keannu
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- Dec 27, 2010
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This writing needs some scientific knowledge like "Lamarckism, the theory of use and disuse". What do you think the two underlined are trying to say? This is a question of a college entrance exam, and the answer was the summary. It seems to denote that the enviroment affected the genetics, not vice versa.
ex) Recent evidence suggests that the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern people, living about 400,000 years ago, may have already been using pretty sophisticated language. If language is based on genes and is the key to cultural evolution, and Neanderthals had language, then why did the Neanderthal toolkit show so little cultural change?
Moreover, genes would undoubtedly have changed during the human revolution after 200,000 years ago, but more in response to new habits than as causes of them. At an earlier date, cooking selected mutations for smaller guts and mouths, rather than vice versa. At a later date, milk drinking selected for mutations for retaining lactose digestion into adulthood in people of western European and East African descent. The appeal to a genetic change driving evolution gets gene-culture co-evolution backwards: it is a top-down explanation for a bottom-up process.
summary : The cultural horse comes before the genetic cart
ex) Recent evidence suggests that the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern people, living about 400,000 years ago, may have already been using pretty sophisticated language. If language is based on genes and is the key to cultural evolution, and Neanderthals had language, then why did the Neanderthal toolkit show so little cultural change?
Moreover, genes would undoubtedly have changed during the human revolution after 200,000 years ago, but more in response to new habits than as causes of them. At an earlier date, cooking selected mutations for smaller guts and mouths, rather than vice versa. At a later date, milk drinking selected for mutations for retaining lactose digestion into adulthood in people of western European and East African descent. The appeal to a genetic change driving evolution gets gene-culture co-evolution backwards: it is a top-down explanation for a bottom-up process.
summary : The cultural horse comes before the genetic cart