Notebook per
Is There a Role for Intelligence in Evolution
Citation (APA): riccardo-mariani@libero.it. (2016). Is There a Role for Intelligence in Evolution [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Is There a Role for Intelligence in Evolution?
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Kevin N. Laland
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Evolution is portrayed in austere terms as a natural process that hews all the prodigious richness and complexity of life out of chance mutational events and the purposeless forces of nature.
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x ORTODOSSIA DELL EV CIECA
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biologists have been deeply skeptical of attempts to attribute any guiding role to intelligent agents.
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GUIDA INTELLIGENTE
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Intelligent Design,
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the impulse to distance themselves from such accounts has led evolutionary biologists to accentuate the role of chance
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x EFFETTI ESTRANEI ALLA RICERCA
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natural selection has given rise to savvy agents that behave in smart, flexible ways, deploying a bootstrapped intelligence that has fed back on and upgraded evolution itself.
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x L IDEA DEL MOMENTO
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in a manner that allows species to co-direct their evolution.
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c
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How Culture Shaped the Human Genome
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T
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there is now evidence that our cultural activities have shaped the human genome.
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TESI
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the development of statistical methods for identifying genes that have been favored by natural selection over the past 50,000 years or less.
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x ULTIMI 50000 ANNI
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distinct regions in the human genome have been identified as subject to recent selection.
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many of these regions appear to have been favored by human cultural practices.
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Some compelling examples of how genes and culture have coevolved concern genetic responses to changes in human diet.
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x DIETE
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Consider, for instance, the evolution of the human ability to eat starchy foods. Agricultural societies typically consume far more starch in their diets than do hunter-gatherer societies.
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c AMIDO
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The enzyme responsible for breaking down starch is called amylase.
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c
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their cultural activities and associated diets have generated selection for increased amylase.
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c
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Another good example of gene– culture coevolution is the evolution of lactose tolerance in adult humans in response to dairy farming.
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x LATTOSIO
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For most humans, the ability to digest lactose disappears in childhood, but in some populations lactase activity, which is necessary for breaking down lactose, persists into adulthood. This adult lactose tolerance is frequent in northern Europeans and in pastoralist populations from Africa and the Middle East, but it is almost completely absent elsewhere. These differences relate to genetic variation near the lactase gene (LCT). There
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c
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populations with a long history of consuming milk have high frequencies of tolerance.
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c
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The signature of selection around the lactase gene is one of the strongest in the human genome, and the onset of the selection has been dated to 5,000– 10,000 years ago.
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x RAPIDITÀ 5000 10000
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Once again, this cultural practice has imposed selection on domesticated animals: milk-protein genes in European cattle breeds correlate to present-day patterns of lactose tolerance in human populations.
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x CONTAGIO AGLI ANIMALI DOMESTICI
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There is also emerging evidence of diet-related selection on the thickness of human teeth enamel, and on bitter-taste receptors on the tongue. It seems that a gene– culture coevolutionary process has shaped the biology of human digestion.
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x SMALTO DENTI
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x RICETTORI DELLA LINGUA
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x DIGESTIONE
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In these and other instances, it is not as if we humans have deliberately imposed selection on ourselves in a conscious effort to enhance our capabilities to metabolize or detoxify the foods we have chosen to consume. But we appear to have imposed a direction on our own evolution nonetheless.
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x NON VOLONTARIO MA DIREZIONE IMPRESSA
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Thousands of years ago, humans kept wolves, choosing for company the less aggressive among them without recognizing that this selection, iterated over time, would favor profound changes in the wolf phenotype and lead to mild-mannered canine descendants.
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x LUPO E CANE. EVOLUZIONE GUIDATA ALTRE SPECIE
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docility, tameness, reductions in tooth size and number, changes in head, face, and brain morphology, floppy ears
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A second domestication syndrome has also been found in plants. Here characteristic features include a loss of head shattering— the process by which plants disperse their seeds upon ripening— and increases in seed size.
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x PIANTE
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Planting crops and tending animals are examples of human “niche construction”— the process by which organisms change their environment in a way that puts new evolutionary pressures on their species and others, triggering the evolution of new adaptive traits.
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x NICCHIA
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Cultivating plants and domesticating animals are not random activities. They are purposeful, goal-directed practices,
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x SCOPO
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In the process, we have imposed a direction on some evolutionary episodes
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Our cultural activities may even affect evolutionary rates. For instance, according to one study, human genetic evolution has accelerated more than a hundredfold over the last 40,000 years.
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x VULTURA E VELOCITÀ EVOLUTIVA
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selection explains the capability but not the content of our behavioral practices
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x ACOMPETENZE E CONTENUTI
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The fact that natural selection underlies our ability to learn, communicate, and engage in cultural practices does not tell us which populations will engage in agriculture, nor what form these practices will take in a particular population, nor what evolutionary episodes will ensue.
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c
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why is niche construction not widely recognized as an evolutionary process?
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T
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For example, in nineteenth-century England, gene variants responsible for dark coloration in the peppered moth population became more common than the gene variants for light coloration, in part because industrial pollution had blackened the surfaces on which the moths settled, leaving the darker moths less visible to predators. Eventually, partly as a result of this predation, natural selection eliminated the gene for light coloration, leaving only the dark colored moths in the population. This is a classic example of natural selection directly changing the prevalence of genes in a population over time.
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x CASO CLASSICO DI MUTAZIONE NEODARWINIANA ORTODOSSA
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Can the same argument be made for the niche construction of worms, birds, or spiders?
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T
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animals control certain aspects of their environment,
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Changes due to niche construction, as opposed to other natural processes, are recognizable because they are reliable, directional, and orderly,
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ORDINER
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Some, more traditionally minded, evolutionists typically treat humans as a special case, arguing that there are special properties pertaining to our species’ niche construction that stem from our unique capacity for culture. This allows them to defend the position that niche construction is not a general evolutionary process, but rather a trait peculiar to humans that has no significant impact on broader evolutionary forces.
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x L UOMO CASO SPECIALE
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Indeed, humans have been described as “the world’s greatest evolutionary force,”
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L BUOMO NLA PIÙCGRANDE FORZA EVO
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Choice and Intelligence
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T
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Organisms can influence the trajectory of evolution through their active choices
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MODO X DIREZIONARWE L EVOLUZIONE
