Martha said:
>Maybe it's the word "adaptation" that I'm stumbling over.  It seems
>to me that there could be persistent behaviors that we adapt to in
>the sense that they don't significantly slow down our reproduction, yet
>we don't need them, and may even be marginally better off without
>them. What am I missing here?

>Ward said:
>> Martha, unfortunately I guess now I am the one who is unclear. :(
>Could you give an example to illustrate such a behavior? Thanks,

And Martha replied:
>Well, I didn't really have any examples in mind, as I was just
>hypothesizing.  Let's see.....um.....um.....picking petals off daisies!
>Writing letters to Santa!  Ear piercing!  Or no, circumcision!   Let's say
>people do this for millions of generations.  It doesn't seem to interfere
>with reproduction.  But that doesn't mean we now need to do it or
>that it does us any good whatsoever.

Oh, I see what you mean. Hmmm... this is just right off the top my head and
I am not really thinking this through, but as you say the behavior would
have to impact fertility or survival somehow to go into the evolutionary
equation, so if the behaviors you are looking at above didn't affect it,
then they wouldn't be relevant.

Also there is an additional facet of evolutionary reasoning (maybe Peter or
Kirt can help me out here), which is that if the behaviors didn't directly
affect *immediate* survival (like meat- or plant-eating would) the
behaviors themselves would have to affect survival in some more general
"strategic" way, and also have some sort of arguable link with genes that
controlled or gave rise to them.

For example, while it is widely thought--actually there may even be quite
specific evidence for it by now, I'm not sure--that there are *generic*
human behaviors controlled by genes (i.e., the necessary brain-circuitry
and predisposition to language, sufficient hand-eye coordination for
sophisticated tool-use, enough brainpower/intelligence for general
reasoning abilities involving foresight and learning consciously from past
experience, etc.), the link to *specific* behaviors like what you are
proposing above probably could not be demonstrated, and if not, they would
have no specific survival effect.

In other words, the general predisposition to language, culture (a strong
and flexible social net is another aspect of human survival), intelligence,
tool-use are in the genes, but their very power in humanity's case is that
they are general-purpose abilities with great flexibility making us
extremely "plastic" and adaptable behavior-wise. Which is one thing that
distinguishes human adaptation from many of the other animals (excepting
perhaps other primates, whales, dolphins, who knows). We aren't tied into
genetically controlled behaviors so tightly like nest-building as birds
are, we have greater "range" and flexibility. I'm probably rambling
again... enough... :-)

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS