(urth) Lamarck, Wolfe and Exultants

[David Duffy]

On Thu, 5 Aug 2010, Lane Haygood wrote:

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

No, this is not correct.  The basis for evolutionary psychology come 
from standard "neo-Darwinist" behaviour genetics and sociobiology.

>
> 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

Sure, but able to be studied indirectly in a variety of observational 
designs

> because the kinds of experiments needed to falsify a Lamarckian
> hypothesis are deeply, deeply unethical.

I presume you are thinking about humans here.  There is plenty of evidence 
of epigenetic inheritance, including transmission of behaviours, in other 
species.  Furthermore, the mechanisms, eg genetic imprinting, are well 
understood mechanistically (sections of DNA are marked by addition of 
methyl groups to cytosines).

> 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.

I think Wolfe has thought deeply about this, starting from _tFHoC_, 
_tDoDI_, to the chems, possession, and Horn-Pas-Silk.  Specifically, the 
chems have souls and an interest in right thought and action, but their 
*minds* can be completely controlled by others, and they are aware of 
this.  For "ordinary" humans, their actions are just as frequently 
controlled by society and exigency, even if they have more 
freedom of thought, so that practically they end up in the same boat. 
Many of his characters do as much good as they can within strong 
constraints. Those constraints can easily be genetic predispositions to 
particular behaviours.

Further, staying on Wolfe, he definitely believes in human nature, and 
that this will persist indefinitely, and will be seen in other species or 
in robots.  A la Lem, you will know when you have a true artificial 
intelligence when it demonstrates laziness, duplicity, self interest, and 
a tendency to do other things, such as contributing to news groups, when 
it should be working.


Cheers, David Duffy.