-----Original Message-----
From: Eva Durant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: list futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: January 27, 1999 3:54 AM
Subject: Re: (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) How science is really done
[snip]
>I believe there was a chap around that also
>had the same general idea as Darwin.
>I also believe that his main stimuli for
>his theory came from his travels to sepaated
>habitats. Also his attempts to adapt his theory
>to human society was a complete failure.
>but let's see the skeptics response on this one,
>they are very much into Darwin...
>
>
I believe you are thinking of Wallace here. If memory serves me, he was
ready to publish a sketchy theory of evolution, and then got introduced to
Darwin who was on the verge of publishing the much more massive "Origin of
Species". My recollection on the matter of human societies is that Wallace
was interested in language. Like most Europeans of his time, he expected
that the language of a primitive people would be demonstrably more
"primitive" than languages of "civilized" people. Wallace spent time among
the Australian aboriginals, and to his credit realized that the data did not
fit the theory. Wallace is usually cited in linguistics as an interesting
precursor of Noam Chomsky whose generative grammar theories predict that all
human languages will be equally complex because the ability to learn
language is innate in the human species, versus structural linguistics which
assumes that language is learned by simple association of ideas, which would
lead to the assumption that some languages would be more "primitive" than
others.
Live long and prosper
Victor Milne & Pat Gottlieb
FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/
LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE
at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/
