Interesting article on evolution

Dexter · Wed Apr 20, 2011 4:05 am

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas ... ?page=full

E.O. Wilson is trying to revive group selection to explain altruism, instead of the commonly accepted kin selection (based on genetic relation), and is receiving a hostile reaction.

It's a little short on details about the theory and evidence, but to be expected I suppose given the venue.

I'm sure the anti-evolutionists will pounce on it for showing doubt about orthodox Darwinism, but in fact it shows scientists are always testing their theories instead of accepting them as dogma.

johnson1010 · Wed Apr 20, 2011 2:41 pm

I've always thought answer to this debate on the origin of morality to be a bit obvious.

Can we all agree that teamwork works?

Organisms working together are more successful than organisms working against one another. Working together means being a part of a team, in some way, and that includes looking after the others of your team/herd/tribe/flock to some extent. Then, its the old sliding scale all over again.

Humans may be the MOST intelligent, but certainly dogs are on a sliding scale of intelligence as well. Humans may have the most complex notions of morality, but certainly other animals are also on this sliding scale of moral complexity.

no problem.

Exactly how that shakes out has yet to be determined, but WHETHER it happens it seems to me, is obviously yes.

Dexter · Wed Apr 20, 2011 3:37 pm

It's hard to gather what are the exact details in dispute, but suppose there was a mutation that led to altruistic behavior toward the group instead of directly toward kin -- since the group is more likely to survive, the gene survives. Would either side of the debate disagree?

Is Wilson just saying that the evidence for direct kin selection is weak? The other researcher seemed quite fond of his mathematical model, so it's not clear what the issue is.

johnson1010 · Wed Apr 20, 2011 3:56 pm

I'[m not mad at Wilson, or Dawkins, about whether it was kin groups, or larger group identities which were involved. probably a general cooperative impulse that spreads beyond kinship (people work with animals for similar benefit. Dogs, hawks, even dolphins for mutual benefit and certainly no close familiar ties) though in most cases the groups people would be cooperating with would be their families.

What i was commenting on is the notion that morality must be given down from on-high. People tend to overlook the obvious implications of group chemistry. The necessity of cooperation in groups, and how that is all dictated by the success of groups, over loners, and how that success has direct evolutionary implications.

I havent looked into this debate invovling Wilson all that much. But like i said, it seems obvious where the seeds of morality would have come from.

Thanks for the link, Dexter!

Robert Tulip · Thu Apr 21, 2011 8:04 am


	Dexter wrote: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas ... ?page=full E.O. Wilson is trying to revive group selection to explain altruism, instead of the commonly accepted kin selection (based on genetic relation), and is receiving a hostile reaction. It's a little short on details about the theory and evidence, but to be expected I suppose given the venue. I'm sure the anti-evolutionists will pounce on it for showing doubt about orthodox Darwinism, but in fact it shows scientists are always testing their theories instead of accepting them as dogma.

Kin selection theory is a mechanistic reduction, and does not capture the wholistic reality of human goodness. Wilson is correct in his sociobiological claim that altruism requires a sense of a higher good. Tribes that cooperate are more successful in evolutionary terms than tribes that fight internally. Cooperation is a first step to altruism.

I wrote a review of Wilson's book Anthill. In that review, I commented that the ruthless pressure of evolution has taught ants what they must do to function as a super-organism, providing a template for how humanity must cooperate to prosper over time. Human evolution requires functioning as a super-organism. The best basis for this change is the Sermon on the Mount, interpreted as a moral theory against a scientific lens.

The Nature letter signed by 137 scientists reminds me of the 100 authors who wrote criticising Einstein. His response was "if I were wrong one would have been enough"

Essentially, Wilson's deep point is that human evolution today requires group selection and will not be achieved by kin selection. We need to evolve beyond kin selection as a basis of morality. The Sermon on the Mount and related writings arguably imply that group selection is based on reason and is essential to good while kin selection is based on instinct and is a source of evil. The Biblical morality suggests we need to evolve from kin instinct to group reason as the basis of social organisation. Dawkins and others who effectively argue this is impossible, because there is no group selection, are saying that humanity is doomed.

Dexter · Thu Apr 21, 2011 8:34 am

Dawkins has said that we can and should overcome our Darwinian impulses -- we do it everytime we use birth control, for example.

The theoretical dispute, as I understand it, is about this Darwinian impulse

DWill · Thu Apr 21, 2011 9:04 am

As Dexter says, anti-evolutionists may jump on this disagreement, but if they do it'll be only to say, "Look, even they're not sure how altruism evolved. That means that we're justified in saying that evolution/natural selection is all wrong." A perfect non sequitur.

If this all depends on math I'll never understand, I'm out of the game. I do have a sense of the difficulty Wilson feels with kin selection and altruism, apart from the math. An organism would act in a way possibly harmful to itself, in order to help spare a kin, so that some of the first organism's own genes can get sent to the next generation? How is that urge genetically encoded? We know that Dawkins doesn't mean the organism actually "wants" its genes replicated, only that somehow it will act in defense of kin but not presumably for the sake of non-relateds. But is it true that social animals are altruistic only towards those closely related to themselves? Clearly not, so what is the "motivation"? It's a difficult problem, because if the alternative is some "group" sense, that seems too weak a force to govern behavior. Is group membership always that definite among animals? Do they always know who's in the group and who isn't?

Robert Tulip · Thu Apr 21, 2011 9:32 am


	DWill wrote: is it true that social animals are altruistic only towards those closely related to themselves? Clearly not, so what is the "motivation"? It's a difficult problem, because if the alternative is some "group" sense, that seems too weak a force to govern behavior. Is group membership always that definite among animals? Do they always know who's in the group and who isn't?

In human society, quite obviously group selection is easily strong enough to govern behaviour through the laws of the state, except in situations of instability. The nation-state is a main group where loyalty and sacrifice to the group has been rewarded as heroic, and the same applies at lower levels from the locality to the tribe and clan.

I don't think this sort of group selection necessarily operates with animals, because to me it seems memetic, based on ideas. But there is an inevitable flow through of memetically successful practices into the gene pool. The meme becomes part of the niche of the gene. Groups who are organised and disciplined, subordinating the individual to group identity, have been more successful than those who are not. So there is an adaptive force for group cohesion.

I don't think Dawkins' understanding, for example in the story about how birth control is a triumph of reason over instinct, really reaches into this adaptive memetic dimension of group selection. There is a whole sense in which religion is the control of instinct by reason that Dawkins rejects, partly because of his dogma of kin selection as a reductive mechanism for natural selection.

Dexter · Thu Apr 21, 2011 10:52 am


	Robert Tulip wrote: I don't think Dawkins' understanding, for example in the story about how birth control is a triumph of reason over instinct, really reaches into this adaptive memetic dimension of group selection. There is a whole sense in which religion is the control of instinct by reason that Dawkins rejects, partly because of his dogma of kin selection as a reductive mechanism for natural selection.

I really don't think Dawkins would disagree with your basic point about group selection taking place in human societies, or even the role of religion (regardless of the truth of its claims).

Saffron · Thu Apr 21, 2011 11:07 am


	Dexter wrote: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/04/17/where_does_good_come_from/?page=full E.O. Wilson is trying to revive group selection to explain altruism, instead of the commonly accepted kin selection (based on genetic relation), and is receiving a hostile reaction. It's a little short on details about the theory and evidence, but to be expected I suppose given the venue. I'm sure the anti-evolutionists will pounce on it for showing doubt about orthodox Darwinism, but in fact it shows scientists are always testing their theories instead of accepting them as dogma.

I heard a piece on the NPR station I listen to about Altruism that included E.O. Wilson. I think it was on the program produced by Radio Netherlands, The State We're In. I will have a look when I get home from work and post a link.

Robert Tulip · Thu Apr 21, 2011 7:53 pm


	Dexter wrote: I really don't think Dawkins would disagree with your basic point about group selection taking place in human societies, or even the role of religion (regardless of the truth of its claims).

I actually think this group selection question is decisive for the philosophy of science. Dawkins holds that religion, because it is inherently delusory, cannot continue to provide a useful input into human society, but only provides a negative input, like a malignant recessive gene. But this means that the main source of group identity, common faith, is excluded as a basis of cultural evolution.

We see here the reductio ad absurdum of the modern empirical reductive method, its exclusion of group selection because it has not yet been reduced to a neat logical formula, along the lines of kin selection, even though our world is in a situation where kin selection is utterly inadequate as a theory of morality, which requires an evolutionary theory of the group.

Group selection operates at the level of the whole group, and is rejected by the scientific critics partly because the causal processes are not easily amenable to demonstration and partly because it opens the path towards the dreaded ground of metaphysics. But Wilson says his paper has a mathematics for group selection that his critics have ignored.

The subtext here is that Wilson is entering the terrain of culture war, challenging the individualism that is foundational to science. Dawkins' selfish gene theory, and his hostility to group selection, puts Dawkins squarely within an English empirical tradition that is highly isolative and amenable to the morality of modern bourgeois capitalist society. His atheism becomes a comfortable and smug device to inflict his arrogant sense of British superiority and condescension. Wilson is implying the prevailing scientific paradigm does not meet evolutionary needs, which require the ability of humans to operate as a group, rather than as disconnected kin groups.

DWill · Thu Apr 21, 2011 10:30 pm

Dexter wrote:


	Robert Tulip wrote: I don't think Dawkins' understanding, for example in the story about how birth control is a triumph of reason over instinct, really reaches into this adaptive memetic dimension of group selection. There is a whole sense in which religion is the control of instinct by reason that Dawkins rejects, partly because of his dogma of kin selection as a reductive mechanism for natural selection.

I really don't think Dawkins would disagree with your basic point about group selection taking place in human societies, or even the role of religion (regardless of the truth of its claims).

Dexter, my impression is that Dawkins rejects the whole idea of group selection as a means of natural selection. That an entire group, and not individuals, can be the unit that natural selection works on, so that the group's genes are passed on to the next generation, is what doesn't make any sense at all to him. Animals, including humans, form groups, and we say that this has survival value and thus is natural selection at work. That's the appearance, but doesn't Dawkins say that it's only that, an appearance? The real action is still on the level of the individual passing on its genes by favoring its close relations. The fact that some animals form small or large groups isn't in this view of primary importance. I might not have a tight grasp of Dawkins' thinking, though. Somebody who has The Selfish Gene should look it up for us.

Dexter · Thu Apr 21, 2011 10:51 pm


	DWill wrote: Dexter, my impression is that Dawkins rejects the whole idea of group selection as a means of natural selection. That an entire group, and not individuals, can be the unit that natural selection works on, so that the group's genes are passed on to the next generation, is what doesn't make any sense at all to him.

I think you're right, hence the "selfish gene," that's why he and others are criticizing Wilson. But Dawkins has said that human altruism is not always based on Darwinian kin selection (and it would seem pretty hard to deny this).


	Robert Tulip wrote: Wilson is implying the prevailing scientific paradigm does not meet evolutionary needs, which require the ability of humans to operate as a group, rather than as disconnected kin groups... The subtext here is that Wilson is entering the terrain of culture war, challenging the individualism that is foundational to science. Dawkins' selfish gene theory, and his hostility to group selection, puts Dawkins squarely within an English empirical tradition that is highly isolative and amenable to the morality of modern bourgeois capitalist society.

Robert, I think you are reading some normative claims into Dawkins that aren't there, and in fact he argues the opposite. In my copy of The Selfish Gene, on p. 201:


	Quote: We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism -- something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

DWill · Fri Apr 22, 2011 7:09 am

Dexter wrote:


	DWill wrote: Dexter, my impression is that Dawkins rejects the whole idea of group selection as a means of natural selection. That an entire group, and not individuals, can be the unit that natural selection works on, so that the group's genes are passed on to the next generation, is what doesn't make any sense at all to him.

I think you're right, hence the "selfish gene," that's why he and others are criticizing Wilson. But Dawkins has said that human altruism is not always based on Darwinian kin selection (and it would seem pretty hard to deny this).

Right, human altruism is just human altruism, having little if anything to do with genes being selected for the gene pool.

Saffron · Fri Apr 22, 2011 8:21 am

I found the NPR program I had mentioned a few posts back. It was not The State We're In, but rather it was Radio Lab.

http://www.radiolab.org/2010/dec/14/

This series of Radiolab features programs on challenges to Darwinism; answers to seemingly unsolvable problems; and how symmetry shapes our existence.

The Good Show: April 3 at 6 p.m.; April 10 at 6 a.m.

In this episode, a question that haunted Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, why would one creature stick its neck out to help another? Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

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