Reply to James Francis from Human Ethology YahooGroup

[Craig Mackay]

Posted by: "mackaycraig11" c...@ast.cam.ac.uk   mackaycraig11

Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:28 am (PDT)

Dear James

I am sorry not to have been able to respond to your postings before
now, having been away for a little over a week.

You raise a number of interesting points which I shall try to respond
to that let me start by saying that you must remember firstly that I
am not a professional ethologist but an astronomer with interest in
this and many other areas. Secondly what I have written is not
intended as an academic text but as a book for the general reader of
popular science. As a consequence I often use words much less
rigorously than you might so when I say "behaviour" most people would
know what I was talking about in a general sense. I also have to be
careful to avoid using the more technical terms in order to maintain
accessibility in what I have written.

You say that "everything a person does is inextricably linked to
information coded in DNA and structures that result thereof", which I
think is missing the point I'm trying to make. Our brain is formed
with a large number (10^11) neurons massively interconnected. The
learning process progressively disconnect these neurons (and not the
other way round as is commonly believed). As a consequence the brain
structure that you and I have is the result on our experiences which
modulate our DNA coded organ, the brain that we were born with, but
everything a person does apart from a few very basic behavioural
patterns is learned and not coded in DNA. The brain structures that
we have today is continually being adjusted as a consequence of our
experiences, what we learn from others, how we perceive our behaviour
has been received by others, together with the structures that we have
created ourselves as a consequence of the process we call reasoning.
None of this is passed to our children through DNA, but this is in
fact what is the most important part, I believe, of human evolution
today. The principal direction of this propagation is peer-peer and
only secondly from generation to generation.

My previous posting was sloppy in the use of the words brain/mind. I
agree that when I talk about inappropriate behaviour I do indeed mean
maladaptive behaviour.

I think that your distinction between transient sensory experiences
and major influences committed to long-term memory is too simplistic.
In practice a great deal of our behaviour is pretty trivial and
transitory but clearly does affect our brain structure because we
learn from almost everything we do and not just from the major inputs.
What happens to elementary, inconsequential experiences is that we
learn by repetition and that fairly slight changes to brain
interconnections is carried out at a low level continually. The
distinction between short-term and long-term memory is convenient
(most of us forget a six digit number within a few minutes) but it is
most unlikely such a distinction is actually as rigid as
short-term/long-

term implies. A consequence of all this is that I
think that very little social behaviour is attributable to the DNA we
received from our parents and the vast majority is learned with a
spectrum of experiences from utterly trivial to life changing.

You wonder about "what use is the Supergene if it does not behave like
some viruses and let the host live long enough to ensure it passes
itself on". I think this is not at all what actually happens.
Firstly the concept of a single Supergene is not one I ever use. I do
not believe our behaviour can be broken into elements which are
distinguishable at all in the way that our DNA may be deconstructed
into individual genes or base pairs. Our instantaneous behaviour is
an expression of a vast number of constructs in our brain, an
expression of the patterns in our brains structure (mathematicians
might like to think of components of the Fourier transform of a
function rather than the individual points that make up the function).
The viral analogy central to memetics is, I think, unhelpful because
of many reasons but particularly the view that it makes us no more
than unthinking automatons, slaves to a competitive and destructive
battle to survival in our minds. The Supergene concept rather
emphasises the wholeness and complete this of what is in each of our
brains and the way that by working as effectively to be optimally
adapted to our social environment we are most likely to be able to
influence others to accept part of our own behaviour/views/opinions
etc and make them ultimately their own. This is how we individually
evolve and the society with which we are best adapted can be thought
of as evolving as a consequence.

There is no doubt that our society is evolving very rapidly but I do
not think that our fundamental values are changing so much because it
is those values that allowed society and groups to survive and
prosper. Ancient art (cave paintings and carvings), and the oldest
literature we have (Greek and Chinese writings including plays and
poetry) suggests that the fundamentals of what makes humans tick is
not now so very different. We like many other animals have circadian
cycles but that does not imply in any way that our behaviour now was
established millions of years ago in an environment utterly different
from where we are now so that human behaviour, as understood by
evolutionary psychologists, is a consequence of those ancient
behaviour patterns being poorly adapted to the modern world.

I hope this answers some of your points at least!

Best wishes

Craig Mackay