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From: moshes@gemini.math.tau.ac.il (Moshe Sipper)
Subject: Re: Cultural Evolution
Message-ID: <1994Sep21.153354.7740@aristo.tau.ac.il>
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Organization: School of Math & CS - Tel Aviv University , Tel Aviv , ISRAEL.
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Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 15:33:54 GMT
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In article <35lc51$c05@scratchy.reed.edu> jhopson@reed.edu (jhopson) writes:
>
>     I was sitting throught sociology class today, and I had an idea.
>We were discussing the interaction of culture, genetics, and
>environment, and how to sort through data to track down complex causes.
> And I had an idea.  Cultural evolution seems to be Lamarkian, both in
>us and in other lifeforms(primates).  This would seem to be an
>indicator of consciousness, if ideas learned by one generation are
>passed to the next.  What implications does it have if our institutions
>and culture evolve larmarkicly?  Wouldn't it be odd if we had a gene
>for Lamarkian cultural evolution?
>
>     Just a thought.
>
>
>
>                          John Hopson


You can find reference to this idea in:

J. D. Farmer and A. d'A. Belin,
Aritifical Life: The Coming Evolution,
Artificial Life II, edited by C. G. Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer and
S. Rasmussen, Addison-Wesley, 1992.

(The paper originally appeared in the "Proceedings in Celebration of Murray
Gell-Mann's 60th Birthday", Cambridge University Press, 1991).

In section 4.2 of their paper they discuss Lamarckian vs. Darwinian Evolution,
maintaining that cultural evolution is essentially Lamarckian.
They also discuss the relevance of Lamarckian evolution to ALife, where an
artificial life form has direct control of its genome.


Moshe Sipper.
--

Yours sincerely,

Moshe Sipper.
