Jim Farmelant farmelant
> Culture operates as a LaMarckian-like mechanism, i.e. allowing
> cultural or
> extra-somatic/non-bodily inheritance of acquired characteristics..
> In this
> sense, human history goes beyond Darwinian natural history. But
> culture
> doesn't obliterate human au naturelle history.
That's true, although I would add that culture also has its own Darwinian-style selection mechanisms too. Engels seems to have had some awareness of this. Later on, Marxists like Plekhanov and Trotsky discussed the role of variation and selection in human sociocultural evolution, and in more recent times, writers like Gerald Cohen, Eliott Sober, and Alan Carling have all addressed this issue, even to the extent of offering selectionist versions of historical materialism.
^^^^ CB: I agree with Jim's point.
However, I don't think LaMarckian evolutionary mechanisms contradict the selectionist aspect of Darwin's approach. The "acquired characteristic" gives a selective advantage too. The LaMarckian contradiction is that Darwinian _genetic_ inheritance does not involve a direct causal link between the life experience of a parent and that parent's genetic legacy. It is not the giraffe stretching to reach food high in a tree that causes her genes to transform in such a way to evolve a long neck. That would be LaMarckian ,not Darwinian. Socalled LaMarckian (cultural, since LaMarckian biological inheritance doesn't exist; that the central dogma of Darwin inheritance) inheritance , lets say for example the invention of the wheel ( assume the group that invents the wheel gains a selective advantage relative to other groups thereby ), is acquired _from experience_ and still passed on to the next generation. The wheel was invented in experience and passed on directly to the next generation.
New genetic characteristics originate in random mutations, random in the sense that there is a random relationship between a genotypic mutation and its phenotypic characteristic that is selected for.
(I'll try to explain it again, if that's not clear)