Title: Evolution 18This shows that we can use the concept of evolution to describe any case where a vector representing the average characteristics of a population can be considered to change in time from 'generation' to 'generation'. We can thus say that behavior 'evolves' if we can find a vector representation of behavior and find some principle that constrains the way the average behavior vector changes.
This vector representation of behavior is provided in the subsequent pages. The need for conformity provides the basis of an intergenerational consistency so that, with some random variation, children learn their behavior from their parents because they must learn to speak in order to be considered human. This means that there is the same general kind of intergenerational constraint on behavior that there is on physiology, no matter how much or how little of behavior is genetically determined.
Thus human behavior can be said to evolve with just as much validity as biological characteristics, and the principle of the Survival of the Just-barely-fit applies as much to human behavior as anything else that evolves.
The primary conclusion is that a mathematical representation of biological evolution (whether in the geometric or algebraic representation) provides a non-prejudicial and non-ideological way of looking at the process. This representation shows that the basic principle of biological evolution is not "Survival of the Fittest" but "Survival of the Just-Barely-Fit", and that such actions as cooperation and altruism are conducive to evolutionary survival rather than impediments to it. The representation also shows that social behavior can be said to evolve just as much as biological characteristics.
It also shows that a science such as biology can be led astray by ideology--not only the simplistic ideology of the protestant fundamentalists but by the elitist ideology of the subculture from which biological scientists are primarily recruited, the melanin-deficient upper middle class.
This leads to the general conclusion that it is extremely useful to a science if it can be represented mathematically because it is more difficult to hide ideological preconceptions in mathematical analysis than in verbal argument.