Or else perhaps there's a black monolith out there somewhere.

No, what they're saying is that something more than standard evolutionary forces has been operating with humans, and there's a common-sense explanation for that: we humans have been consciously influencing our own evolution since we became conscious. We selectively breed ourselves every time we choose a mate, execute a criminal, enforce a taboo, or conquer a neighbor. Repeat for 5+ digits worth of generations, and the cumulative effect is significant.

Herbert Spen-n-n-cer. Actually, this idea is a fascinating synthesis of social and biological evolutions, and is very, very close to Spencer's thought. We are talking about a kind of meta-evolution, wherein human social institutions are themselves the evolutionary stress which select biologically for higher intelligence and culturally for more and more adaptive institutions. What happens to the genes of those too, well, stupid, to assimilate more adaptive institutions, but who remain mired in the past? The same thing that happens to their culture, of course. I like it.

No real problem with intelligent design here, unless one is a 168-hour creation man. We may consider how this idea is related to to co-creation as enunciated by John Paul II.

And Mayr said evolution came to a screeching halt when homo sapiens arrived and there has been none since. Ok, class, who is right: A)Mayr; B)Lahn; or C) both?

Peter:

Both. Lahn is saying there was rapid evolution leading to homo sapiens, not what has happened since. Bipedal locomotion and the potential it entails for language, as well as the fully opposable thumb both preceded homo sapiens.

they're not just arguing that we're a product of Intelligent Design but that we, in effect, are designed by our own intelligence.

Ever hear of feedback loops?

We're all Lamarckists, now.

Jeff:

Ah, "feedback loops," so you too are an I.D.er now?

Papaya:

Evolution is really just selection by a Consciousness. You too?

The circle is complete. Humans are intelligent due to socialization, and vice-a-versa.

By this standard, it's clear that since conservatives have more children than liberals, evolution is now selecting against Liberalism in favor of Conservatism. Future socio-biologists will undoubtedly recognize that liberals were really a different species, and homo liberalis like the Neanderthals was unable to compete with homo sapiens.

Since scientific reasoning is a reliable guide and history progressive, why not just cut to the end-point and establish Conservativism right now?

The proposed "cause" (i.e., socialization) alone is insufficient to account for this development -- otherwise why is there not a similar, overwhelming selective pressure operating with all other social animals, from the social insects thru the social mammals and particularly the social primates? Further, there is no reckoning of the negative consequences of increased brain size and intelligence: higher maternal and infant mortality, the antisocial behavior of more intelligent individuals, and the increased lethality of conflict.

Repeated selection for a bigger brain ought to produce bigger brains, up to a point.

But the kind of knowledge that cannot be genetic can be equally selective.

To take a current example, just before a big tsunami rolls in, the ocean retreats. The uninformed behavior of shoredwellers is usually to rush out and pick up a free seafood dinner among the stranded fish.

Those who have heard cautionary tales go the other way and live to reproduce.

The difference in amount of brain power between those who rush out and those who rush back is probably insignificant.

So despite the sneering about culture etc., it is easy enough to see how it works, and, indeed, just a few minutes after sneering here, Orrin was making that point with regard to Chartres Cathedral.

Ah, "feedback loops," so you too are an I.D.er now?

Hardly. They are everywhere you look, and operate wholly without intelligence.

Which, if you weren't so ID blinded, you would quickly recognize.

Harry: And the people who gain critical knowledge tend to pass it on and the recipients tend to gain more knowledge, etc. Thus, we are all Lamarckists now.

Jeff:

They are everywhere you look, because of intelligence.

Sexual selection has the power to produce incredibly rapid
"runaway" evolution-- look at the peacock's tail or the horns of the rhinocerous beetle. The human brain is most likely the product of sexual selection, since there is nothing in our physical environment that would select for intelligence. Other hominids -- choosy females, competitve males -- are the substrate in which our evolution took place.

Harry:

There'd never been a tsunami in the Indian Ocean--everyone walked out.

Bradley:

That's a fascinating assertion based on nothing.

Bradley-

A bit of circularity in your reasoning there. C'mon, admit it, we don't know the cause. The conclusion one reaches is a matter of faith. Reason alone doesn't help us understand, defintitively, how it all came to be.

It is so easy to fall into the error of confusing curtural and biological evolution. The Nazis did itl; contemporary "multiculturalists" do it, as we can see from the following discussion of "Hispanic race"; and even people who read and post here may do it.

The successful cultural trait is adaptability. We need to be careful here: this is a "conservative" trait only in the Richard Weaver sense. Many, most non-western cultures are very conservative, but they are conserving the wrong things. Our civilization, and I hold that the United States, the pinnacle of that civilization, succeeds because it is adaptable but not reckless. Our instititutions are in balance.

It is not necessary for a Western triumphalist to be a racist: we may leave that error to those of less confidence in the supremacy of their institutions. Races surpass or go under only incidentally to the vitality of the cultures that sustain them.

Survival, in its technical evolutionary sense, means living long enough to reproduce successfully. It would seem easy enough to argue that intelligence is an anti-survival trait.

David C is still mixing up biological with cultural evolutionary success. One First Class Petty Officer on an SSBN who fathers 2.1 children is more of an evolutionary success than the five million primitives he can extirminate by pushing a button, even if each of then has bred a dozen worm-ridden waifs. Numbers are now maladaptive. Cultural progress has changed all that bigger batallions business.

I am astounded that gentlemen of eloquence and ostensible intelligence persist in discussing human evolution in historical time in purely biological terms. Please tell me that this is being done merely to point out the fallaciousness of Darwinist thought.

Lou:

Not if he doesn't push the button.

They walked out? Not what I heard.

evolution has been working very hard to produce us humans

Lou: I don't think I'm mixing it up. I think I'm talking about biological evolutionary success.

As for cultural evolutionary success, I don't believe in it.

They are everywhere you look, because of intelligence.

And you know this how?

Feedback loops can cause rapid change until reaching some limit or limits. In the case of humans, those limits happen to be maternal mortality, female mobility, and length of childhood dependency.

David:
Okay. Make the argument.

Jeff:

Exactly. Feedack loops require intelligence.

David C.: One does not believe in "cultural evolutionary success," as if it were the Trinity, one simply describes. Individualism, rule of law, free exchange of ideas, free enterprise, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are purely cultural phenomena. They result in things like communications technology, scientific advancement, and weapons, always the weapons, for Polemos Pater Panton*.

The further result is that some cultures prevail and others go under just as they adapt to their environment, which environment includes other cultures. A ready example of this might be the way paleolithic peoples move from stone to steel in the space of a single generation.

oj: Readiness to use the tools of your culture is itself a cultural institution of the highest survival value. The stone axe beats the gun, if the man with the gun is too morally weak to use it. Balance is the key.

*Any churl can drop mere Latin maxims.

Jeff: It seems likely that strength, rather than intelligence, has correlated more highly with successful reproduction and gene spread throughout most of human history and in much of the world today. Today, when, as Lou notes, intelligence correlates very strongly with material success in the west, I think you would find that intelligence correlates strongly with having fewer children later.

Lou: The question is whether cultural superiority leads to survival and forcing out of less superior culture. I say that it does not, except as a tautology. Is our culture superior? Sure. Does that guarantee us of victory over other cultures? Not so much.

I also do think that "belief" is the proper term to use of anything that smacks of social Darwinism. It partakes of the same fundamental flaw as most of leftism and the cult of Progress: the faith, as against all evidence, that we can overcome our natures and that conditions will just get better and better.

We in the United States are living in a golden moment. It can't last forever. That's why we're so afraid of ghosts, goblins, the bogeyman and our own shadow.

It's lasted four centuries so far.

"There'd never been a tsunami in the Indian Ocean--everyone walked out."

1833.

The Pacific rim gets them about every ten years.

Never. What never? Well, hardly ever.

"Exactly. Feedack loops require intelligence."

The earth's climate is a giant feedback loop, powered by a giant nuke. Oh yeah, the Big Spook.

No nuke, no feedback, my bad.

Uncle:

The Pacific Rim doesn't surround the Indian Ocean.

Oj -- Just how stupid do you think I am?

Read the damn link! "They spread out into the Indian Ocean and struck the coast of India."

The point is that you are in fact wrong. However, there is a difference between some disaster that happens once a century and once a decade.

The difference is not never, it is not as often.

And, if you tell me that what you meant was in the memory of living man, then the Bible does not exist since the events described did not occur in the memory of living man either.

Uncle:

"spread out into the Indian Ocean"

In other words, there's never been a tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

Mr. Judd;

You are completely wrong that feedback looops require intelligence. I know, I design them for a living. It is the purpose of my design to remove any need whatsoever for intelligence in the feedback loops because users are stupid. Note, also, that I don't design the feedback loops themselves. I design a system in which the loops will be emergent properties, i.e. that because of the way the system is structured such loops will occurr without any intelligence having to know or care of their existence.

P.S. You're mixing levels again. Any complex set of rules will support feedback loops. You can argue that good loops require good rules and those in turn require a designer, but that's not at all the same as the loops themselves requiring intelligence.

You are completely wrong that feedback looops require intelligence. I know, I design them for a living.

Now, that's just baiting him.

OJ: Are you saying it can last forever?

Longer than any of us will be around.

Speak for yourself. I'm going to be kept young and healthy by fetal stem cells harvested from my clones delivered with pinpoint precision by nanobots, right up until my consciousness is moved to a computer. There I will while away the days until the energy death of the universe, by which time we will have discovered how each of us can create our own universe, in which we shall be as gods. I'm thinking about something in the classical Zeus line, myself, but I don't want to lock myself into anything.

David:

It seems likely that strength, rather than intelligence, has correlated more highly with successful reproduction and gene spread ...

It seems likely to me that strenght and intelligence correlate most highly with successful gene spread.

BTW--I was referring to intelligence in the general sense, not as a matter of degree. IQs below 80 are not noted for being any more prolific than those above, say, 150.

Ah, intelligence as a human trait, rather than intelligence as a difference within h. sap. I'll still bet on the cockroaches.

David C and oj re "going on forever": Do we remember what the sucessful trait par excellance is? It is adaptability, of course.

Quick, what is it that is known as the "permanent revolution" and "the machine that would go of itself?" Clue: It's not China, and it's not Islam.

David C and oj re "going on forever": Do we remember what the sucessful trait par excellance is? It is adaptability, of course.

Quick, what is it that is known as the "permanent revolution" and "the machine that would go of itself?" Clue: It's not China, and it's not Islam.

Lou: "Adaptability" is what frightens me. Whatever does us in, the doer will be us.

Orrin is wrong about no tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

I talked to several geologists Monday. They all referred to Kerry Sieh, of Caltech, who has been researching this for a few years.

He uses coral cores to find drowned reefs (results of big earthquakes and therefore big tsunami). Around Sumatra they average about 230 years apart.

I did not talk to Sieh, but part of the problem of Lamarckian evolution in this regard is that communications among the various societies around the Indian Ocean was so small that no tradition of areawide tsunami ever emerged. Each little community had its own flood tale, but they hadn't integrated their isolated bits of knowledge to create a higher level of what would have been very useful tradition indeed.

Emergent properties at work.

Sieh's papers are very clear. You should read them, Orrin.

Harry;

The Brits would have noticed it. You should read history.