I finally found my letter exchange with Lewontin as reported to this list in December 2005. Will look for the articles discussed.
Charles http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-December/019560.html Marxism-Thaxis] Response from Lewontin Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org Mon Dec 12 14:54:34 MST 2005 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Logical Empiricism (reformatted) Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Back in October I sent a fax ( my email didn't get through to him) to Richard Lewontin with interjection comments on his article New York Review . He sent me a letter back. I called him and asked him if I could send his letter to the list. He said ok. I'll copy my original note to him below. Dear Mr. Brown: Thanks very much for your thoughtful comments on the recent article in The New York Review. I was particularly struck by your point that culture, if modeled on an evolutionary process, definitely has a Lamarckian inheritance. What is not always appreciated by scientists is that once one has a Lamarckian form of inheritance, the strictness of Mendel's Laws no longer applies, of course, and almost anything is possible. A very interesting book showing the implications of forms of passage from one individual to another without any particular fixed rule of inheritance is the book on cultural inheritance by Feldman and Cavalli. What they show is that the moment you get away form strict genetic segregation and allow an arbitrary probability of the passage of a trait from one individual to another, the whole question of selection fades. Let us say, a trait can spread not because it is selected but because the rule of transmission strongly favors it. If everybody who ever heard a particular word that had been invented now used it ,it would spread very rapidly through the population, even though it could not be said to have some particular selective advantage. In a sense, the distinction between the rules of inheritance and the rules of selection disappear once one allows a free possibility for transmission rate. I am delighted that you read the article so critically and that you saw one of the most important points about cultural inheritance. Thanks again for having written me. Yours sincerely, R.C. Lewontin ^^^^^ October 20, 2005: The Wars Over Evolution <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363> Human culture is a LaMarckian-like mechanism; one more point at the end of your essay Professor Lewontin, Thank you for the article below which is elegantly clarifying of the fundamental issues therein. In my amateur opinion, you can add a section at the end of this discussion in the vein that I discuss in my interjected comments below. Culture gives humans a LaMarckian-like mechanism in adapting. I guess I should say potentially adaptive, since we have nuclear weapons which seem inherently maladaptive in just about all current , likely environments. At any rate, the main point is I think valid. Culture gives humans the ability to inherit acquired characteristics, extrasomatic characteristics in the main, though there may even have been some shaping of the body at some point, the latter is very speculative of course. Early humans could have bred themselves to some extent. Reminding of Darwin's selection in domestication, but with the subjects being humans themselves. In the main I am thinking of extrasomatic characteristics, like rituals and the whole panoply of cultural institutions. I am not an academic ,but I did study anthro at U of Michigan with Professor Sahlins after he "left" the cultural evolutionist school. So, I am familiar with the efforts and problems in this cross of biology and anthro. Peace in, Charles Brown Detroit Volume 52, Number 16 . October 20, 2005 Review The Wars Over Evolution By Richard C. Lewontin The The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explana-tion. ^^^ CB: Ain't it the truth. Two opposite reactions: idealism and biological reductionism. ^^^^ One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools. The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to account not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The Evolution-Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By Genes Alone with the second. -clip- This may seem odd, since the process of natural selection is supposed to make organisms more fit for their environment. So why does evolution not result in a general increase of the fitness of life to the external world? Wouldn't that be progress? The reason that there is no general progress is that the environments in which particular species live are themselves changing ^^^^^ CB: This is relativity of natural selection fitness. ^^^^ and, relative to the organisms, are usually getting worse. So most of natural selection is concerned with keeping up. Certainly quite new kinds of making a living have been occasionally exploited in evolution, but every species eventually becomes extinct (99.9 percent already have) and no way of making a living will be around forever.[4] <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363#fn4 <BLOCKED::http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363> > Judging from the fossil record a typical mammalian species lasts roughly ten million years, so we might expect to last another nine million unless, as a consequence of our immense ability to manipulate the physical world, we either extinguish ourselves a good deal sooner or invent some extraordinary way to significantly postpone the inevitable. Clip- That was no guarantee that his model for evolution would have to be entirely correct because it might have turned out that there was significant inheritance of acquired characters. ^^^^ CB: Now he's at it. Culture is LaMarckian ( not Darwinian). Culture allows inheritance of acquired characters, inheritance of extrasomatic ,i.e. non-bodily, acquired ( by experience) characters Inhertitance through cultural transmission, not genetically, but nonetheless, humans' biological "bodies" include their cultures. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
