I have just two comments to make on the article:
The following paragrah has particular interest to me because the hypothesis I am advancing on my website on evolutionary economics is that almost all economic goods were once 'status goods'. By this I mean that they were originally acquired not for their present-day purpose but to claim, or confirm, status in the social group. I think that the first status good was probably pigments and ochres of various sorts which were used as body ornamentation -- a universal behaviour among all hunter-gatherer tribes. There is evidence that such ochres were traded over long distances at least as late as 75,000BC. It would thus seem from the latest evidence, that clothes fall into the same category -- that is, that they were worn long before there was a climatic need for them when humans migrated into Europe and up to the edge of the Ice Age glaciers. Every hunter-gatherer tribe, even in the tropics where clothes are not at all necessary has some form of uniform -- such as straw body-cones, cloaks and hats -- which are worn on special occasions such as initiation ceremonies or war dances or partner selection meetings with neighbouring tribes.
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Clothing came long after we were naked. Dr. Mark Stoneking, of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, managed to address this question by calculating when the human body louse (which lives only in clothing, not hair) evolved from the human head louse. That proud event in human history dates to between 72,000 and 42,000 years ago, Dr. Stoneking reported.
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And then there's another part-paragraph which I'd like to quote:
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Most animals struggle to survive in a harsh environment, beset by accidents and predators. Humans got that problem largely under control long ago but live in a fiercer jungle -- that of a human society. Indeed, social intelligence -- the ability to keep track of a society's hierarchy and what chits an individual owed to others or had due -- may have been a factor in the increase of human brain size.
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The fact of rank order, and also of the balancing up of obligations were probably implanted in our genes and brains long before the brain started growing into the frontal lobe regions at a rapid rate. What the frontal lobes did in the case of rank order was to make the status of the individual more explicit by means of body ornamentation -- and then a whole series of possessions that became fashionable in successive periods of history. As to satisfying debts, then there is much evidence that the anicent Sumerians, at about 3,000BC used suitably impressed clay tablets as credits. This, too, would have been a result of the frontal lobes being able to create imaginative objects which helped individuals' memories of their obligations.
KSH
<<<< THE END OF EVOLUTION?
Nicholas Wade
The most improbable item in science fiction movies is not the hardware -- the faster-than-light travel, the tractor beams, the levitation -- but the people. Strangely, they always look and behave just like us. Yet the one safe prediction about the far future is that humans will be a lot further along in their evolution.
Last week population geneticists, rummaging in DNA's ever-fascinating attic, set dates on two important changes in the human form.
Dr. Alan R. Rogers of the University of Utah figured out that the ancestral human population had acquired black skin, as a protection against the sun, at least 1.2 million years ago, and therefore that it must have shed its fur some time before this date.
Clothing came long after we were naked. Dr. Mark Stoneking, of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, managed to address this question by calculating when the human body louse (which lives only in clothing, not hair) evolved from the human head louse. That proud event in human history dates to between 72,000 and 42,000 years ago, Dr. Stoneking reported
So where do we go from here? Have we attained perfection and ceased to evolve?
Many geneticists think that is very unlikely, though few find it easy to say where we are headed or how fast. Until the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, people used to live in small populations with little gene flow between them. That is the best situation for rapid evolution, said Sewall Wright, one of the founders of population genetics. But Sir Ronald A. Fisher, another founder of the discipline, argued that large populations with random mating -- just what globalization and air travel are helping to bring about -- were the best fodder for rapid evolution.
"Which of them is right? No one really knows," Dr. Rogers said.
Considering that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived only 5 to 6 million years ago, human evolution seems to have been quite rapid. The chimp, our closest living relative, is still a standard ape, whereas we have become a truly weird one. And our evolution put on an extra spurt just 50,000 years ago, the date when we may have perfected language, made our first objets d'art and dispersed from our ancestral homeland some place in northeast Africa.
Despite the medical advances and creature comforts that shelter people in rich countries, natural selection is still hard at work. Microbes and parasites still nip at our heels, forcing the human genome to stay in constant motion. It is clearly in the throes of adapting to malaria, a disease that seems to have struck only in the last 8,000 years, and the protective gene that has sickle cell anemia as a side effect is a sign of a hasty patch.
It seems reasonable to predict that the human physical form will stay in equilibrium with its surroundings. If the ozone layer thins, pale skins will be out and dark skins de rigeur. If climate heats up, the adaptations for living in hot places will spread, though it could take tens or hundreds of generations for a new gene to become widespread.
Sexual selection, too, is busily at work. This powerful process, first recognized by Darwin, works on traits that are attractive to other sex, and help the owner's genes spread into the next generation. The peacock's tail, a wonder of the natural world, has been created by the sexual preference of generations of peahens.
Human skin color and hair distribution may be pale echoes of the same process. Recent social changes may have accelerated the pace of sexual selection. "You used to marry a lass from your local village, now it's anyone you can track down on the Internet," said Dr. Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in England.
Though features like the peacock's tail are chosen for aesthetic, or arbitrary, reasons, they often seem to be correlated with health, and indeed their owners are chosen as mates because these features subliminally advertise a good immune system or freedom from parasites. So if sexual selection in people becomes more intense as people have a wider choice of mates, that suggests a terribly Panglossian forecast we will become more healthy and ever more beautiful.
Most animals struggle to survive in a harsh environment, beset by accidents and predators. Humans got that problem largely under control long ago but live in a fiercer jungle -- that of a human society. Indeed, social intelligence -- the ability to keep track of a society's hierarchy and what chits an individual owed to others or had due -- may have been a factor in the increase of human brain size. As the prevalence of Caesareans suggests, the circumference of babies' brains seems to have gotten as large as circumstances permit. Will requirements for extra neural circuitry make our descendants into coneheads? Doubtless, sexual selection will maintain a decorative swatch of hair on top.
Society, and the knowledge needed to survive in it, seems to get ever more complex, suggesting that human social behavior will continue to evolve. Unfortunately, evolution has no concept of progress, so behavioral change is not always for the better. "I suspect that our social behavior evolves rapidly but that much of it changes direction over time," said Dr. Henry C. Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah.
Warrior societies like the Yanomamo of South America give reproductive success to the man who is "violent, scary and effective at male-male conflict," whereas among peasant farmers, the successful male would be one who feeds his children and passes on an estate to them, Dr. Harpending said.
A dramatic instance of the former process came to light earlier this year with the discovery that no less than 8 percent of men who live today in the former domains of the Mongol empire carry the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan and the Mongol royal house. It is hard to see a Genghis having much reproductive success in modern societies. Perhaps another Panglossian prediction is called for in a more ordered society, evolution will favor the fostering type of male over the Yanomamo-style brutes.
Not everything is roses in evolution's garden. Ronald Fisher, the British biologist, pointed out in 1930 that the genes for mental ability tend to move upward through the social classes but that fertility is higher in the lower social classes. He concluded that selection constantly opposes genes that favor creativity and intelligence.
Fisher's idea has not been proven wrong in theory, although many biologists, besides detesting it for the support it gave to eugenic policies, believe it has proven false in practice. "It hasn't been formally refuted in the sense that we could never test it," Dr. Pagel said. Though people with fewer resources tend to have more children, that may be for lack of education, not intelligence. "Education is the best contraceptive. If you brought these people up in the middle class they would have fewer children," Dr. Pagel said. "Fisher's empirical observation is correct, that the lower orders have more babies, but that doesn't mean their genotypes are inferior."
Given all the possibilities for human evolutionary change, it is hard to know which path our distant descendants will be constrained to tread. From a New York perspective, however, it is hard to ignore a certain foreboding that under the joint power of sexual selection and Fisher's gloomy prognosis we will become ever more beautiful and less acute. The future, in a word, is Californian.
New York Times 24 August 2003 >>>>
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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