Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, December 23, 2013, 04:34 (3989 days ago) @ David Turell

Matt: I think evolution alone is sufficient, and that the rapid advances we've seen in humanity is perhaps that we were the first ones to exhibit behaviors that allowed advantages that were written right back into our genome. Once social behavior began to develop, it created an evolutionary paradigm shift. The only intelligence necessary to explain man's jump is his own: an intelligent being can sidestep the automata of nature and begin to quite literally select on himself and his kin. (In the evolutionary sense.) 
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> > I haven't started it yet, but E.O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth" argues that the dominance of humans as well as the dominance of ants and bees is precisely due to our similar adoption of social behaviors.
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> We have no way to understand why our brain grew as it did but as we became upright and our hands developed the dexterity apes don't have there is obviously a feedback loop where the use of the hands drove the brain motor development. The development of speech with alteration of our throat, palate, tongue muscles and larynx drove the brain speech areas to develop, another feedback loop, and so on. A plethora of beneficial changes, none of which were required by the challenges of nature. All serendipity?
> -If you understand the LONG feud between Wilson and Dawkins you'll understand that Wilson states that instead of the "selfish gene" that the primary driver of evolution in humans is the demands placed on us by social circumstances. That's based on a summary of his work, and not a detailed reading, but you should be able to see immediately the primary difference: Dawkins takes the traditional "geological" approach to evolution, and E.O. Wilson takes an approach that directly states that evolution can make rapid advances in species that become reliant on social circumsntaces. In my mind, I think that the evolution of hands, language and motor skills are all interdependetly related on the fact that we're social creatures and that mutual survival of the group tends to dominate selection for traits we pass to our offspring. -> I agree with your comment about socialization as a major factor.-And I think that a retroactive look at socialization both at the cellular level and the macro level will address many of the supposed "gaps" we see in the record.

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