Comments on: The Eponymous Bone Is Not Connected to the Clue Bone

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:35:34 +0000

As Kieran said in a different context, let’s all discuss this as though nothing has ever been said about it before. I don’t have the patience.

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:20:02 +0000

Someone whose immune system can’t tolerate the common allergens of modern living has to go to great lengths to live safely.
But it’s possible.
Someone whose psyche can’t survive the pressures and presences of the soon-to-be 7billion in earlier times could light out for the territory, become a mountain-person, etc. But they had to be in a position to be able to do that. Not everyone who needed to could, just as not everyone today who needs an allergen-free environment gets one.
There’s a culling process in both cases. With a an increasingly massive tilt away from the wilder-philic.
Scorn and disgust at the idea of “primitive” living comes out of the evolutionary shift that’s taking place.
The Kalahari bushmen are nothing but inconsequential dead wood, their loss or presence either way of no importance at all.
There’s a direction, there’s a coercive aspect, there’s parameters, probably involving more than simple randomness.
The binary presentation, benevolent anthropocentric deity v. pure molecular flux with no rhyme or reason behind it, like most moral binaries obscures the possibility, and likelihood, of other unstated terms.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:11:49 +0000

“What about, say, rabbits in Australia – are they evolving and are they a part of evolutionary process in general? ”

I expect they’re developing a very powerful venom.

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:42:08 +0000

What about, say, rabbits in Australia – are they evolving and are they a part of evolutionary process in general? Of course they are, it’s a process of trial and error; anything and everything is a part of evolution. Do the rabbits in Australia ‘direct’ evolution? Of course not.

I don’t see how humans are any different.

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:53:45 +0000

20 dan s-
Lack of appropriate terminology makes everything “natural” because there’s no outside of nature for us earthlings. Thus, once the resistance to overly-processed and highly synthetic food-like products became economically significant, everything got packaged with that bright exclamatory NATURAL!
Because it’s semantically void.
But what was intended by its original users was recovery of the diminishing wholesomeness of food. “Natural” meaning there close to the ground, to the source. All these terms can be jot-and-tittled into meaninglessness, but there’s a truth there that won’t go away no matter how much its rationalized at.
What we had when we had it was a fierce opposition to the predatory sweep and flux of mortal living, responding to the dangerous with cleverness and defiance. We’re still fielding that. But it began under those culling forces, not above them. Getting above them, taking control of everything that once threatened us, until very recently was so dogmatically in place it went unquestioned. Bears at the zoo. The drained and paved swamp.
The weather has gone some way to mitigate that arrogance, I think.
Harmony, balance. These are the key terms, and they won’t fit into any binary.
I’m not the one putting human nature and culture outside of nature, somebody else is, by placing them above nature.
The same processes that keep us intact and whole, like anything, medicine, food whatever, carried to an extreme become toxic.
We had to develop tools and strategies, biological and cultural, just to survive. But there’s something Oedipal in our success.
Employing that same attitude and posture now is only aiding the survival of a dwindling minority of humans. Vivian’s “wealthy white males”.
It seems like both the fundamentalists and the progress-at-any-price team are competing to be the elect in the dynamic of survival. And competing to have their opponents become the preterite. This is by way of a modified condemnation of what you’re calling “modern life”.
Modern life isn’t really working all that well at the moment, and it’s showing clear sign of not working at all quite soon unless enormous recalibrations are undertaken tout de suite.

19 vivian – What I meant by “defer that human control to their anthropocentric deity”. We’re in agreement.
I’d expand that a little and modify “wealthy white male subset” to a particular type of male, not always necessarily white, who become wealthy because of the existing culture’s bias toward them.
The patriarchy or whatever it is has controlled the evolution of the species for a long time, and directed it in a way that furthers their dominance. A “natural” thing, all perfectly legit Darwin-wise, but the heart of humanity has been consistently been kicked further and further to the outer edge. America is a microcosm of this now.
It’s probable that one source for the ferocity of anti-evolutionism is a psychological refusal to see how shaped and molded those people especially are and have been, by earthly cultural institutions. Cattle, once aurochs, if they had the intelligence, would have a similar reluctance to see what had happened to them.

18 neil-
Thanks for the reading tips.
But “We have been in the business of directing evolution as long as we have been humans” is only true if you mean influencing, not controlling. And only if you define being human far more narrowly than I do. The Kalahari bushmen are human, marginalized to the point of near-extinction, yet still capable of living the way they have for tens of thousands of years. Without disrupting the weather.
Harmony and balance.
One of the frankenstein food tropes rests on Mayan plant breeding, genetic modification of corn from wild grass. “They did it, you think that’s okay, so what are you whining about?”
Binary logic at its most virulent.
It’s only very recently that we’ve taken a majority directing hold on our own evolution, eliminating the traditional culling forces that required us to get quick and smart in the first place. Now the darwinian pressures are economic mainly, taking place in an abstract landscape where traditional survival skills are not just useless but threatening.
If I’m right you’d expect a kind of evolutionary eddy effect, where more people would be getting slower and stupider and a minority would be prospering, once those forces had been neutralized. I leave it to your experience of contemporary humanity to judge the accuracy of that prediction.
Of course we’re still evolving, sexual reproduction guarantees it, but there’s no one here who can see the totality of forces at work on what we are, and some of the more insidious aspects of that are what I’m on about.
“We” aren’t in control of the culture and physical environment that are mostly what’s shaping humanity now, only some of us are.

By: fargo north, decoder

fargo north, decoder — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:33:06 +0000

Ah! Twenty posts in, may I make an editorial suggestion?

“P. Z. Myers has a humerus post….”

By: Dan S.

Dan S. — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:04:28 +0000

But Roy, you’re falling into the same kind of trap as the folks who see natural and artificial selection as being fundamentally different things. In this case, you’re putting human nature and human culture somehow outside of nature. Where d’you think our big brains – the ones providing the cognitive, social, and cultural framework that makes science, science heroes, and prosthetic immune systems possible – come from? And the resulting modern life creates its own selective pressures.

By: vivian

vivian — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:38:41 +0000

Roy, if you think that fundies aren’t anthropocentric, you aren’t thinking about the fundies. Their deity might be more powerful than humans, but that’s only to establish that everything is subordinate to people, or at least a wealthy white male subset of people.

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:58:49 +0000

Roy, there is a huge literature on the interaction of culture and evolution. Start with Boyd and Richerson, go on to Dan Sperber, and read the references therein. This is mainstream stuff, not marginal. We have been in the business of directing evolution as long as we have been humans

By: ogmb

ogmb — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:32:51 +0000

I guess ‘eponymous’ wasn’t on the LSAT

Actually, LSAT and GMAT don’t test vocabulary. Only the GRE does (or did, I’m not really up to date). Never understood why, other than the argument by an admissions officer at a top science program that they mostly look for verbal scores in their candidates because they take quant skills as given.

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:39:10 +0000

It’s so stupid I guess he must be writing satire? (Or, maybe the creationists are too dumb or incompetent to write their own stuff and need well-meaning smart pro-evolution people to take pity on them; that would explain it, too.)

But notice he could have answered his own question by opening a reference book. He isn’t just criticizing Shubin’s science: he’s saying Shubin is dumb. He’s saying evolution isn’t so great because evolutionary biologists are so dumb they can’t properly explain the science they profess. (He even comes close to implying that Shubin fails to understand himself.)

They’re not playing the same game by the same rules. Worse, they are like the kid who ends up stopping play until everyone else concedes “okay that wasn’t a strike it was only a foul.”

Be sure to click through to the Discover Magazine article.

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:52:04 +0000

Roy Belmont: first against the wall when the evolution comes.

By: Cliffy

Cliffy — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:49:36 +0000

Well duh, roy. Nature’s got that whole red in tooth and claw thing going. Of course we want to escape that to the extent possible. Evolution isn’t a good thing anymore than gravity is a good thing. They’re just processes which occur. To the extent that humans through the application of reason can bend the rules for their own benefit, of course we’d want to do that.

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:36:57 +0000

Can somebody somewhere sometime at least once talk about the glaringly obvious fact that while the science/religion polarity is distinguished by a binary for/against evolution’s factuality, both sides seem to be united in their repudiation of evolution as a non-anthropocentric process?
The science guys may be united in their conviction that evolution is how we got everything we have, but there is nowhere except out at the lunatic margins a championing of that process as an ongoing beneficial good.
The culturally revered heroes of science are in the great majority those who have thwarted the principal instruments of evolution. The creation of prosthetic immune systems being just one example.
Sex and death being the principal instruments, the inheritance of patriarchal cultural sex taboos, enforced by industrial/capitalism, means we’re carrying on in the same manner the work of the anti-evolution ecclesiasts. Molding the genome by human hands. Both sides want that.
We no longer get shaped by evolution from the outside. Death now for people under 30 in the US is not an evolutionary phenomenon, it’s a random cull through traffic fatalities, and right behind that come the remnant diseases which are attacked with outraged fervor, by science.
Both sides of the polarity have a great deal in common when it comes to contemporary human evolution. They think it should be under human control. The fundoids just defer that human control to their anthropocentric deity. Science takes the reins solo.
Nobody wants evolution to do its thing ungoverned. For both sides it’s all about getting nature out of the scheme.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:20:35 +0000

@lemmy

Now I’m not certain, but I think it was used correctly due to Tiktaalik’s place in evolutionary history as the ancestor to both cows and dogs.