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EDWARD O. WILSON was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929. He received his
The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.
The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities.
major
To see this point clearly, think of a blossom in a painting rendered photographic in detail and as beautiful as life. In our minds the macroscopic entity has truth because it matches real flowers sprung from the soil. From a distance we might easily confuse the image with the real thing. But the algorithms that created it are radically different. Its microscopic elements are flakes of paint instead of chromosomes and cells. Its developmental pathways exist in the brain of the artist, not in prescription by DNA of the unfolding of tissues. How do theoreticians know that their
Plato's allegory of thee cave
complexity theory,
connections—more precisely, the points of connection and the ultramicroscopic
yet remain capable of reasoned responses when pressed. •
Epilepsy
The polarization promotes, for one thing, the perpetual recycling of the nature-nurture controversy, spinning off mostly sterile debates on gender, sexual preferences, ethnicity, and human nature itself.
There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides.
The question remaining is how biology and culture interact,
process called gene-culture coevolution.
epigenetic
The innate tendency to react with both fear and fascination toward snakes is the epigenetic rule. The culture draws on that fear and fascination to create metaphors and narratives.
gene-culture coevolution, culture is reconstructed each generation collectively in the minds of individuals. When oral tradition is supplemented by writing and art, culture can grow indefinitely large and it can even skip generations. But the fundamental biasing influence of the epigenetic rules, being genetic and ineradicable, stays constant.
human species has evolved genetically by natural selection in behavior, just as it has in the anatomy and physiology of the brain. Poisonous snakes have been an important source
Gene-culture coevolution is a special extension of the more general process of evolution by natural selection.
Chance mutations are the raw material of evolution.
“Culture is a product; is historical; includes ideas, patterns, and values; is selective; is learned; is based upon symbols; and is an abstraction from behavior and the products of behavior.”
culture has departed from the genes and become a thing unto itself.
omnis cultura ex cultura.
Whether that metaphor is accepted or not, the undeniable truth is that each society creates culture and is created by it. Through
Culture is constructed with language
symbols invented purely to convey information.
tightly prescribed by genes and cannot be altered by learning.
lack the singular human capacity to invent rather than merely to use symbolic language.
rightfully be called the babbling ape.
But that perception needs to be accepted with caution: Chimpanzee inventions may not be culture in any sense.
they seldom imitate the precise movements employed or show any clear sign of understanding the purpose of the activity.
summary, the language instinct consists of precise mimicry, compulsive loquacity, near-automatic mastery of syntax, and the swift acquisition of a large vocabulary.
The instinct is a diagnostic and evidently unique human trait, based upon a mental power beyond the reach of any animal species, and it is the precondition for true culture.
When did symbolic language arise, and exactly how did it ignite the exponentiation of cultural evolution?
least for the time being. To pick up the trail of gene-culture coevolution,
Episodic memory recalls the direct perception of people and other concrete entities through time, like images seen in a motion picture. Semantic memory, on the other hand, recalls meaning by the connection of objects and ideas to other objects and ideas, either directly by their images held in episodic memory or by the symbols denoting the images.
But the brain has a strong tendency to condense repeated episodes of a kind into concepts, which are then represented by symbols.
Concepts and their symbols are usually labeled by words.
coloring
the essence of what we refer to as meaning.
In due course they will capture the physical basis of mental concepts through the mapping of neural activity patterns.
When new episodes and concepts are added to memory, they are processed by a spreading search through the limbic and cortical systems, which establishes links with previously created nodes.
natural elements of culture can be reasonably supposed to be the hierarchically arranged components of semantic memory,
node-as-meme,
The total variation in the trait in all the survivable environments is the norm of reaction of that gene or group of genes in that species.
and estimate the amount of the variation due to heredity.
fraction is the heritability.
estimating the fraction of variation due to the genes—the heritability—
only the same number of genes
thus possessing the same heredity
But it contains oddities that deserve close attention with reference to the consilience between genetics and the social sciences.
