: 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.The home of the Dawgs, eh? I grew up in Montlake (between the U and capitol hill).
: We've used Dawkins' idea of the "extended phenotype" as a sort of springboard idea.
I'm not familiar with Dawkin
: 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!
I can immediately think of one big way that a city is different from those structures. A city is a tool used by a collection of individuals, each with their own genotype & pheontype, and each of those individuals ostensibly competeing with each other intraspecifically, whereas a beehive, bever dam, termite mound, etc all operate solely for the benefit of one or a mated pair of phenotypes, since those social insects (to the best of my limited knowledge) only have one individual contributing genes to the hive's progeny. To me, a city seems more like a colony of birds nesting in the same area, because the benefits of group living outweigh the costs. Of course, I don't know of any cases of nesting birds also extensively using tools... but at any rate I'm interested in hearing more about your project. I assume you are a graduate student?
: Just out of curiosity, what school do you attend?
WSU =-)
- Yellow Bellied Sap Sucker
CJClark@wsunix.wsu.edu
None.
