I’m half way through the article and it’s been an interesting read so far but I got to this sentence:
> But that is the trouble: we have no way to tell which traditions are adaptive and which are merely drift.
The article (so far) didn’t provide evidence for that. I’d even say that the article provides some evidence against this claim. It describes a bunch of traditions, identifies them as useful, and explains why they’re useful. I thik there are exaples of traditions that people identified as useless (or harmful). Like using torture to extract confessions (I hope this is an example old enough to not be controversial).
So far my impression is that the article makes a good case for “distinguishing useful traditions is hard” and provides a few examples of traditions for which reasons why they’re good require way more knowledge than people executing those traditions have. Still saying it’s impossible seems wrong.
On the other hand pointing out that we might invent a wrong explanation for a tradition (removing bitternes from manioc) and screw up the clean up process is a good point.
I’m half way through the article and it’s been an interesting read so far but I got to this sentence:
> But that is the trouble: we have no way to tell which traditions are adaptive and which are merely drift.
The article (so far) didn’t provide evidence for that. I’d even say that the article provides some evidence against this claim. It describes a bunch of traditions, identifies them as useful, and explains why they’re useful. I thik there are exaples of traditions that people identified as useless (or harmful). Like using torture to extract confessions (I hope this is an example old enough to not be controversial).
So far my impression is that the article makes a good case for “distinguishing useful traditions is hard” and provides a few examples of traditions for which reasons why they’re good require way more knowledge than people executing those traditions have. Still saying it’s impossible seems wrong.
On the other hand pointing out that we might invent a wrong explanation for a tradition (removing bitternes from manioc) and screw up the clean up process is a good point.