[Marxism] AMNH staff lecture: "How Culture Transformed Human Evolution"

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Friedman :



The Anthropology Division invites all staff to attend the 2005
Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
"How Culture Transformed Human Evolution"
Dr. Robert Boyd
Dept. of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles

Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005
2:00 pm
Linder Theatre

Abstract:
Humans are an exceptionally successful species. We occupy a wider range of
  habitats, utilize a greater range of resources, and live in a more
diverse  social systems than any other animal species. At the same time,
humans  engage in spectacularly maladaptive behaviors. We risk life and
limb to  reach mountain summits, restrict our fertility in order to attain
economic  and professional success, and march off to war to defend God or
liberty or  nation. How can it be that we are both so clever, and so
stupid?
In this talk I argue that culture is the key. Humans are much better at
learning from others than any other animal.


^^^^
CB; And especially, humans are able to learn from dead generations of the
species through culture,tradition, custom.  This renders a LaMarckian-like
mechanism to human culture in its impact on the realm of human biological
adaptation. Through culture , humans have non-bodily traits that function
like naturally selected bodily traits and organs in non-human species.
Unlike, oraganic traits ( somatic traits), culture is not limited by the
principle of "no inheritance of acquired characteristics." The knowledge of
how to make a wheel is acquired by one generation and inherited by the nexte
and future generations. This is not possible with traits inherited through
genes.

^^^^^^^




 This ability is a powerful
adaptive mechanism because it allows populations of humans to gradually
accumulate the technology, knowledge, and institutions over generations
that no individual human could invent on their own.

^^^^^^
CB: Note that this "accumulation" is qualitatively characterized by
accumulation _across generations_.  The key is accumlation _across
generations.


^^^^^^^


However, it comes with
  a built in tradeoff-culture provides a rich source of adaptive
information,  but to use it efficiently individuals have to be
"credulous," mainly  adopting the beliefs of those around them and this
credulity allows  maladaptive beliefs to spread.

^^^^
CB; Also,paradoxically, because culture allows humans a qualitatively better
method of adapatation, the human population so well adapted, that it can
carry traits that are kill many but don't cause the human population to stop
growing; the human species  has the luxury of thereby accumulating practices
that tend to maladaptation ( the current most dangerously maladaptive
cultural trait being nuclear weapons).  Humans can carry cultural practices
that kill many members of the species "prematurely" without starting a
downward trend in the population size of the species as a whole.




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