Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Laboratory >

Culture & Evolution- Linked?

All Acting Regiment

19:53 / 18.07.05

Can the purpose of that wide area that we call "culture" perhaps be to aid our evolution?

"Culture" could include anything from dancing to football violence, and "Evolution", while generally refferring to a change in a species to make it suit the env. better, also has a host of other interpretations and details.

So, to start with I will ask for examples where you think a cultural practice has caused evolution- or devolution- of one kind or another. I will add my own shortly when I have read uo a bit more.

21:13 / 18.07.05

I'm not sure if this is what you're after, but the first thing that comes to mind is the ability to tolerate lactose, which IIRC is a characteristic having western European or northwestern African ancestry, since those folks historically raised cows and goats, respectively. Hence, animal husbandry (culturally transmitted) affecting the human digestive capability (genetically transmitted).

21:18 / 18.07.05

Well, inasmuch as evolution is structured by reproductive success, then it seems pretty obvious that culture plays a role, since most of the ways we pick suitable mates are culturally mediated.

Or at least *seems* to be.

09:33 / 19.07.05

I object to the word "devolution". It's meaningless.

I raise this point about culture and evolution when someone tries to use "evolution" or "genetics" rhetorically. One big problem is the widespread belief that evolution is going toward something--that there is a right way and a wrong way to evolve, which leads to a curious belief that evolution was "better" in the past--ie, that some form of bigotry, for instance, is an evolutionary mechanism and to eliminate it is to threaten the competativeness of the human genome.

"Evolution" doesn't produce anything and can't be aided by anything. It is a process whereby the environment produces random mutations, most of which do not repeat. At first glance, it will seem that a violent organism will destroy a peaceful organism; an uncomplicated organism will have fewer opportunities to fail than a complicated organism; a wildly reproductive organism will overwhelm a more reserved organism. But in fact it's impossible to predict what qualities will be suited to future environments, and so complexity, sensitivity and responsiveness are strong traits. A successful organism will be violent and peaceful, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution

All Acting Regiment

15:17 / 19.07.05

Here's one. Which helps us as a species survive better, Fascism or Communism? Or is this a corrupt question?

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

04:52 / 20.07.05

as we progress through linear time as a species, the greater number of us now live in urban environments.

as we shape our urban environments, so they shape us.

we live awash in 60Hz oceans of signal, and have managed to survive in the stressed out state it perpetuates, using pharmaceuticals to dampen the symptoms of our ill health.

we live in our own waste (car exhaust, etc), and have evolved a defense mechanism of denial to continue to do so.

we live with more processed food, in closed quarters with domesticated pets and not-so-domesticated vermin, and have learned to question those who question it.

we live in a paradigm of time that hadn't existed before 1582, and have evolved an imagination that can't fathom immersion in another.

and so here we are, typing away to one another across a global, electronic network discussing our culture and evolution.

if nothing else, my typing speed has increased greatly.

now all we need is to "mutate" a means of not getting cancerous tumours from living in all this filth we call home (and Vancouver isn't all that dirty compared to Mexico city, Bangkok, Dehli, etc).

ten ix

sdv (non-human)

10:13 / 22.07.05

Fascism or Communism --- ? isn't this a rather 19th C question, to ask whether a doctrine which in the traditional sense (Nazis and Stalinists) is an inheritance from the period when traditional communities developed in the interests of industrial development and then later into mass-social-consumption..

If you meant in the Deluezian sense of micro-fascism and so on then yes.... But at the end of the 20th C and especially now in the 21st C in the light of developments in biology, information technology, the physic life of individuals, sexual revolution --- points towards developments towards the maximum singularisation.

Isn't this singularizaton what the development of technics (always already social after all) and the individual direct us inexorably towards....

s

All Acting Regiment

11:37 / 22.07.05

Would you define this "Singularity" for laypersons?