Re: Lamarck

My work schedule and personal inefficiencies make keeping up impossible. Forgive the tardiness of this reply and its hastiness, as well/

>>> "MORRIS VILLARROEL" <MORRIS@santandersupernet.com> 10/27 5:32 PM >>>
Dear all,

I wanted to address some of the recent comments on VEMS with respect to
biology. I think we have been referring to two general topics, 1) the
emergence and evolution of VEMS (why individuals became societies) and 2)
VEM dynamics (inter and intra-society discriminations). From my point of
view, the first involves explanations that are more ultimate and refers to
genes and the other is more proximate and perhaps refers more to memes (� la
Richard Dawkins).

An important difference is that gene type fitness is correlated with
Darwinian natural selection pressures. But social fitness is not Darwinian,
instead it seems Lamarkian! One thing is slow, long term, a priori evolution
and
another is immediate, fast changing, experiential dynamics which are shared
above and beyond genetic information. Importantly, Lamarkian dynamics also
leaves room for reversibility (which I think is an important element in
VEMS and has been mentioned by Stockinger and Ebeling).

>>I do not see why Lamarck needs to be brought in here. It may be necessary, but we are far from knowing that yet. Meanwhile, it is very easy to exaggerate the speed of cultural change and to forget what it is whose evolution we are talking about. In m
y opinion, we should focus on the evolution of social systems, and I believe that they may indeed get marginally better at what they do (is that "development") but that they "evolve" by inventing new things to do very rarely. Thus, to the degree that int
entionality enters in, social systems intend to do what they know how to do, not change what they do. And they have various mechanisms--Inquisitions, FBIs, KGBs--to see that new things rarely get done. I suspect that such institutions provide examples o
f the cruder analogs to social selection taking place. In other words, there is still selection, but the information on which selection occurs inside systems is different from the selection between systems.
This does not mean cultural evolution is no faster than biological evolution--of course, words are cheaper than genes. But the eye should be on the population of systems whose evolution is at stake--and that is not the individual people but the societies
.

When we refer to the inception of social complexity and VEMS we can look
to natural selection pressures as a cause e.g. colonies or societies formed
to improve defense, mating opportunities, food finding etc. But once the
minimal
society is formed (and we get rituals, rites and VEMS) we jump to different
dynamics and leave room for things like altruism (another messy field which
is still quite hotly debated in biology), shared accumulation of knowledge,
etc.

I think the discussion on fitness up to now has dealt only with individual
fitness in a Darwinian sense, but social systems move in a Lamarkian
dynamic.

>>See above

And a final question, Is the bridge between genes and memes what we call
"information processing"?

>>Do not understand the question

Morris

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
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Received on Tue Nov 10 12:21:19 1998