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Excellent! Thanks for your effort and the info. Prof David West wrote: > I was thinking of the Yanomami when I wrote this paragraph. I would > have to return to grad school notes to find others. > >> That would mean that given any _two_ cultures, there are some >> identifiable universals (over the set of two). >> >> But as we increase the size of the set from two to three to N, the >> number of those invariants shrinks, perhaps quite rapidly. > > You can also have commonalities across a subset of "all cultures" - for > example, there seem to be a limited number of kinship patterns with a > given pattern shared by a number of cultures rather than a different > kinship scheme for each culture. >> >> Is there such a strong argument out there? Do we have some idea of how >> rapidly invariants fade as the number of cultures is increased? > > I might depend on the specific practice (invariant) at issue. For > instance: the practice of polygamy - specifically polygyny - sixty > percent of the world's cultures practice/sanction polygyny to the > invariant covers a large majority of cultures. At the same time, > polyandry is practiced by less than ten cultures, so you almost > immediately find variants. Within the ten - cultures that practice > polandry, most of them (I don't remember the exact number) practice > fraternal polyandry, so within the subset the invariant is high. > >> >> But doesn't rationale like this lead one to think that "culture" is, >> itself, just a convenient packaging of biology? I.e. all culture >> probably reduces to biology, we're just too ignorant to know _how_? > > No, I think it is merely the fringe of unknowns where this there is > uncertainty. I think that most anthropologists believe that most of > their field of study is not reducible to biology. The exception being > socio-biologists that do want to reduce all of culture to biology - > humans and human culture are merely the means for genes to replicate > themselves. > > I just remembered - the mind is a strange thing - the closest answer to > your original question about differentiation of anthro from bio - social > transmission. Culture is transmitted from one person to another, and > more importantly from one generation to another via social mechanisms, > not biological. - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. -- Socrates -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFH4TTupVJZMHoGoM8RAunFAJ0e17WkAeRtFGcyotdeD1vhZUQTnACfR7zJ WTlZx9HfNPJT4ciUcwO+iLE= =0UD2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
