Who knows? I presume the excerpt (from Climbing Mount Improbable) is via this recent SciAm blog post.
That's assuming that the real explanation isn't even better than one which basically reduces flowers to the level of wallpaper.
Soulless at any rate, or haven't you read The God Delusion?
....me neither.
Wait, scientifically, isn't the kid right? Wildflowers do provide pollen which is used by bees which both contribute to the overall balance of the broader ecosystem. And the flowers being pretty attracts the bees! (IANAS...)
This also sort of reminds me of a convo with Rory recently after I had gone to Mass. She was sharing her thoughts on the lack of scientific evidence for the existence of God and how God is nice as an abstract idea but she doesn't really buy the whole God thing as a matter of concrete reality. There is a definite tension, as a parent, between wanting your kid to believe what you believe and wanting your kid to have the freedom to find her own way in the world. I lean toward the latter, but do wonder if I've done/am doing her a disservice by not providing more of a spiritual background.
Third choice:victim of the enlightenment
"Soulless shithead" is a zombie, isn't it?
Come see the soullessness inherent in The Enlightment.
Predictably, the commitment to disenchantment displayed in that story reminds me of something. Ah, yes, here it is:
They do, in fact, help the bees make honey (if not for us). So she's partly right.
An interest in ecology is to be encouraged, not deprecated.
I imagine that what Dawkins was saying 'wasn't so' was the human-centered world she imagined - that the bees made honey 'for us,' that the world was made pretty for us. Then again, given the way that humans and bees have evolved together during the agricultural period, I'm not sure she's wrong.
I have a habit of over-explaining everything to kids. As in, a friend's child brings me a pretty sea shell, and I start telling them all about where the animal had lived, what it was, who it was related to .... and they're just blinking up at me, wondering when I'm going to stop talking.
So many of the sociobiologists' arguments look like reductio ad absurdum. Here's E.O. Wilson, from the link in 1:
Wilson suggested that natural selection might have instilled in us a "biophilia," or reverence for nature, that benefits both us and those creatures with which we enjoy mutually beneficial relationships.
It might be worth reading Dawkins' own words, rather than the (somewhat hostile) summary that Heebie quoted from John Horgan in Scientific American. From Climbing Mount Improbable:
I was driving through the English countryside with my daughter Juliet, then aged six, and she pointed out some flowers by the wayside. I asked her what she thought wildflowers were for. She gave a rather thoughtful answer. 'Two things,' she said. 'To make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us.' I was touched by this and sorry I had to tell her that it wasn't true. My little girl's answer was not to different from the one that most adults, throughout history, would have given. It has long been widely believed that brute creation is here for our benefit. The first chapter of Genesis is explicit. Man has 'dominion' over all living things, and the animals and plants are there for our delight and our use.In other words, it's the "for us" that Dawkins thinks is wrong. Flippanter refers to this attitude as a "commitment to disenchantment" but Dawkins sees it otherwise: he thinks that the idea that flowers are produced by plants to bribe bees to fertilise them is just as enchanting as the idea that flowers are there to make the world pretty, and also has the merit of being (modulo pedantry about the teleological language) true. His Unweaving the Rainbow is a book-length elaboration of this point of view.
7: "Commitment to disenchantment." I like that phrase, and I admire the commitment.
Like Di in 4, I occasionally ponder whether I am doing my kids a disservice by not exposing them to more spirituality. I really do value my own Catholic upbringing. But no.
I don't know what Dawkins told his kid, but a real explanation of flowers doesn't diminish their beauty.
On the veldt I would have gleefully whacked both E.O. Wilson and Dawkins with a stick.
13. Only if you got to them before me.
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Everybody back to the park!
Temporary restraining order says city can't prohibit protestors from reentering Zuccotti Park with tents and equipment, at least until after a hearing later this morning.
|>
The Last Psychiatrist, to whom I linked this weekend is very much into the culture of narcissism
"Because a real narcissist doesn't see himself, he sees himself reflected back by the other person." [and then manipulates the other to get a self-image he likes]
"If the other person is also in a glass box[identity], then you have a serious problem. If everyone is in their own glass box, well, then you have America."
Why does Dawkins care what his daughter thinks about flowers?
11 is right. Someone who thinks that an atheist biologist can't find the world enchanting has just not met many (or any) atheist biologists. I would put in an xkcd link here but I understand that they're deprecated.
On the veldt I would have gleefully whacked both E.O. Wilson and Dawkins with a stick.
I understand that Oakland PD are looking to hire people willing to whack elderly unarmed academics with sticks.
Parenting and evolutionary biology, what can possibly go wrong?
9, 11.last and 17 were a relief.
Wait, what about 12.last?
Sigh. There's no love for the pwned.
13 evinces a surprising (to me) willingness to do the dirty work of the harder genetic determinists/evolutionary psychologists in that debate.
Also, holy crap that SciAm post is idiotic.
21: yes, yes, 12.last and 2 get into the party.
Why does Dawkins care what his daughter thinks about flowers?
Maybe he just likes to put the meddle to the petal.
I am finding it surprisingly upsetting to imagine Dawkins with a young daughter. I think I had somehow managed, during his massive sexism-denial fiasco of earlier this year, to avoid wondering if he was parenting anyone.
Forget didactic explanations of biology or botany, I'm wondering what it's like to grow up with someone who has such contempt for so much of humanity.
So, in summary, this quote does nothing to answer the question in the post (he could be a soulless monster, but he's certainly not acting that way with his daughter, and he could be a responsible parent, but the anecdote sheds no light on that fact). It does effectively show exactly the opposite of what the SciAm author claimed it showed (with a "bless his heart"! What a dick!).
I hated The Selfish Gene with an amazing fury when I was forced to read it in college. I think I've never forgiven him for that book.
13 evinces a surprising (to me) willingness to do the dirty work of the harder genetic determinists/evolutionary psychologists in that debate.
I'm just annoyed by a wide variety of people and my UK ancestry gives me a love of thumping fools. OTOH, I was spanked a few times as a child...
Dawkins is completely clueless about religion, but the only thing troubling about the quoted passage is the reaction some people seem to have to it.
27: why? (I've never read it; I think the only book of his I've read is The Ancestor's Tale, which is great.)
27. Look at it this way. Reading that spared you reading "The Extended Phenotype", so it wasn't all bad.
To be honest, I'm entirely on the same side as Dawkins in the greater scheme of things. My animus towards him is largely based on considerations similar to Witt's at 25, plus the fact that he seems to me to argue very dishonestly from time to time. I sometimes think that if Dawkins hadn't existed Ken Ham would have had to invent him.
As to the OP, I don't really care what aspect of the child's fantasies he felt needed attention, anybody over the age of 15 who feels the need to jump in and make factual corrections when a six year old is going off exploring her ideas and creativity needs to grow up. If there's a point to be made you make a mental note and bring it up another day, in another context.
Temporary restraining order says city can't prohibit protestors from reentering Zuccotti Park with tents and equipment, at least until after a hearing later this morning.
Are they likely to win though? It seems unlikely someone's going to declare a constitutional right to camp. We cleared our park with the exception of a couple structures they can use for logistics, keeping equipment in, etc. Protest all day long, they just can't camp there because (as any cop in this town knew would happen) they quickly got inundated with shitheads who object to the homeless shelter's repressive rules against things like smoking crack in the common area.
30: His thesis is fine - it's probably what you think it is - that evolution doesn't have any "goals" or "ambitions" or any anthropomorphic characteristics of drive that people like to impose on it. That the sole mechanism of evolution is "which genes are overrepresented in the next generation's gene pool?"
To explain this point, he turns genes into little people with goal, ambitions, and all the anthropomorphic characteristics that my fellow students could possibly want to impose onto genes.
It's hard for me to remember if I loathed the book, the class discussion, or the combination, but it left a terrible memory.
And to clarify, I have no idea what the situation is in Zuccotti Park. Maybe it's fantabulous and nothing like what was going on here.
32.last: but it wasn't some pedantic factual correction to ruin her fun; he was helping her learn about the world in all its splendiferous beauty, etc. I really don't grasp how that's so monstrous.
HOLY FUCKING LIGHTNING/THUNDER! I just jumped a foot out of my skin.
To be honest, I'm entirely on the same side as Dawkins in the greater scheme of things.
Depends on where you're drawing lines. On Dawkins vs. Creationists, I'm with Dawkins. On Dawkins vs. women, I'm with the women. On Dawkins vs. God, I'm with Dawkins, though I think he could be nicer about it. On Dawkins vs. Gould (the subject of The Selfish Gene), Dawkins is full of shit.
narnia does have its annoying moments. I had 3-finger rings custom made for me and my partner and after a failed attempt at retrieval from the giant post office out in fucking eunos I now have to go after friday to the main cop shop, the cantonment in chinatown (which they don't even like you looking at hard, swear to god) and be escorted to the department of armaments and explosives to (hopefully) get them back. my pointing out you can buy all the knuckle-dusters you want in far east plaza failed to impress. I'm going to go dressed up nice, and looking like a fluffy bunny/tai tai. I though I always looked harmless generally, but recently others have taken exception. I probably shouldn't have chosen thuglife.com.
Dawkins is completely clueless about religion, but the only thing troubling about the quoted passage is the reaction some people seem to have to it.
Yeah - just because Dawkins has made a career out of being delightfully cruel to people and trying to shatter people's pleasant illusions doesn't mean he behaves that way to everyone.
33: and usefully, the camping is what made the protests notable in the first place. Almost everybody wins!
I too side with the wimmenz in the sad case of dawkins v. everyone with the misfortune to have a vagina. he's been such a sexist dick that I am almost unable to agree with him even on subjects where I do agree with him, causing cognitive dissonance.
To explain this point, he turns genes into little people with goal, ambitions, and all the anthropomorphic characteristics that my fellow students could possibly want to impose onto genes.
"Personification of genes really ought not to be a problem, because no sane person thinks DNA molecules have conscious personalities, and no sensible reader would impute such a delusion to an author. "
-- Richard Dawkins, preface to The Selfish Gene
38. Agreed on all points, to the limit of my competence (ultra-selectionism makes no logical sense to me but if somebody offered me overwhelming evidence I'd have to accept it.) I was going for a higher level of "side" than that - for the scientific method; against mythical explanations of the world.
As I said, he's about the worst advocate for the good guys it's possible to imagine, which drives me nuts. His performance over "elevatorgate" was, besides being disgusting, surprising to me, because he usually has a better grasp of his own image than that. Maybe he's losing it.
so then I can just anthropomorphize away without any worries! richard dawkins, the whole fucking rest of the selfish gene.
Pwned by 42.
43. Have you actually read the thing? Heebie's characterisation is more accurate than Dawkins' apologia.
"Personification of genes really ought not to be a problem, because no sane person thinks DNA molecules have conscious personalities, and no sensible reader would impute such a delusion to an author. "
I'm glad to see I remember it so accurately. Really, in an actual classroom, the personification of genes undermined his point in an unforgivably godawful way.
The Selfish Gene is one of those well written, superficially convincing snotty know-it-all books written by someone who does not actually know it all. I don't like books like that. Group selection is a very real possibility for humans and in many ways seems to fit the evidence better than the rigid, doctinaire, individual-only selection Dawkins pushed in that book. But Dawkins depicts group selection like believing in Santa Claus. You'd never know there was even a debate.
...the department of armaments and explosives....
"Shrapnel! This dynamite is barely half-detonated! You and Congreve get out to the earthworks and don't come back until you both look like Wile E. Coyote met an exploding cigar!"
Huh. The Times says they are kicking people out of the park again? Claiming variously that there is either a downed electrical wire or a suspicious package?
Dawkins is also pretty Islamophobic, and not as an extension of his general anti-theism. Not even a year ago he wondered if atheists should send funds to African Christian missionaries, since that lesser evil may be the best practical hope for halting the spread of Islam. I've been done with him ever since.
The [Dawkins/Pinker/whoever] is an arse because of [this quote from a hostile summary/my own strawman version] of [something he or she may or may not have written] thread is becoming a genre to itself.
Have you actually read the thing? Heebie's characterisation is more accurate than Dawkins' apologia.
Of course I've read it, I've got a degree in the damn subject, and I never got confused into thinking that phrases like "genes want X" were anything more than convenient shorthand, as Dawkins went to considerable lengths to explain in the book.
The lack of quantitative analysis and modeling in the debate over group selection is infuriating. It's completely obvious that this is a quantitative issue that can't possibly be solved by simple armchair theorizing. If groups die out often enough relative to individuals within groups then obviously it's possible to have group selection.
I hope the scientific literature on this point is better than the popular literature, but I'm not super optimistic.
and I never got confused into thinking that phrases like "genes want X" were anything more than convenient shorthand,
But it's supposed to be accessible by exactly the type of person who isn't like you.
It's not that college first years literally think that genes have little top hats and Mr. Peanut style spats. But they anthropomorphize everything, and so a book which claims to disassemble that urge, and then turns around and does the SAME GODDAMN THING, is singularly unhelpful.
9, 11.last and 17
I like to think the flowers are pretty for the bees, and we get to look at them as a sort of collateral pretty.
Sorta like when someone dresses real sexy for a date with someone else and you catch a discreet glimpse of them on the subway.
But it's supposed to be accessible by exactly the type of person who isn't like you.
I didn't read it when I was doing my degree. I read it when I was thirteen years old.
57: Look, I didn't anthropomorphize the genes either. You and me are soooo smart!
This thread is trending toward the highest ratio of hostility to interesting argument of any Unfogged thread not involving read, I think.
Sorry, that was a bit snide. I'm just saying that tons of undergraduates in this evolutionary biology class that I took seemed to animate the genes and found the book really difficult to grasp.
I have a habit of over-explaining everything to kids. As in, a friend's child brings me a pretty sea shell, and I start telling them all about where the animal had lived, what it was, who it was related to .... and they're just blinking up at me, wondering when I'm going to stop talking.
I have this problem, too. I'm trying to do a better job of staying in the moment with the kid instead of turning everything into an Educational Opportunity. Also, to answer only the question a kid asks.
OT: Is there an outpost of the Mineshaft in Little Rock? And/or does anyone have restaurant and visiting advice? I'll be in N. Little Rock without a car but with some budget for taxis.
This thread is trending toward the highest ratio of hostility to interesting argument of any Unfogged thread not involving read, I think.
This is probably true - sorry about that.
OT: Is there an outpost of the Mineshaft in Little Rock?
For "Mutumbo" read "Bill", throughout.
I think all the hatin' on The Selfish Gene is only possible with the benefit of hindsight. In the early 1970s, popularisations of evolution had not really taken on board the gene-centred view pioneered by Hamilton and Williams. The group-selection theory of Wynne-Edwards (that atempted to explain altruistic behaviours and ecological features like population density in terms of some kind of regulatory feedback for the good of the species) was still a live issue.
After Dawkins popularised the gene-centric view in The Selfish Gene, everyone was all, "of course the gene-centric view is a compelling way to look at selection in most instances, we always knew that, but now let me tell you about a couple of points where Dawkins has overstated his case".
Alan Grafen:
I am convinced that The Selfish Gene brought about a silent and almost immediate revolution in biology. The explanations made so much sense, the fundamental arguments were so clearly stated and derived completely from first principles, that it was hard to see after reading the book how the world could ever have been any different.
29 seems to me to get it right, though one of the "disturbing" responses -- which, in this particular case, seems to derive more from the blog post author than Dawkins himself -- is the implication that the 6 year old's answer somehow is the "religious" position.
The SciAm post seems very silly indeed.
54: there is plenty of quantitative theorizing. A huge amount actually, it drives the whole field. I unfortunately could not find the full text to this Samuel Bowles article (I hate AAAS) but he apparently plugs actual estimates of ancestral mortality from intergroup conflict into quantitative models of group selection.
I'm trying to do a better job of staying in the moment with the kid instead of turning everything into an Educational Opportunity. Also, to answer only the question a kid asks.
Nah, fuck that, tell them stuff. That's how I grew up, and, I guess partly why I ended up home educating. You have conversations about things, and children do mostly, in my experience, want to know stuff about the world, so I'll carry on the conversation until they walk away. Answer the question they asked, and then ask them a question, see how far the line of thought can be taken.
anybody over the age of 15 who feels the need to jump in and make factual corrections when a six year old is going off exploring her ideas and creativity needs to grow up
It doesn't seem exactly obvious from the article that he jumped in with "Wrong!" (like my soulless shithead dead (hurrah) alcholic uncle-by-marriage), just that they were having a conversation, which he had started, so then he offered his ideas and they probably carried on talking about it for a little while.
(I mean, obviously, don't derail things if they're in the middle of doing something, but if you're having a chat, chat away.)
62: recently married old-timer Michael lives in Little Rock, but he's been missing from the Mineshaft for quite some time now.
The group-selection theory of Wynne-Edwards (that atempted to explain altruistic behaviours and ecological features like population density in terms of some kind of regulatory feedback for the good of the species) was still a live issue.
It still is a live issue, that was my point above. In fact my impression is that the debate is more about the degree to which group selection exists then whether it exists. But a whole generation of casual outside observers of the field have no idea, thanks to Dawkins.
48, 54
Read WD Hamilton's papers, especially the sex ratio one and the selfish herd 1971 paper.
I do not know of any observation that requires group selection, or any specifically group selection predictions that stand up to scrutiny. Certainly nothing in plants, where you would expect the strongest effect among isolated populations of plants capable of selfing. On the contrary, pollen competition between plants is common, and kin selection has worked well there as far as I know. That said, distimguishing between kin selection and group selection is difficult, there's a lot of overlap in the theories, so most observations are indeterminate. Not a closed question, but there's IMO very weak evidence for cluttering one's thoughts with group selection, while kin selection works in a number of tricky cases.
Last remark: "gene" is a term that can usually be dispensed with. Generally people mean either "locus" or, for the purposes of this discussion (which usually concerns population genetics), "allele."
George Churchyard and Alan Templeton are two geneticists whose papers I look for and try to understand; they are rarely wrong and often interesting. I basically do not read about human behavioral genetics, the signal:noise ratio in the literature is terrible.
56 works for me, with fascinated meditation on: why should the bees and I agree?
There's an otherwise great intro book to stable isotope ecology that uses velleity to explain isotope preference, and I think it makes some errors much easier. There's not a lot of pithy language without reference to intent, though. Narrative needed for memory formation ?
PS, Rob, did you fix your showerhead ?
68: Yeah, I don't mean one shouldn't try to expand their knowledge, just that I can easily lapse into "Look at me and all the stuff I know!" show-off lecture mode.
9, 61, 68: Yeah, I think kids either don't mind the droning on about random facts or they like it. I'm one of those, and my kids make fun of me for it, but they do seem to enjoy it, and I think they've gotten the idea that for almost anything you can look at, there is stuff to know about it. Nothing's just a rock -- the dullest clod of dirt you can imagine is something you could talk about for years if you knew enough.
A more popular speech by Bowles on the importance of group selection in understanding human behavior.'
Look, every time you read an annoying internet pick up artist giving an "evolutionary psychology" explanation for their idiocies, Dawkins is partially to blame. He took all the complexities of human evolution -- the depth of cultural/genetic interaction, group-level selection -- and ironed them flat into this presentation of genes as puppeteers. Heebie is right about how that read to the casual reader, and frankly I've seen sophisticated people screwed up by it as well because of how compelling the genes-in-the-drivers-seat rhetoric is.
71. The paper does not eliminate kin selection as an equally plausible model. For the claim that altruism arises from group selection rather than kin selection, it is essential to examine the behavior of groups of unrelated individuals. This is not possible for early humans. That's a real constraint on our ability to gather knowledge about the genetics of human behavior.
This constraint is absent in plants and insects.
Dawkins is arrogant and unlikeable. He's brilliant when he's not talking about living people, though.
Of course I've read it, I've got a degree in the damn subject,
My gripe with Dawkins isn't anthropomorphism, it's reductionism - which, if course, Dawkins also denies. What do you think of the concept of the "selfish gene"?
72, 77 -- Sorry lw, I think you're wrong on where the state of the debate is. See here for a quick review of the literature (the result of googling and I can't vouch for it). The reason I looked at this again (and was shocked by how misinformed I had been by Dawkins and the rest of the pop discussion) was EO Wilson coming out for the centrality of group selection. Then I read Bowles and thought more about it in the human context. Obviously there is a very live debate here but when you have Darwin and EO Wilson, along with plenty of less prominent supporters, saying group selection is a central evolutionary mechanism I'm not sure you get to just wave it away.
I'm naive and haven't read any of these books. Are these cases where people are trying to explain an important ongoing scientific debate to the public? Or are people actually trying to make their case in popular books? There's a certain maneuver people try in which publishing a book shows that they're incapable of actually convincing anyone with real scientific papers (see, for example, Penrose or Wolfram).
re: 77
If I recall correctly, Sober and Wilson have some plausible examples of group selection -- or at least species that seem to exhibit some of the features necessary for some of their abstract models to work -- in Unto Others.... They aren't, as far as I remember (and it's been a while since I read it) higher mammals, though. Mostly parasites/insects, I think.
An article about philosophy, or indeed about human behavior from any source, is not going to do it for me. Identifying a case where group selection works and kin selection does not outside of human behavior is what I would be very interested in. Most of what we observe about can plausibly be explained by either, so identifying such a case is not easy.
Insect sex ratios and pollen competition are examples of the converse.
The recent Wilson paper I found pretty disappointing-- it's generalizations and a tenuously related mathematical model. The question is about the model's scope.
72: Here is a good piece by David Sloan Wilson ('Open Letter To Richard Dawkins: Why Are You Still In Denial About Group Selection') that makes clear the connections between group and kin selection. Not a connection in the sense that they are difficult to distinguish empirically, but a connection in that you have to understand both individual and group-level competition to fully model genetic selection. This should not be surprising. Neither groups nor people are the fundamental replicators in an evolutionary sense. Genes are. But people and groups can both be targets of genetic selection. If you want to take the true "gene" perspective then both individual people and groups of people have a lot in common.
re: 83.1
There are examples of that type in Unto Others, vis possible real-life instantiations of the 'Haystack' model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#The_haystack_model_and_trait_groups
Not personally arguing for or against. It's been years since I read it. But I remember finding it semi-convincing at the time. At least in terms of broad plausibility. The concrete facts may well have been wrong, as I don't know enough about the life cycles of the organisms in question.
77: I'm not in this argument, because I know nothing. But looking at the link in 80, I see this:
In addition to modeling, Wade (1976, 1980) conducted laboratory experiments (mainly on red flower beetles Tribolium castaneum) that demonstrated the strong causal effects of group selection in a given population. Wade compared the evolutionary response of an inter-group selection process (that is, selection between reproductively isolated breeding groups in a population) to a process of kin selection (that is, selection between groups of relatives in a population with random mating within a common pool) to a random process (that is, selection between groups chosen at random) and to a process of individual selection (that is, selection within groups in each of these population structures). His theoretical and empirical results demonstrated the causal importance of the group selection process during evolution. That is, when group selection was taking place it generated an evolutionary response over and above all the other processes, easily detectable even when individual selection or a random process promotes the same trait as group selection, that is, even when affecting a non-altruistic trait (Griesemer and Wade, 1988).
lw -- that looks to me like a description of a paper studying non-human organisms, explicitly attempting to distinguish between kin selection and group selection, and finding that there were effects attributable only to group selection.
It sounds as if you're saying that research meeting that description doesn't exist. Am I misunderstanding you, or is the cited paper discredited or something, or what?
(What's up with Peak Bee these days anyway? Is that still happening?)
I think they figured it out, but I don't know if there's anything to do about it. Heebie posted about it a while back -- an Australian virus, maybe?
Yes, Wilson knows ants and has very interesting examples. However, the last time I looked, kin selection is a plausible alternative explanation for the example I had the energy for.
84, 86. The cited 2008 Kohn feature looks interesting, thanks, I'll see what's there. A paper about beetles more so, I'll definitely read that when I can.
After I've weighed in on the argument, I must say that I don't really understand it at all -- that is, I'm vaguely aware of it, but I'm not clear on the exact definitions of the terms, or what the different sides are asserting. (I had that problem with Gould v. Dawkins: I love Gould's essays, and so got interested when I was reading that everything he ever said about evolution was wrong, and then never quite managed to pin down what was at stake in the argument; everything seemed to be fairly unimportant matters of emphasis.)
I think they figured it out, but I don't know if there's anything to do about it. Heebie posted about it a while back -- an Australian virus, maybe?
73: vinegar worked for the downstairs shower, but not the upstairs one. It was heartening to figure out that the stupid thing just screws off and no shutting off of water is required. I'm going to buy a fancy new shower head to make up for the past year of crappy showers. Thanks for the advice!
I read Hamilton's sex ratio paper, it's really beautiful work. I'll have a look at the other paper.
At any rate, I realized that a more parsimonious explanation for the lack of that sort of discussion in the popular literature is that Gould is afraid of math, and Dawkins is overconfident in his own ability to work things out by pure thought.
Kin selection is the claim that any observable effects of an allele in a population are completely explained due to the allele's co-occuring more often among related individuals than unrelated ones. Reductionist lines of thinking are possible, many of which lead to productive insights.
Group selection I'll let someone else define; the definitions I've seen are that there's a population benefit to altruism, with various attempts to define what a population is. I'll read that beetle paper, it looks like MJ Wade has done a bunch of interesting work with beetles unrelated to group selection as well.
Gould had a persecution complex, knew a lot about paleontology and not much about genetics. Dawkins lacks humility, knows a lot about genetics. Using genetics to think about the distant past often introduces ambiguity; there's much that people do not know.
Dawkins has two problems: 1) he has become a television don asked to comment on matters far outside his metier and hence ends up talking arse quite a lot and 2) he is a vindictive little shit who tends to carry grudges to unreasonable ends. Viz his feuds with Gould et all.
Overlooking these faults, I still liked the pop science biology books of his I've read: Selfish Gene ages ago, The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale more recently. Not suggesting that these are the be and end all of evolutionary biology, but as far as I can judge, they were all good introductionary books on the subject.
What I'm dying to know however is where Chris Y's hatred of E. O. Wilson comes from, as I know him mostly as being v. good at explaining the human caused wave of extinction going on right now.
But it seems like it'd be pretty easy to set up an experiment with bacteria where you impose enough whole-group mortality to get group selection in lab setting.
I don't know why all you people keep dissing Richard Dawkins. He was waaaay better on Family Feud than Steve Harvey. Richard Dawkins? Survey says: THE BEST!
96. Bacteria reproduce differently than eukaryotes, population genetics is quite different. But you should be able to do it with plants or bugs definitely, and there are plenty of examples of isolated populations that could benefit from cooperation.
Dictyostelium is a potential corner case-- it's on the cusp between a single-celled organism and a metazoan. Only some individuals in the cooperating colony necessary to create a fruiting body above ground reproduce. There may be some technical obstacle to using this easily manipulated and well-studied organism to study group selection quantitatively.
What I'm dying to know however is where Chris Y's hatred of E. O. Wilson comes from
It's probably at least partly misplaced, but goes back to the debates surrounding the publication of "Sociobiology" in the early 70s. I don't really know how these stand any more, as attention seems to have moved on to EvPsych, which I understand to be subtly different. My uninformed reaction to sociobiology though, was that it was likewise over-reliant on just so stories.
My understanding was that a "who is the bigger asshole" competition between Wilson and Dawkins would be a close call.
The name varroa destructor sounds way more imposing than a tiny mite.
IIRC, Dictyostelium cells in the nonreproducing stalk 'cheat'.
98.1 Oh yeah, good point. I was just hoping for something where you could do the experiment fast enough.
Also, come on: Hogan's Heroes. How can you not love the guy? And to go from that to Chocolate Thunder shows a range that lesser actors could only dream of. Conclusion: you're all just Jealous Jennies.
everything seemed to be fairly unimportant matters of emphasis.
Though I fall in the Gould camp generally, I think both sides of that argument mischaracterized the opposition.
The Dawkins types would say things like: Gould thinks that genes have nothing to do with human behavior; Gould would respond that the Dawkins types insist on attributing all human attributes to the direct influence of selfish genes. Neither is correct.
I'll read the beetle article and report back. I guess that I'm partly reacting to not having noticed group selection as a working tool among plant biologists, who definitely use kin selection. Biased sampling of plant people, bla bla bla.
16: Does anyone else think the Last Psychiatrist is sort of crazy? Even though he's right about narcissism?
After Dawkins popularised the gene-centric view in The Selfish Gene, everyone was all, "of course the gene-centric view is a compelling way to look at selection in most instances, we always knew that, but now let me tell you about a couple of points where Dawkins has overstated his case".
This is not at all why I hate The Selfish Gene.
106: I think it's an eggareted internet persona, akin to "The War Nerd" or "Tucker Max".
To echo Essear's point, I've never understood exactly Dawkins' role within evolutionary biology. People seem to treat him not just as as a populizer but as a major theorist himself. Is there another scientific discipline where much of the major debate seems to be in the form of popular works written for the educated general reader? (the same holds for Gould, and, I guess EO Wilson). If that's what's going on (and I'm definitely not saying it is) isn't that in itself an indictment of the state of evolutionary biology as science?
I don't know that "the major debate" in evolutionary biology is in the form of popular works. There are a lot of popular works because evolutionary biology lends itself to grand theorizing because a lot of it is about the distant and unknowable, like any other type of science that seeks to learn about what happened in previous eras, or cosmology. And a debate in the form of grand theorizing is more conducive to popular works than a debate in the form of "I think this blood cell is a macrophage because it expresses these proteins, but these jokers think it's a dendritic cell because it expresses these other proteins".
My impression is that most of the work in paleontology is painstaking details. Gould studied land snails in the Bahamas. It seems plausible to me that publications are expected to be serious and detailed, and that the grand theorizing needs another venue to get out.
Yes, you're right.
In most branches of science grand theorizing is just not possible because we KNOW so many of the details that someone with a competing view of how the immune system works, or of how molecules get oxidized, is either a crackpot or someone who can't get enough research funding to prove his probably-crackpot ideas.
I may be wrong, but I believe that most of the cutting edge stuff in evolutionary biology is detailed quantitative analysis that the popularisers tend to ignore on the grounds that the general public wouldn't understand it or be interested if they did. I don't know how valid it is to abstract the theoretical issues from this, because I haven't read much of it. I am, like you, uneasy, less about the state of the field though, than the accuracy of the pop reportage.
"16: Does anyone else think the Last Psychiatrist is sort of crazy? Even though he's right about narcissism?"
I think he is wrong about the narcissism.
113, 114, OK, but surely that implies we should treat the grand theory with some caution as "science", or at least as well understood science. Which seems to cut against some of Dawkins' own rhetoric, not that I know his work that well.
So I recently read Dawkins' "The greatest show in town." Mostly I was kinda bored because it's a retread of stuff I already knew from other stuff. But the stuff about C. Elegans development is just stunning. They literally know the full developmental history of every cell in the animal (i.e. "this cell started as one of the original 5 cells, then was the dorsal cell in a dorsal/ventral split, and then a left cell in a left/right split, etc.). It's really quite amazing.
Rhymeswithmaria had a guest speaker at her program who does neurology research on C. Elegans. not only do they know exactly how many neurons there are, they take a laser and remove one of them and see how the behavior changes. Like, if you zap this neuron then it'll no longer recoil when you poke it with an eyelash. Just amazing.
I mean, I'm mostly just trolling from a place of ignorance, but if the state of the art really is: group selection, does it exist or not, we're at a pretty low level of understanding of the process.
The name varroa destructor sounds way more imposing than a tiny mite.
True, and yersinia pestis sounds way less imposing than a Europe-wrecking plague-agent should. Latin's funny that way.
Let's not even get into the humpback whale.
One thing that Dawkins and Gould agree on is that the concepts they discuss can be made clear to a motivated lay reader. I believe them. Am I wrong?
Let's not even get into the humpback whale.
Now you tell me.
Rhymeswithmaria had a guest speaker at her program who does neurology research on C. Elegans. not only do they know exactly how many neurons there are, they take a laser and remove one of them and see how the behavior changes.
If you could do this with humans, you could figure out exactly which brain cells enable people to understand collective action problems.
That would be the first step in curing for libertarianism.
I find evolutionary biology research rather readable (e.g., more readable than I find math papers outside of my field). Obviously there's stuff I'm totally missing (see the exchange above where I made a dumb think-o), but I do think a lot of it is stuff where a good expositor can make the issues clear to a motivated lay reader.
However, what a motivated lay reader can't do is actually culture stuff in a lab, or actually prepare a fossil, or actually find a phylogentic tree based on some DNA in a vial. And a lot of interesting things end up coming from details like that, not from abstractly thinking about the big picture.
This is contrast to say physics, where I think an informed layperson really can't understand the issues. Like I can barely sort out why neutrino oscillations have anything to do with them having mass, and that's despite knowing quantum mechanics and being able to understand eigenvectors in my sleep. The ordinary informed reader wouldn't have a clue. I have no idea what a quantum field is, and my one sentence research description has the word "quantum field" in it. I genuinely don't think evolutionary biology or paleontology are like that. The issues are usually easy to understand, it's the details that are hard.
115:
Man's desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits
3 votes to 1 in favor of TLP! Now that's some science
(Just happened across that quote in my reading about Japanese post-WWII fiction. Spent four hours this wee morning with Dazai Osamu. Not voluble.)
e.g., more readable than I find math papers outside of my field
Math really seems to take the cake for least-readable discipline.
But I wonder, when reading literature in fields far from your own: how do you know who's competent enough to be worth reading? Sorting it out for yourself sounds like a lot of work, even if the papers individually are readable.
Sorting out controversies is certainly way harder, but a lot of stuff isn't that controversial.
For example, when I was traveling to Hawaii I wanted to read about why the Hawaiian Islands for a line. And there was a great article where they actually got someone to take samples from the tops of the Emperor Seamounts so that they could analyze *what latitude the lava cooled at* (apparently the magnetic field of the earth lets you do that). This showed that the hot spot actually was moving downwards when the Emperor Seamounts formed, and the turn in the Emperor/Hawaiian chain comes from the hot spot settling down rather than from the plate changing directions. (That is, it used to be that the hotspot was moving faster than the plate, and now the hotspot is roughly still while the plate is moving.) I don't think there's much of a controversy here as the hard part is actually getting the samples because that's very expensive.
On the other hand, I had a bear of a time trying to sort out whether the current consensus is that New Zealand was or wasn't completely submerged at some point in the last 30 million years. I'm pretty sure that I worked out that they now know that at least some parts stayed above water the whole time and at least some of the species in New Zealand came along from Gondwana rather than dispersing over oceans. But I'm really not very confident about that, because it was clearly controversial and I didn't know any of the authors.
Meanwhile in non-arsehole biologists/geologists/science populisers, what do we think of Richard Fortey?
117: I also just read The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and it really is a nice introductory treatment of the subject which does a good job of covering the material relevant to the subtitle. So, Dawkins at his best. But also at his worst as he cannot let go of the polemic and digs at people who might otherwise be interested in the book*. This review covers that aspect pretty well.
*Of course a healthy debate can be had on whether there actually is a significant adult group who are evolution doubters and want to read a book like this. On the other hand this would be a book I would have given my kids if it were available, as it was I pushed The Ancestor's Tale on them, and two of the three read it.
As someone with the same name as Chris Y, I can't tell you how convenient I find it to have someone with the same name writing the same things I would write if I had time in comments sections all over the internets. Carry on, other Chris.
We're focusing on a dispute between hard-to-distinguish theories; people understood a lot about light when they believed in the existence of Ether, for example. Heisenberg's and Schrodinger's formulations of quantum mechanics were not understood to be two alternate descriptions of the same thing for a few years, for another example.
Matt Ridley's popular books about contemporary biology are good, IMO. Carl Zimmer is also OK. For exact sciences people interested in genetics, Austin Hughes' books and articles are usually good.
Grand theories (like Darwin's, or Hamilton's or Kimura's substantial refinements) will occasionally produce a flood of useful new insights; they can be hugely valuable. This particular debate (kin selection vs group selection, maybe both exist) is of marginal importance, but very useful for armchair theorizing about human behavior.
111 There are a lot of popular works because evolutionary biology lends itself to grand theorizing because a lot of it is about the distant and unknowable, like any other type of science that seeks to learn about what happened in previous eras, or cosmology.
Cosmology is a weird field. On the one hand, there's a lot of amazingly precise science (experimental and theoretical) explaining everything back to big bang nucleosynthesis. Then there's a lot of really wonderful precision science that tells us dark matter and dark energy exist, even though we know almost nothing about them other than their existence. Then there's a weird semi-coherent experimental + theoretical story about inflation that seems to convince everyone except the people who invented the idea of inflation in the early 80s. These people, and some others, drive a growing industry of writing papers about questions like "why are we not just isolated brains floating in empty space?" that is so far removed from anything empirical that I hesitate to call it science. But that's kind of the dominant thing in the field right now, as far as I can tell, and it's probably what gets popularized. Experiment and observation keep chugging along but I fear there just aren't that many measurable numbers and I'm not sure the dramatic growth in our understanding of cosmology that happened in the 90s can really be pushed too much further.
It would be so great if 130 was Chris Y using a sock puppet.
Has anyone written a really good history of the universe popular book which doesn't attempt to cover the why, but just the what. That is a blow-by-blow history of the universe told as history with a bare minimum of theory.
why are we not just isolated brains floating in empty space?
Because we have the internet?
134: I don't know. I've never read Weinberg's The First Three Minutes, but maybe it's in the right ballpark?
Another book with which I had good success in getting my children as teens interested in Life Sciences was Colinvaux's Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: An Ecologist's Perspective. It was written in the late '70s so presumably a bit out of date, but still a compelling introduction to the broader subject area.
Somehow I don't find the first 3 minutes the most interesting part. Stuff like that the only reason we have heavy elements is that they've gone through multiple supernovas, or what the universe was like before stars formed, or when we first had galaxies, or the late heavy bombardment.
Inflation hasn't convinced me yet either, as it seems mightily convenient to just have a period where suddenly the universe expanded at greater than light speed. All that dark matter and dark energy and dark flow seems a bit dodgy epicyclal as well.
If only Eric Lerner was right.
139.1: With all due respect, you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
138: Yeah, that would make an interesting book. I don't know of one like it, though.
John Baez's website has some fantastic history of the earth and history of the universe stuff. But something more book-length would be really interesting.
The wikipedia article on Kim Sterelney's book about the Gould vs. Dawkins polemics gives a pretty clear description of what was and wasn't at stake between them.
I actually have a lot of positive feelings for EO Wilson, but I suspect that they are all emotional transference from a fascination with ants.
140: just enough to be skeptical, if not aware of any plausible alternatives to the standard cosmology.
To return to the original post:
In what ways will my life be a living hell, destructive of myself and others, so dysfunctional I can barely walk out my door in the morning...
...if I believe in the cosmological turtles?
I have never been interested in biology, geology, genetics, cosmology and so know nothing about them. Yet here I am, 60 and happy. Is ignorance so different in practice from unfounded or unjustified belief?
I don't believe in science. I do believe in discourse.
shorter 147:
Dawkins vs Gould
Why should I give a flying fuck?
Serious question
If dark matter isn't a particle that interacts only with gravity, then it's sure going out of its way to imitate one.
Dark energy I'm less clear about. Isn't there some chance that "dark energy" is just a number that's constant through the universe?
Math really seems to take the cake for least-readable discipline.
For example, on this typical Wikipedia page about a math concept, every sentence is incomprehensible to me for at least three reasons.
But I wonder, when reading literature in fields far from your own: how do you know who's competent enough to be worth reading? Sorting it out for yourself sounds like a lot of work, even if the papers individually are readable.
You're supposed to be able to do it based on the quality of the journals they publish in. Ha ha! You arxiv people can't do that anymore!
One last try:We started with "pretty flowers" vs "evolutionary science" Necessary or cruel?
We in the course of the thread went to whatever, groups, string theory.
Method of discourse domination? Do you see how it is done?
Start out underemployment, forced to DSGE with behavioral haven't you read the latest paper, go away and let the smart people do your thinking. We'll get back to you.
The feminists are good about seeing domination. Count guys versus women in this thread.
That article actually has a single great readable sentence that is both accurate and relatively accessible: "In this case X is homogeneous if intuitively X looks locally the same everywhere."
148
No one expects the troll to give a fuck about science.
Serious answer.
59: This thread is trending toward the highest ratio of hostility to interesting argument of any Unfogged thread not involving read, I think.
20 -> 59.
153: No one expects the Trollish Inquisition! Amongst its chief weapons are smugness, obfuscation, and the oddly placed nuke!
Also, popular science recommendation for UPetgin(9):
Ending in Ice: The Revolutionary Idea and Tragic Expedition of Alfred Wegener. An odd little book with nice little summary of the Continental Drift controversy and a more in-depth look at his final doomed expedition. Not that the earlier ones went swimmingly, if I recall correctly three people died on the first and on another one they ended up dragging their last horse along on a sled before finally shooting it and eating it*.
*Although maybe it was a, "PigHorse like that you don't eat all at once." situation.
Smugness, obfuscation, the oddly placed nuke and complaints about policing the discourse.
It's absurd how incomprehensible math is. I periodically try to understand what's so great about the Fundamental Lemma that won somebody the Fields Medal a couple of years ago. This introductory article convinced me that I'll understand it about 300 years after they invent an immortality treatment, and not a moment before.
"I like that phrase, and I admire the commitment."
I think it's misplaced. It's possible to be disenchanted, but appreciate where the enchantment comes from -- that the telling of stories about nature is part of the human experience. The capacity to make shit up seems to have pretty deep foundations.
149 If dark matter isn't a particle that interacts only with gravity, then it's sure going out of its way to imitate one.
Yeah. And postulating one new kind of particle is an "epicycle" in the sense that it's a small adjustment to existing theory that is perfectly happy with the new data. I'm not sure why people view this as a criticism; not every new piece of data calls for a dramatic revolution.
Dark energy I'm less clear about. Isn't there some chance that "dark energy" is just a number that's constant through the universe?
Yeah, "dark energy" is a really annoying name. It seems most likely to just be a cosmological constant. Nothing particularly weird about that, except that we don't know why it's the size that it is.
144: This is Mrs. K-sky's position -- when we were first checking out each other's books* I raised an eyebrow at her Wilson** and she said, "What? He's just this sweet old man who loves bugs."
*Erm.
**Ahem.
134: My friend's book is just about the opposite of what you are looking for, but it's funny and he just got a deal to write another one so I cannot resist plugging it.
Smugness, obfuscation, the oddly placed nuke, complaints about policing the discourse and dogs!
Yeah, "dark energy" is a really annoying name.
Dark Energy Mecha Wars High School Splash by Hirokazu Minaguchi, on shelves soon.
The fundamental lemma is a bit of an extreme case. There's plenty of Fields-medal worthy work where the question itself is totally comprehensible (Poincare conjecture, for example).
The annoying thing about Langlands is that now all these people are running around talking about how it just boils down to S-duality of N=4 super-Yang-Mills, or something like that, so I can of feel like I should be able to roughly grok what the underlying idea is, and yet I still don't have a clue what it is. I went to a talk by that Berkeley mathematician who made the movie about himself being naked and writing math on a woman's skin, which was supposed to be accessible to physicists, and he started out by stating some cool facts and then spent the rest of the time telling us that it would be too difficult to explain to us why these things are true. It felt a little patronizing.
"can of" s/b "kind of". This is what happens when you try to quickly rearrange a sentence.
Actually the writing in 167 is generally a trainwreck. The talk was supposed to be accessible; I don't know if the movie was or not, I just inserted that because I decided not to identify him by name in the comment. And I think it's super-weird.
now all these people are running around talking about how it just boils down to S-duality of N=4 super-Yang-Mills
Tell me about it. I hate those dudes.
that Berkeley mathematician who made the movie about himself being naked and writing math on a woman's skin, which was supposed to be accessible to physicists
Wait, what?
I found it by searching google for "that Berkeley mathematician who made the movie about himself being naked and writing math on a woman's skin".
it just boils down to S-duality of N=4 super-Yang-Mills
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this woman is too narrow to contain.
"What? He's just this sweet old man who loves bugs."
If you only hang out with environmentalists with little feminist consciousness, this is exactly the impression of him you get. It captures something of the reality.
Not just any woman's naked body! A naked Japanese woman's body in a kimono! I don't even know calculus, but I believe the theorem this movie demonstrates is "I am fucking insane."
I demand a joint review by Bob, Essear, and UPetgi(9), or this place hasn't lived up to its potential.
Wait, what?
I only know what I've heard at, like, thirdhand. But he made a movie called Rites of Love and Math (intentionally resembling Mishima) about a mathematician who finds "the equation of love," or something like that, and most of the movie involves him and a woman naked on a bed while he tattoos equations on her body. They were going to show this movie at some math-related thing at Berkeley and some women mathematicians were like "wtf? you don't think this objectifies women?" and some male mathematicians were like "I can't imagine what you could possibly mean!" Then I stopped following. Anyway, apparently the movie was screened at the place where I heard the guy give the talk I was referring to, and based on some discussion I overheard some of the people involved in the screening think those poor women at Berkeley are just total philistines, or something. I have not seen the movie, but it all sounded incredibly weird and sketchy to me. Maybe Upetgi knows a less thirdhand and vague version of it all.
166: What's an example other than the Poincare conjecture?
Friends of mine really want to watch that movie as a drinking game. Meanest rule is "every time you see your advisor naked, take a drink."
175: I think it says "I saw that movie with Ewan McGregor. I'm hot like Ewan McGregor."
175: Naked and in a kimono? That's something.
It takes some pretty complex topology to be naked in a kimono.
The movie looks like my preferred kind of crazy, it does seem likely that the movie is "sending a message that men do mathematics while women are reduced to passive sex objects." or math objects, even.
Clearly we need better math porn.
Also if I understood the point was to say "math is pretty just like girls are pretty!", or something along those lines. I really don't see how it couldn't have been astonishingly sexist, based on what I've heard.
OMG I love this so much.
F/renkel told Italian website Oggi Scienza that the film's challenge was finding a way to "unite the beautiful body and mathematics," and the "beauty of a woman's body" served as a metaphor for the task. He also has said that he wanted to dispel the common conception of mathematicians as depicted in films like "A Beautiful Mind."
Why shouldn't everyone in a boring profession make a movie where they write stuff on some naked Japanese woman's back? "I'm an accounting professor, and I've described why this financial statement complies with FAS 102 and is GAAP compliant ON YOUR SEXY NUDE BACK."
Let's see... Working backwards, I think comprehensible but vague explanations of substantial parts of their work to mathematically literate people should be possible for: Smirnov, Tao, Perelman, McMullen, Jones, Freedman, Faltings, Thurston...
For example, Tao: For any positive integer n, you can find an n-step arithmetic sequence a+b, a+2b, a+3b, ... a+nb where all those numbers are prime. (For example, 3, 7, 11 gives a sequence of length 3.)
The further back I go in the list of Fields medalists, the more I see for whom I have at least a vague awareness of what they did, so maybe even the ones that seem really obscure now will be digested and reprocessed into well-known tidbits a few decades from now.
The capacity to make shit up seems to have pretty deep foundations.
heebie is very smart.
with his six-year-old daughter when she enthused over some "pretty" wildflowers.
The post was about how the language of science is used to repress the female imaginary and reproduce the patriarchy.
"Isn't that cute. Now listen to your father."
184: Huh, it's easier than I thought. You could definitely do Tao and Faltings. Faltings would be even easier than Perelman, since you could say something like "most polynomial equation in two variables of degree higher than 4 have only finitely many integer solutions".
Not just any woman's naked body! A naked Japanese woman's body in a kimono!
Beyond the pale. Bring my bow of burning gold, my arrows of desire horsewhip.
Really, all the future great male mathematicians, as children, undressed their sisters' barbie dolls and wrote arithmetic all over them.
And a movie about tattooing math equations on the back of a Japanese woman is a neat metaphor for science controlling women's bodies.
Mizoguchi in the early post-war movie about Utamaro and Masumura more directly in Irezumi 1966 do variations on the idea.
In reality, the female body come in a distant third place amongst the surfaces most used for mathematics, behind mirrors and windows.
190 cont: Forgot the Red Peony Gambler exploitation series.
Still, that movie with Ewan McGregor and Vivian Wu was hott. It seems like there should be room in the world for "The Pillow Book, but with math."
187: The theorem is much stronger than that: finitely many *rational* solutions. But I agree with the main point: Faltings is probably the easiest one.
"The Pillow Book, but with math, smugness, obfuscation, the oddly placed nuke, complaints about policing the discourse and dogs."
Huh. So The Pillow Book, the movie, was very different from The Pillow Book the book?
I found the movie ludicrously pompous and stupid, not to mention racist and sexist. I like the book. But YMMV.
I've seen The Pillow Book, Prospero's Books and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and you know what I decided? If Peter Greenaway ever shows up at my door, I'm not letting him anywhere near my books!
I really really really dislike Greenaway. But, again, YMMV.
198:I have only seen Belly of an Architect with Brian Dennehy. Liked it ok, but I'm told it is atypical Greenaway.
Oh, and Sundance had The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy in rotation for a while, and I dipped in and out. Good grief.
118
I mean, I'm mostly just trolling from a place of ignorance, but if the state of the art really is: group selection, does it exist or not, we're at a pretty low level of understanding of the process.
If the situation is that group selection is theoretically possible under specific conditions that rarely if ever occur in practice then I don't think arguments about possible examples indicate a lack of understanding exactly.
A lot of people (Steve Sailer for example) seem strangely invested in group selection. I haven't found the arguments for its importance very convincing.
I haven't found the arguments for its importance very convincing.
I feel like every time I walk out the door I see evidence for group selection, in human society at least.
202: well, he would be interested in group selection, wouldn't he, what with the wanting to prove the white race is all superior and stuff.
183 reminds me of the AP Herbert thing about the man who wrote a cheque on a cow.
"Was Ms Watanabe crossed?"
The problem with "the selfish gene" as a phrase (as opposed to as a book, and I have read it) is exactly the same one as "the survival of the fittest" - it's a stylish and convincing formulation of a complicated concept, but one which people drag into all sorts of other arguments just because it's aesthetically/rhetorically elegant.
Spencer could have written "organisms whose combination of inherited characteristics and random mutations are better suited to their environment will survive to reproduce more often, on average, and therefore such characteristics will become more common in the population", but to be honest, would anyone have read it?
The downside is that people use it in all sorts of contexts with some fairly terrible results. Basically, whatever Richard Dawkins' original motives, its purpose is merely to spread...ah. In fact, it's more like a bacterial plasmid that gets horizontally transferred than a eukaryotic gene.
I bet Ms Watanabe was cross if somebody had written all over her. Wouldn't you be?
I hate being written on. In my youth, I'd had girls occasionally flirt with me by writing on me. God I hated it, but I had to act like it was cute and shit.
206 is right. Also, Dawkins himself uses rhetoric in The Selfish Gene that's fairly pernicious in places. Perhaps understandable in the context of the time, I suppose, but it's not neutral.
I quite liked the Extended Phenotype. (And most of Dawkins stuff on evolution, and in fact even some of his explicit pop-sci stuff. It's just his political atheism that is rubbish.)
I fucking hate the concept of memes though, and I find it fucking hilarious that they have ended up the way we talk about bad jokes on the internet.
204
202: well, he would be interested in group selection, wouldn't he, what with the wanting to prove the white race is all superior and stuff.
It's more than that, he wants to posit the existence of racial solidarity genes (arising from group selection) which cause people to altruistically favor members of their own race. Which I don't see a lot of evidence for.
203
I feel like every time I walk out the door I see evidence for group selection, in human society at least.
Examples?
211: I think you've answered your own question, James. His narrative on group selection sounds like his other racial narratives.
But I'm curious what you don't see evidence for. You don't think that people are often willing to, say, hire members of their own race over better-qualified members of other races?
Or you don't see evidence that this behavior is selected for?
Anyway, you seem to have this idea that Sailer looks at evidence and reaches conclusions. You've got it backwards.
But I'm curious what you don't see evidence for. You don't think that people are often willing to, say, hire members of their own race over better-qualified members of other races?
That is not necessarily group selection. Group selection is the idea that "alleles can become fixed or spread in a population because of the benefits they bestow on groups, regardless of the alleles' effect on the fitness of individuals within that group".
For racial preference to be an example of group selection, you'd need to show that
a) racial preference was genetically determined
b) it had no effect or a negative effect on the fitness of the individual doing the selecting
c) it had a positive effect on the overall fitness of the group.
A genetically determined trait that says "prefer people who look like you" can be explained in kin-selection terms.
Kin selection clearly has significant explanatory power, but it seems to me that it's just as clearly a radical oversimplification of the actual complexity of natural interactions and that oversimplification becomes more problematic as animals get more complex. The argument (per ajay above) that you can rationalize something using just kin selection as a hypothesis is a bit of an evasion of that. It's prioritizing Occam's razor over actually examining the phenomenon. The list of complexities you have to ignore to make kin selection your be-all and end-all is very long. It includes indirect genetic effects, manipulation of group members by other group members, culture-genetic interactions, and lots of other stuff I don't know but is relevant to non-human animals as well. I think evolutionary biology is a fascinating field with lots of scientific creativity that is still in many ways open in that the complexities have not yet been fully explored.
It's more than that, he wants to posit the existence of racial solidarity genes (arising from group selection) which cause people to altruistically favor members of their own race.
Forget racial solidarity, it's too loaded. Think group solidarity in general. Think soccer fans if you want. Group selection is greatly enhanced in cases where the group organizes to punish within-group defection and rewards cooperation against other groups. I think people are genetically primed to do this and to do it far beyond family boundaries. Sure, you can rationalize the initial origins of this using kin selection alone (on the veldt we wandered in extended families so we unconsciously assume anyone we interact with cooperatively is a family member). But the impulse is so strong and can be triggered so indiscriminately that it seems to me that it's old and basic enough to reflect group selection.
Also, although group selection can certainly play into racism, so can kin selection. I tend to think of the kind of racist theorizing you are citing from Sailer as an artificial limitation the actual nature of human group solidarity, since cooperative bonds can and clearly do work across racial barriers. You have to implicitly introduce a crude kin selection overlay (races are families and cooperation is only natural within the family!) to make it work.
215: But the impulse is so strong and can be triggered so indiscriminately that it seems to me that it's old and basic enough to reflect group selection.
This appears to me to be quite an intellectual leap. There certainly do seem to be a lot of sophisticated group behavior in humans, that almost certainly has some level of genetic basic (or culture building on genetic hooks etc.), but the connection to the specific method of selection by which the genetic underpinning developed seems quite contingent.
216: if you can't make intellectual leaps in blog comment sections, where can you make them? But seriously, the Bowles article I linked to way back up in 67 is one of a whole set of papers he has done trying to model the effects of plausible scenarios for veldt-type situations on group vs. individual selection. So that is in the background of what I'm saying.
To be clear: I am not "against" kin selection and the debate actually should not be framed as kin vs. group selection. Kin selection is clearly operative and immediately falls out of any reasonable model of gene-based evolution. What I am against is kin selection as hte General Theory of Everything, or the General Theory of 99% of Everything, which is where I fault and Dawkins and certain others. This has had a toxic effect on the popular understanding of this stuff.
The thing is, biology is full of poorly defined and overlapping concepts which someone once found useful and ran with. Paying attention to too many of these is not so great-- isochores, giemsa bands. The central notions of gene, species, and fitness each have a cluster of methodologically-oriented defintions; keeping track of these is already a lot of work.
Asking where an idea is necessary is a first cut.
I read the beetle paper and a couple of others, I'll send in a guest post in a day or two.
Cool, thanks lw.
Also potentially interesting to look at -- some papers on indirect genetic effects, which can also play havoc with simpler kin selection models. Two early seminal papers. A more recent experimental/field measurement of the size and impact.
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But I'm curious what you don't see evidence for. You don't think that people are often willing to, say, hire members of their own race over better-qualified members of other races?
People don't do this so much if they know it is going to hurt them personally.
Or you don't see evidence that this behavior is selected for?
I find it implausible that such genes would become (or stay) common. Consider a gene that causes white people to favor other (not closely related) white people even when it is to their personal disadvantage. Suppose initially half the white population has this gene and half doesn't. Then each generation the frequency of the gene (within the white population) should decrease as its holders sacrifice themselves for the good of the group.
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Anyway, you seem to have this idea that Sailer looks at evidence and reaches conclusions. You've got it backwards.
I find Sailer to be more open minded then most. For one thing he isn't partisan. But he does have blindspots and group selection is one of them.
