Evo-Devo

Evo Devo blog assignments:

1. So, for my thoughts on Evo-Devo, I'm going to give an example of how considering the interaction between evolution and development can help us to work out humanity's evolutionary pathways, that is to say, by studying the way our behavior takes advantage of our changing biology.

In class last week we were debating about the likelihood of the Homo genus tipping over into "Sapiens" territory while they (we?) were in Africa.  It made me think of an interesting piece of African developmental evolution, that is to say, a good idea had by Africans. Pictured here, so-called persistence hunting caught my attention because it nearly exclusively exploits human bipedalism, for efficiency, and big brains, for tracking.  As Mr. Attenborough points out, even having a throwable spear is more of a ceremonial than a practical gesture when hunting this way.  The combination of bipedalism and smarts is what moved us to tack "Wise" on to the end of our name as a species.  Perhaps the exclusive use of these two traits as a hunting method suggests that the method was a new innovation to take advantage of newly altered biology.

2.  Unfortunately, and as cynical as this may seem, the greatest impact Darwinism has had in my life is through its misinterpretations. The theory of species change by itself is very benign.  The environment changes, so the animals change.  This isn't news!  The animals are part of the environment anyway, specifically each other's environment.  The rest of the theory, natural selection and such, is just quibbling over the details of mechanisms of change.  It's important quibbling, to be sure, but nothing to lose your hat over.

So, as a benign theory mapping out the obvious macrocosm and giving us a nice venue to debate the not-so-obvious resulting microcosms, the only super-dramatic splash that Darwinism has made  has been through people using it as an excuse to be dicks.  Somehow, an idea that boils down to "things change" itself changed into the theory of "let's kill everyone", aka imperialism, especially cultural imperialism.  These two ideas have nothing to do with each other.  Perhaps Darwin ran afoul of the authoritarian streak in the scientific culture of his time, which then got sucked up into the regular old governmental authoritarianism, thus pushing the culture in the direction it was already going.  I don't know, but somehow everything went wrong.  Hopefully the next big splash Darwinism makes will be a happier one.

Something I should have made clear above, as re the second paragraph of this heading:  I don't swallow the theory of natural selection precisely as it's presented nowadays, simply because I don't think we understand how genetics and heritability work.  That is to say, environmental conditions mediating genetic expression makes perfect sense, and it would be wonderful if we had any idea how genetic expression worked so that we would be able to extrapolate anything at all from that connection, which right now we can't.  We'll get there.  Once we do, I'm perfectly happy to entertain anyone's theory of the mechanisms of biological change, including that it's God.  I just think we're getting ahead of ourselves in that debate.

That's it.