specific way.
I’m always perplexed by stuff in the evolutionary field that is supposed to be insightful and\or debateable.
Of course, culture is driving evolution and — at least one would suspect — speeding it up. How can it not be?
Darwin’s insight about natural selection seems … insightful. But once you say, “hey organisms are adapt to their environment through selection” … then logically you’re off and running. *Everything* in the environment would affect selection. Once people learn to throw spears then obviously spear throwing and spear making ability would affect selection. Once folks consciously migrate through known seasonal “good feeding” grounds, then memory and spatial orientation are selected for. Once we learn to beat up the other guys with clubs … club weilding skill. Once folks share information by talking … then talking is in the mix. Once you have written language, then skill with that is in the mix. And numbers. And navigating village, town, city “human relations”. And salesmanship. And skill at climbing the corporate greasy pole. Whatever the environment is … it’s plausibly affecting selection. That’s simply “by definition”.
Now that we have welfare — societal support for women to pop out kids sans husband … taypaying middle class saps like me are selected against, “fitness” is … Octomom!
Is culture driving evolution is is it the other way around? Are culture and societal norms really just natural selection dressed in fancy clothes?
An incredible statistic is that 9 in 10 adults of South Asian origin in the UK have Vitamin D deficiency:
http://www.patient.co.uk/health/Vitamin-D-Deficiency.htm
That’s a pretty significant Darwinian fact.
How much are cultural attitudes to race merely a cloak for the instinctive demands of natural selection? For instance, is there a greater desire amongst dark-skinned people in cold climes to marry lighter-skinned people rather than dark-skinned people? Could this be perceived even in different seasons – dark people preferred in summer, light in winter?
Just a couple of questions from an ignorant layman.
The comments section following that article were painful to read. The last guy to comment (#123) was pretty exasperated that so few commenters grasped what the author was saying.