: Yes, our phylogeny is an inescapeable aspect of human biology, and we can learn much by understanding the phenomina involved; True indeed! I'm currently working on applying Darwinian theory to cultural change. For the first 100 years or so, archaeologists thought they understood evolution, but instead had a confused, progressivist, essentialist and typological paradigm that really wasn't Darwinian at all. Over the past few years, a few of us here at U. Washington (Seattle) have really started applying a more rigorous evolutionary approach to archaeology, and the project seems to be going quite well.
We've used Dawkins' idea of the "extended phenotype" as a sort of springboard idea. If we model the things we do and make as part of our phenotype, rather than as a way that humans have "overcome selection," we can interpret human prehistory in some pretty productive ways. The approach is a bit much for a lot of people, but if you think about it, New York City is not fundamentally different from a beaver dam or an ant hill. It's the kind of structure that an organized, integrated colony of humans builds. If the ant hill (or beehive, wasp's nest, termite mound, etc.) is part the phenotype of the ant (bee, wasp, termite), then it's reasonable to look at New York, farming, tool making, etc. as parts of our phenotype. After all, the phenotype is the thing that selection operates on, and without our technologies, we'd have long since been selected against pretty severely!
:when I did a report on eugenics I had the 'pleasure' of reading a couple issues from 1939 of the journal from the "eugenical society of America." Many of the hideous articles in these journals were devoted to identifying triats should be selected for or against in the view of the authors. (for example, being black was a trait to be selected against, and being blond and blue-eyed was to be selected for. Many of the authors were from Germany, and many more were from the U.S.)
Yes, the eugenics movement was indeed disgusting and vile. Let me warn you, though, that a lot of the anti-science folks try to tar all of Darwinian theory with the eugenics brush. "Robert" in here does this all the time, no matter how often I explain to him that the asserted connection is false. That's the big problem with the "other side's" arguments; they make an assertion, we demonstrate why that assertion is invalid, and they simply ignore the demonstration and repeat the assertion as though it was proven. The belief that repetition increases the truth content of a statement seems to be pretty widespread. Beware of that! ;-)
(SNIP)
: Hah! Preaching to the choir! I'm a practicing Roman Catholic.
Good for you! So's my mum. I respect anybody that has deep religious sentiments, even though I don't really. Keep it up.
:Anyway, Floyd, thanks for replying! It's interesting how inaccurately the term was used on most of the pages I found when I did a search for it. Of course, most of those were also pages dedicated to denying the plausibility of something that is only a "theory". =-)
That's pretty typical. Foley's talkorigins website has a searchable index, and the term "neo-darwinism" came up with several hits. "Modern Synthesis" is another term you can search for, and it means the same thing. By the way, the phrase "only a theory" could only ever be used by someone who never tried to construct one! ha ha
Just out of curiosity, what school do you attend?
-Floyd
