Scholars have referred to Homo sapiens’ game-changing capacity to transform the biological evolutionary process into an intellectual exercise—or what I refer to as super-adaptability (McGettigan, 2011, 2013)—in a variety of ways. Karl Popper (1999) distinguishes between biological and cognitive problem solving. In so doing, Popper emphasizes that for most organisms the one and only means of resolving survival problems is via Darwinian evolution: nature’s creations either evolve random genetic solutions to survival problems, or they go extinct. However, Popper adds that humans have developed a unique capacity to resolve survival problems intellectually. As a result, humans have succeeded in concocting and deploying efficacious solutions to survival problems at the speed of thought. Indeed, Richard Dawkins (1989) developed the concept of “memes” to identify the intellectual equivalent of genes in order to describe Homo sapiens’ unique ability to adapt culturally.
Biologists believe that genetic change is primarily Darwinian—that is, it occurs via natural selection operating upon undirected variation. Human cultural evolution is Lamarckian—the useful discoveries of one generation are passed directly to offspring by writing, teaching and so forth (Gould, 1987, p. 70).
…there are no real shape-shifters in nature…Being limited to what their collections of genes evolved to do, no one species can do everything. That was, of course, until humans came along and rewrote all the rules that had held for billions of years of biological evolution…Where all those species that had gone before us were confined to the particular genetic corner their genes adapted them to, humans had acquired the ability to transform the environment to suit them, by making shelters, or clothing, and working out how to exploit its resources (Pagel, 2012, p. 46).
References
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Gould, Stephen Jay. An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
McGettigan, Timothy. Good Science: The Pursuit of Truth and the Evolution of Reality. Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2011.
Cite This Article
Timothy McGettigan (2013). Ideas Having Sex: Lamarckian Evolution Triumphant. The Socjourn. [https://sociology.org/ideas-having-sex-lamarckian-evolution-triumphant/]
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