Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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Uncommonly Denyse reported upon her correspondent with DeWitt vis dog breeding. She concluded thusly:
| Quote | | Hmmm. We hear plenty about Darwin?s natural selection, but almost nothing about neoteny. And, to the extent that Dawkins was counting on our ignorance of neoteny, why SHOULD he bother to read Edge of Evolution before discouraging others from reading it? |
Denyse, dear, we hear almost nothing about neoteny because we are utterly ignorant of the literature of the field we critique with such confidence. Our ignorance of neoteny is part of a larger ignorance. We are, for example, ignorant of the work of an obscure writer named Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a book in 1977 entitled "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," the thesis of which was that evolutionary modifications of developmental plans, including heterochrony and neoteny, were important in evolution, particularly human evolution:
"I believe that human beings are "essentially" neotenous, not because I can enumerate a list of important paedomorphic features, but because a general, temporal retardation of development has clearly characterized human evolution. This retardation established a matrix within which all trends in the evolution of human morphology must be assessed...This mechanism was utilized again and again in human evolution because retarded development carried a set of potential consequences with it: prolongation of fetal growth rates leading to larger sizes and the retention of juvenile proportions. Is not such a system the proximate cause of evolutionary increase of the human brain?" (p. 365, emphasis in the original.)
Gould's work anticipated evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo), and was immeasurably influential. Sean Carroll in Endless Forms Most Beautiful:
"Such was the setting in the 1970s when voices for the reunion of embryology and evolutionary biology made themselves heard. Most notable was that of Stephen Jay Gould, whose book Ontogeny and Phylogeny revived discussion of the ways in which the modification of development may influence evolution...Gould's book and his many subsequent writings reexamined the "big picture" in evolutionary biology and underscored the major questions that remained unsolved. He planted seeds in more than a few impressionable young scientists, myself included." (p. 7-8)
(I will say, Denyse, that "counting upon your ignorance" does seem a sensible strategy.)
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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