Natural Selection Can Act on Human Culture

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that the process of natural selection can act on human cultures as well as on genes. The team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures, evaluating 96 functional features that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the vessels. Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems. 'People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term,' said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford."

Comments

Memetics?

[nickovs]

Isn't this just memetics in action?

Re:Memetics?

[kripkenstein]

Isn't this just memetics in action? Memetics is a fun term. As a qualitative notion, it makes some intuitive sense. But what the article mentions is work that was quantitative (it compared functional vs. decorative features and their rate of change), and hence actually scientific. If you must talk using terms like 'memetics', then you might say that this research is important in that it finally brings some quantitative investigation into memetics instead of the usual 'just-so' stories.

That said, whether the researchers' results can support their wild speculation at the end of TFA (connecting their research to global warming, religious fundamentalism, and what have you) is another thing. Such speculation is silly.

In the Windoze world

[spammeister]

Does that mean because Windows Vista is an inferior design to XP does that mean natural selection could play a role in "weeding out" this particular direction the Windows world is taking? Definitely an "unsustainable approach" as far as I'm concerned.

Or we just put separate M$ design teams on a deserted islands on the Pacific and whoever can build a canoe to get them back to society wins?

Long-term

[michaelmalak]

Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term.

Oh, it'll work out very well in the long term, that is, assuming the entire race isn't annihilated. The most sustainable cultures on Earth will survive. I think the quoted researcher meant to say medium term.

Re:Long-term

[AikonMGB]

Have you taken a look at Western Civilization's fossil-fuel consumption? These are resources that by their very definition are not replenishable. And, quite frankly, all the metals in the world won't do you squat if you don't have the energy to drive them around or build anything with them. Beyond fossil fuels, there are other important resources, such a food. Notice how the deserts (in North America, sure, but in China in particular) are growing? They are losing arable soil at an alarming rate, and yet their population is increasing all the same. Food doesn't grow on trees, you know ;) In all seriousness, what happens when you go to the market to buy food for your family and find that vegetables have gone up in price 10-fold because China has started importing en masse?

These are just two particular examples, but there are many more.. do some research on the renewable water table levels in Asia; you might be surprised how dry some of their mega-aquifers are. There's no point in trying to defend the "sustainability" of a fossil-fuel based society/economy. Even if the space program takes off and we fly to Titan to rape her resources, we're just prolonging the same situation: a dependence on a resource that is fundamentally limited in quantity.

----- Note that the above is the end of my point, and what follows is just additional ranting; do not make reference to it when defending the discussion at hand, as I am well aware that I am now talking about time-scales on the thousands or tens-of-thousands of years. -----

When you get down to it, nuclear power; there is a finite amount of suitable radioactive material in this world that, assuming our use of nuclear power continues to rise, will one day run out (of course this is much longer-span than fossil-fuels, but the time it takes is the only difference).

North-America (which I can speak to directly since I live there) lives in a wasteful, consumerist society. We are wasteful of our environment, we are wasteful of our resources, of our energy, of our food... In the "long term", unless we leave this planet, our energy consumption must be limited to a "solar quota", i.e. the amount of sunlight the Earth receives, as that is the only "input" energy this world has. Everything else is simply consuming solar energy that was stored a long time ago.

----- And now for some wild hyperbole, simply because its fun. -----

Actually, if you really get down to it, there's no point in anything since anything we do contributes to the eventual heat death of the Universe, and there is only a finite amount of energy (assuming a finite Universe) that we can consume even if we had ideal means of obtaining it.

Re:"Natural" Selection

[talljosh]

But seriously, this approach on first glance says to me that these scientists don't understand the word natural in the term Natural Selection, and probably don't understand scientific method very well either.
Based on my understanding of the biological process of natural selection, natural selection would roughly translate in this instance to the boats which are most well-suited for thir environment surviving long enough to reproduce while those less well-suited dying off before they can breed.
I agree: the observations would seem to be better explained by good design practices than by some form of natural selection.

Re:Evolution/design

[Cairnarvon]

That's a beautifully convoluted straw man you have there.

Nobody's saying evolution necessarily implies a lack of a designer.
In the case of the evolution of life, we're saying a designer is not necessary at all to explain what we're seeing, and in fact introducing a designer creates a whole host of new problems that need answering without adding any value.

If you want to imply a designer, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence. Until someone can point to something that couldn't have arisen without intervention from a designer (irreducible complexity in a real sense, I suppose; the examples the ID movement has brought on have all been debunked, though), invoking one is just bad science.

Natural selection avoidance? Nice trick

[Hope Thelps]

People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption.

Nonsense. People haven't "learned to avoid natural selection", they've been subject to it. In the short term natural selection has favoured these "unsustainable approaches" which have helped in providing decent life expectancy and thus breeding opportunities for billions of people, in the long term natural selection may not favour this approach (by definition, it won't if they are in fact unsustainable). That's natural selection at work. There is no avoiding it.

Bad Science or Bad Reporting?

[europa universalis]

So if I get this right... the outcome of their research is that over time, pacific islanders tried to make better and better boats?
By not changing features that worked well and changing features that failed?
Doesn't natural selection have to be done by nature for it to be natural?
Isn't this just selection?

For what it's worth, I suspect that the original paper had to do with the applicability of the mathematical models for predicting the rate of change, or something. To imply that divergence was shaped by a winnowing process during migration from island to island, they would have demonstrate that the alterations under consideration actually had improved seaworthiness. Otherwise, the divergence is just random drift, and it's just a demonstration that the pacific islanders knew what the critical elements of outrigger design were, and didn't mess with them too much. Saying that "natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs" is just saying "shucks, we didn't disprove our hypothesis."

[previously on the 'firehose' thingy by accident, whatever that is]

humbug

[ph0rk]

I am beginning to grow less and less fond of the application of terms from evolutionary biology to the study of culture.

In 99% of instances, cultural schemas do not need to be 'fit' in a darwinian sense to spread through diffusion or other processes - they can be spread due to power imbalance or just because whatever new widgets one makes once they follow the ways of whatever look cool.

I suppose that "cultural evolution" is somewhat shorter than "culture change over time", but that does not mean that when using the former term we should try and treat it like biological evolution - it just doesn't follow. Assuming that getting to the island they can't see over the horizon but know are there is an urgent crisis, then yes, they will probably have a somewhat linear progression of canoe design, keeping the innovations that worked around longer. To assume otherwise is to assume the early Polynesians were idiots. Why this becomes a problem is it is difficult if not impossible to determine what the urgent issues are for past cultures, and you'll need a few more examples to make a stronger case.

Even then, you may have an interesting theory about efficiency of design when under long-term pressure, but how the heck do you apply it to more ephemeral cultural components like religion or etiquette?

Re:In other words

[ultranova]

Umm,no.

Wow that was annoying wasnt it

Um, no :p.

What do you suggest for the 'fine-tuning' protocol?

Natural selection. People who stay in good shape even when eating mainly junk food are more likely to find a mate and pass their genes on than the ones who turn into human balloons while their arteries jam.

and why in hell should we adapt to require less excercise to stay in shape?(that *could* be translated into what the gp problary ment, but im betting thats not your point.)

Because we aren't getting much excercise nowadays, so requiring less of it is an advantageus feature.

The gp suggested that we'd evolve to tolerate the effects of being fat; I suggest it more likely that we evolve to not get fat in the first place, since that would require much less changes to our biochemistry (fine-tuning) than the ones required to support useless (in a post-industrial civilization) fat.

Re:More correctly

[Cairnarvon]

No, it'd be like postulating that anyone believing in quantum theory in, say, the 1600s would have been nuts to do so, which is true. There was no reason to believe they existed at the time, so belief in their existence would have been unscientific. It's perfectly scientific to posit the non-existence of a designer, as there is no evidence.
The fact that you can't be absolutely certain that it's true is a reflection of the fact that our scientific knowledge is always an approximation at best.

The fact that something might be wrong does not make it unscientific; in fact, every single scientific hypothesis might be wrong. That's just the nature of things. It's not possible to know anything for sure.
This emphatically does not mean that all hypotheses are equally valid or likely, though.