ギャルトンの問題について : 通文化研究における機能・伝播・歴史の関係
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概要
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After critically reviewing the four alleged solutions to Galton's Problem, NAROLL'S Interval Sift Method. Linked Pair Method and Cluster Test, and LOFTIN-SIMONTON'S Autocorrelation Method. the author discusses Galton's Problem in an analogy to two biological models: "natural selection" and "genetic drift." He defines "Galton's Problem' as the problem of distinguishing correlations due to the functional linkage between the variables from those produced by sheer historical accidents alone. In biological evolution, more efficiently adapted traits have a chance to be reproduced more widely than those less efficient. This is the process known as "natural selection." For example, the correlation known as "Bergmann's Rule" which states that homothermal animals living in cold areas tend to have greater body bulk than their close relatives in warmer areas, represents such an adaptive process. When the shape is constant, the larger the bulk is, the less is the surface area per unit volume. Consequently, larger bodies can better preserve body heat than smaller ones. Therefore, in cold areas larger bodied animals have a chance to reproduce more offspring than smaller ones, and in hot areas vice versa. In this case, function (causation between environmental temperature and body-bulk) is the cause ; the correlation is the result ; and reproduction is the implement by which means the result is realized by the cause, a media playing a role like the amplifier of a radio. Occasionally it happens that biological traits which have no functional relationship to each other are also widely reproduced together to result in a correlation. This is known as "genetic drift." In a small inbreeding population, gene frequencies fluctuate widely due to sheer chance alone. Once the frequency of a trait is set by chance at a certain point, it will remain as such, under Hardy-Weinberg's Law, even after the population has grown to an enormous one consisting of millions of individuals. The strong (negative) correlation that the gene of Blood-Type B is near-absent among both North and South American Indian populations has been regarded as a product of such genetic drift. It occurs only with functionally-neutral traits. In either natural selection or genetic drift reproduction works as an amplifying media between the cause (function or drift) and the effect (correlation) . It is absurd to sift out the individuals for the reason that they are descended from a common ancestor so as to be "the duplicated copies of the same original." The extent of reproduction in those correlations has nothing to do with whether they are due to function or genetic drift. With correlations between culture traits, the same is true, too. Functionally related traits can better diffuse together than traits which are not functionally related to result in a correlation, as NAROLL (1961: 34-35) pointed out. Unlike he thought, however, not-functionally-related traits also sometimes diffuse together well to form a correlation, because of the following reason : traits which stand in an eufunctional relation to one another must have a tendency to diffuse together, pulling each other like the north and south poles of magnets. Traits which are dysfunctional to each other cannot diffuse together because they resist one another like the same poles of magnets. Traits which stand functionally neutral, neither pull nor resist one another, with the result that they may diffuse together as a historical accident.
- 日本文化人類学会の論文
- 1979-12-30
著者
関連論文
- Raoul Naroll, The Moral Order : An Introduction to the Human Situation, (道徳の秩序 : 人間の状況への序説), 1st ed., Beverly Hills, Sage, 1983, 498 pp.
- ギャルトンの問題について : 通文化研究における機能・伝播・歴史の関係