(urth) Lamarck, Wolfe and Exultants

[Lane Haygood]

Lamarckism is making a comeback in the pseudoscience of evolutionary
psychology.

It's still just as much crap as Lamarckism is, but the spectre of
heritable acquired traits just will not die from the popular
consciousness, probably because the ideas of "corruption of blood" and
the "sins of the father" are so prevalent within our mythologies.  It
breaks down along the same inscrutable fault lines as the "nature
versus nurture" debate about how we, and other organisms, learn our
behavior.  How much is instinct?  How much is conditioned?

As best I can tell, the answer is "a mix of both" in unknown ratios
because the kinds of experiments needed to falsify a Lamarckian
hypothesis are deeply, deeply unethical.  The way one feels toward
evolutionary psychology (and related doctrines) tends to have more to
do with how one feels about a range of philosophical issues, from
one's stance on the mind, to the metaphysics of souls, to base
factionalism.  So I recognize my own rejection of it as calumny
reflects my own particular biases against such concepts as "human
nature," a materialist account of consciousness, or phenotypic
properties being causally-linked to genetic properties.

But I think I have darn good reasons to find such concepts
objectionable, so via the transitive property of bad ideas, modern
Lamarckisms are vile calumny.

LH

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>> Wolfe is quoted as thus...
>>>> "I didn't know that anybody was working in the Lamarckian area, today
>>>> to be honest with you. I think somebody should be because I have
>>>> never been convinced that Lamarck was wrong."
>>>>
>>>> Lamarckism states that acquired traits are inherited.
>>>
>>> Yes, but "Lamarckism" is not a product of Lamarck himself. Inheritance
>>> of acquired characteristics is an ancient idea in one form or another,
>>> and Darwin allowed something like it in his idea that somatic tissues
>>> generated heritable "gemmules" in response to the development or
>>> disuse of various organs.
>>
>> Actually, aspects of Larmarckism are making a comeback with the
>> understanding that our bodies are determined by more than our DNA
>> blueprints. The following is a link to an abstract of a study that
>> argues that your longevity is significantly determined by whether your
>> grandparents experienced famine in their childhood.
>>
>> http://www.springerlink.com/content/x61m87x016213823/
>>
>> Obviously, if a trait can be acquired across generations based on
>> experiences occurring before the second generation was even conceived,
>> this could --over time-- have an evolutionary effect.
>
> This may or may not be an "acquired" trait so much as a flexible
> phenotype. There's also jazz like epigenetics and reversion that can
> effectively undo the adaptation in a small number of generations; we need
> many generations to be sure. But this may not have been available to the
> author at the time of writing.
>
>
>
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