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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."
Isn't this just memetics in action?
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
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.
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.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
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]