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Okay, as long as we sem to be drifting a bit on this topic...... There is problem in the definition of economic demand and elasicity of demand that will have strong influence upon the ability of the nominal homo "not so' sapiens relative to adapting to rapidly changing economic conditions. One popular choice has been to choose inelasticity and finding a scapegoat population (do I really need to give an example here?) To put in slightly different terms how does culture get adapted to environment as opposed to the more familiar adaptation of adaptation of the environment to expectations, until the inelasticity of the environment strikes back, eg collapsing fishery stocks, dead zones from pollution, or more mundanely shifting from a car culture to high density occupancy. It seems as much to do the principles and vocabulary of economism(note spelling, ie not "economics"). Another variety is political reformism. I went to a grand confabulation of MoveOn.org here recently and they had four top issues and then a a whole elaborate concept of generating a lobbying organization. Trouble is, as one example, in the advocacy of "Clean Energy" they didn't have a clue as to what they were advocating for and what the real choices are, other than a very nebulous "restoring democracy" (doesn't anyone real political and economic history at all?), In the lobbying process they seemed uncommonly tilted toward specious speculations about bio-ethanol or nuclear as an acceptable risk. The more particular response was that I was way ahead of them. It all seems to be more about being caught in a certain set of demand assumptions, and refusing to adapt to the 'environmental' details. It seems to bode very poorly for the hand axe equivalents over pther possibilities. Comments general and specific, please, Tadit On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:37:24 -0500, Michael H Goldhaber <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > The discussion of cultural evolution reminded me of something I wrote > a while ago in an early effort at a blog. See http:// > mhgoldhaber.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_mhgoldhaber_archive.html > > It is titled "Acheulean Hand Axes Ought to Tell Us Something, But > What? " > > Best, > Michael >