On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Alexx Kay wrote: > > me: > > To me the greatest advantage of these laws was that it set the > > community apart from their neighbors, as did circumcision. This > > separation probably brought a lot of persecution but a lot of cohesion as > > well. > > There is an intriguing and relevant evolutionary theory that this reminds > me of. > > Consider the problem of introducing genetic change to a population. If > the population is very large, and interbreeds essentially at random, then > mutations, even favorable ones, will tend to get "damped out", and vanish > before having a chance to become part of the general genome. Such a > species is very stable, but less likely to be able to adapt quickly to > the next environmental change. > > One "solution" to this, which evolution appears to have "invented", is > Culture. That is, an arbitrary set of behaviours that seperates the > species into small breeding pools. These pools are small enough that > favorable mutations will often spread throughout the pool, rather than > be damped out by widespread interbreeding. [extensive snippage] As present this sounds like an argument for species-level evolution, which I tend not to believe in, being a gene-level guy myself. Dawkins/Dennett refer to evolutionary change along with culture as the Good Trick or Baldwin effect and say the combo speeds evolution but is not evolution per se, if I understand their thinking. > If true, this theory has some interesting implications. Language > evolved as a tool for easy differentiation of Culture, not because > of intelligence. I've long thought that language was developed so that people could write poetry (or songs, if one insists) in order to get laid.