It gets worse. Via Andrew Sullivan, this travesty from Tim Worstall:
The inheritance of acquired characteristics is, in evolutionary terms, referred to as Lamarckian: and as above, with reference to genes, it’s wrong. However, with reference to culture it most certainly is not wrong.
No, I’m not going to try and prove that culture is transmitted in a Lamarckian manner. Rather, I’m going to prove that you and everyone else already believe it is. . . .
So we believe this about our society now: that attitudes, mindsets, extended networks, are indeed transmitted across the generations, not via Darwinian evolution, but in a way that can best be described as Lamarckian. The inheritance by the next generation of characteristics acquired by the previous one.
It goes downhill from there. It's really just a matter of sloppy thinking based on sloppy terminology. (Well, thinking about it, maybe it is more than that -- note the comment about "we all believe it is." We're back to the "belief trumps reality" meme.) Sure, we refer to our cultural heritage as an "inheritance" all the time, but that's a very different meaning of the word than that used to descibe our genetic heritage. It's really no different than the creationists' use of the term "theory": They shuffle back and forth between different meanings in order to fuzz the argument. I can't really tell if Worstall is doing it deliberately, or whether he really doesn't know what he's talking about.
The central flaw, again, is using the term "evolution" to describe the development of culture without any apparent awareness that in that context, the term must be taken as a metaphor. When you start dragging Darwin into discussions of cultural transmission, what you wind up with is a big mess. Adding Lamarck only makes it worse.
The irony here is that there's no reason for Clark or Worstall (or Sullivan, for that matter) to drag in Darwin or Larmarck, or any of it. No one is describing an evolutionary phenomenon. I don't know why any of these people muddied it up like that, except that in Clark's case it's a way to get some attention for a book that has probably been written by several other people at various times with cogently structured arguments based on the real phenomena and mechanisms of the transmission of culture. And yes, we even have a term for it there -- the one I just used. Maybe not as sexy as "evolution," but a hell of a lot more accurate.
Worstall's piece is titled "Getting Greg Clark Wrong." It should be "Getting Everything Wrong."
3 comments:
Perhaps worth mentioning something I added to one of the comments:
"This Lamarck and Darwin is purely my own addition. Yes, I understand that it’s incorrect technically. It’s an allegory, no more, and certainly not the way that Clark himself explains it. It’s just that his critics (or at least this one, today) are insisting that as Darwinian evolution doesn’t work with this speed, or that they don’t want to think that being bourgeois is caused genetically, I’m trying to point out that cultural or memetic evolution does happen….and I’m using the term Lamarckian for that, the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”.
Anything wrong with the analogy is purely my fault, not Clark’s."
Deals with most of your complaints, doesn't it? And yes, I did add it before reading your complaints.
Seems to meet most of my objections, except the fundamental one of dragging the idea of "inheritance" in any sort of biological sense into a discussion of cultural transmission. I don't know that that's entirely your doing -- from the review, Clark does seem to flirt with the idea of genetic change at the root of this, albeit he's very coy about it (and I realize I'm on shaky ground here, not having read his book).
I'm afraid I'm a hardliner on this one -- neither Darwin nor Lamarck have anything to say on this topic, and to bring evolutionary theory into the discussion is just obscuring the reality. The mechanisms are not even congruent.
My basic objection remains: why not talk about cultural transmission in terms of -- well, "cultural transmission"?
Looking at this again, please refer to my previous post, "Darwin, Interrupted." Clark does, indeed, try to posit a genetic/biological basis for his argument without ever quite managing it -- for starters, he presents no evidence. Sort of short-circuits his argument, doesn't it?
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