Lateral and Vertical Transfer in Biology, Linguistics and Anthropology: An Account of Widely Neglected Ideas in the Formation of Evolutionary Theories

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• 作者：Frank Kressing
• 关键词：Reticulate evolution ; Socio ; cultural evolution ; Anthropology ; Co ; evolution ; Lateral/horizontal transfer ; Interdisciplinary networks
• 刊名：Evolutionary Biology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：December 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：43
• 期：4
• 页码：474-480
• 全文大小：
• 刊物主题：Evolutionary Biology; Ecology; Developmental Biology; Human Genetics; Animal Genetics and Genomics;
• 出版者：Springer US
• ISSN：1934-2845
• 卷排序：43

文摘

The scope of this paper is to highlight models of reticulate evolution in a dual sense: (1) by stressing the importance of early models of horizontal/lateral transfer instead of models of unilinear vertical transfer in biology, linguistics, anthropology and related disciplines, and (2) by demonstrating that the acceptance of evolutionism as leitmotif in the nineteenth century was only possible by intense and repeated networks between scholars of different academic realms which lead to the assumption that the development of biological species and human cultures could be perceived as part of the same co-evolutionary process. Contrary to these widely popularized models of unilinear evolution, I would like to draw attention to alternative theories emphasizing the horizontal transfer of words, phenotypes/genotypes, and culture traits. Examples are the method of areal typology in linguistics, the theory of endosymbiosis in biology, and the anti-evolutionist attitude in Boasian anthropology, combined with an emphasis on the diffusion of culture traits. Further, it shall be pointed out that, even when—after the general dismissal of evolutionist ideas in the beginning of the twentieth century—the idea of co-evolutionary processes in the development of human populations and languages was again forwarded in the late twentieth century, this ‘modern synthesis’ of genetics, linguistics and archeology relied largely on interdisciplinary reticulations between sciences and humanities and serves as another example of reticulate evolution.