Thursday, March 12, 2009

Art and evolution (con'td.) ...

... The Peacock Problem. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The argument, as I understand it (or misunderstand it) is that the overriding drive underlying evolution has to do with adaptation in the interest of survival. There seems to be a bit of circularity in this. Any species that has survived is presumed to have adapted. But the proof that it adapted seems to have been that it survived. Anyway, given this assumption, one then thinks up ways in which a given behavior may have or could have contributed to survival. One then concludes that it did contribute to survival and was therefore an adaptation in the interest of survival.

2 comments:

  1. Not necessarily. A species can survive simply because nothing came along to kill it off yet.;) And any specific adaptation only works against some specific environmental background, so we have a rather stringent set of criteria to discover such adaptations, and, in fact, given the environmental conditions, can predict the specific adaptations that will be advantageous (or not). Nothing is assumed.

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  2. Thanks for the clarification, but it doesn't quite address the argument advanced by those who would explain various human activities - e.g., art - in terms of survival, since they are certainly assuming that we didn't just survive because nothing killed us off and are specifically assuming that an essential human characteristic - the making of art - can bets be explained as contributing to said survival. Also, an example of a predicted adaptation would be useful. There is, presumably, no record of anyone predicting that art would enable humans to survive.

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