Group selection of chickens is great. I always get the whole bucket.
I initially read the bit in the first paragraph as "these best lawyers are more enthusiastic cannibals," but then lost interest when I realized I'd misread it. I can only hope that I've added value in mentioning that.
OK, the clearest example ->page not found.
The Dawkinistas have their tentacles eveywhere! Here is a working link. An extraneous < /br> got in there.
Actually I guess I am just doing some "break-trimming" (from the abstract) whatever the fuck that is.
I assume it should be "beak-trimming".
That's what it says later in the abstract, so yeah.
So I agree that group selection is not just theoretical, but I suspect that it's like parthenogenesis or prions, an interesting marginal case rather than an essential idea.
Why do you think this, when there are so many theoretical and empirical papers arguing it is essential and appears throughout nature? How much of your fondness for individual selection is driven by the elegance of the theory, and if it is, don't you need to check out the theoretical papers on group selection as well?
The whole individual/group selection argument reminds me uncomfortably of economics, where a field becomes enormously reliant on a superficially appealing model that has some explanatory power but relies on heavy simplifying assumptions (individual/kin selection in biology, competitive markets in economics). In the case of individual selection there is more explanatory power (there can hardly be less explanatory power than economics), although of course Wilson and Nowak argue that this empirical power has been enormously overstated.
I'll admit part of my prejudice here is the sense that group selection is obvious in humans and the fondness for Hamilton-type stuff in pop "evolutionary psychology" directly reflects the crude libertarianism of recent ideology.
This is obviously a continuation of a previous thread I didn't read, so it's not entirely clear to me what the dispute is about, but it still seems pretty interesting. Carry on.
I agree with 9.4. "Deep" explanations that porport to reveal the true inner workings have an automatic intellectual appeal. We live in a era where the only explanations that count as "deep" are ones in terms of selfishness.
OK, the clearest example I found where group selection rather than kin selection is unambiguously necessary is in chickens; ...
I just read the abstract but I fail to see what this paper has to do with whether group selection is an important process in nature.
As I understand it, the group selection debate is about the extent to which evolution in nature will select for traits that are good for the group but harmful to the individual. Obviously human animal breeders can select on a group basis if they want but that does not mean this is a common process in the natural world.
9
I'll admit part of my prejudice here is the sense that group selection is obvious in humans ...
It's not obvious to me but perhaps we are talking past each other. What do you mean by group selection? In my interpretation this would mean that humans obviously have many genetic traits that are good for the group but disadvantageous to the individual and I don't see this.
9
The whole individual/group selection argument reminds me uncomfortably of economics, ...
Group selection advocates remind me of creationists with their dubious claims that evolution cannot produce some things.
I think it's fairly obvious that genetic traits for charity, altruism, sharing food, equal division of the group's spoils etc. could in practice be harmful to some individual humans (though helpful to others) and helpful to the group.
15
I think it's fairly obvious that genetic traits for charity, altruism, sharing food, equal division of the group's spoils etc. could in practice be harmful to some individual humans (though helpful to others) and helpful to the group.
Obviously you can imagine genetic traits that are beneficial to the group but harmful individually. This does not mean humans actually have any great number of such genes or explain how evolution would establish them in the population.
Note in most human societies it is individually advantageous to be perceived as generous and unselfish which confused things a bit. There are lots of studies that show people act in a more group oriented way when they know they are being watched. For example IIRC people tip less (on average) when they are eating by themselves.
15: I'm not actually sure about this, which is largely why I haven't been in this particular argument swinging hard. I mean, while I can see that altruism might be disadvantageous to an individual on a particular occasion, it doesn't seem clear to me that it's necessarily (all caveats are deeply meant here) going to be disadvantageous to most individuals on most occasions. If it averages out more advantageous than not to the individual, then couldn't an altruistic trait be explained by individual selection?
I guess what it comes down to is that I'm not really clear on what precisely it would mean for 'group selection' to be an evolutionary force or not.
I am with James in being unclear on how a natural environment would ever mimic this experiment.
PGD, what's the best hypothesized example from nature of this? I believe you've mentioned human examples of obvious group selection. What are they?
Contra Walt in 11 (and James in the previous thread), I think group selection fits neatly with Steve Sailer-ish tribalism, which doesn't strike me as an improvement over Randian economics.
(Paragraph 3 is, of course, silent on the subject of whether group selection actually takes place.)
17
... If it averages out more advantageous than not to the individual, then couldn't an altruistic trait be explained by individual selection?
It doesn't have to be anything as specific as an altruistic trait. A general getting along with the group trait would suffice for behaviors that are socially encouraged.
18
Contra Walt in 11 (and James in the previous thread), I think group selection fits neatly with Steve Sailer-ish tribalism, ...
Just for the record I agree that group selection appeals to Sailer for reasons other than scientific merit and I don't think I said anything contrary to that in the earlier thread.
I don't understand any of this. Man, you guys are smart.
How do biologists explain the sterility of worker bees, if not through group selection?
Group selection advocates remind me of creationists with their dubious claims that evolution cannot produce some things.
Let's be clear. We're not arguing about evolution here. I (and I imagine everybody here) thinks evolution produced everything. Genes are the unit of evolutionary selection. There are many genes in an individual person, and there are also many genes in a group. The issue is whether the *target* of evolutionary selection can ever be at the group level, or whether it has to be at exclusively at the individual level. (Note it can be, and almost certainly is, at both levels at the same time).
The Dawkins/kin selection/inclusive fitness hypothesis says that even genetic traits that look like they might have been the product of group selection, like eusocial traits (sharing, self-sacrifice, and so forth) are the product of individual favoritism toward closely related kin, so the only way group altruism could have evolved is e.g. mothers favoring babies or siblings favoring each other. Kin selection is the magic key to all evolutionary explanation and everything else is waved off. As I said, there are an increasing number of way-smarter-than-me biologists and theorists who are saying this can't be true.
Obviously you can imagine genetic traits that are beneficial to the group but harmful individually. This does not mean humans actually have any great number of such genes or explain how evolution would establish them in the population.
I linked to several articles in the last thread with detailed models of how evolution could establish eusocial genes. You don't actually appear interested in questioning your own beliefs in this area, you simply repeat a simple and doctrinaire stance.
Note in most human societies it is individually advantageous to be perceived as generous and unselfish which confused things a bit.
It doesn't confuse anything. One of the easiest ways to render eusociality evolutionary stable is for group members to actively punish uncooperative behavior and reward cooperative behavior. It will not escape your notice that humans *love* to do this. It might be our third or fourth favorite behavior after sex and eating. Entire Unfogged threads, entire TV channels, are devoted to singling out total strangers for damnation or praise based on fifth-hand descriptions of their behavior. It's a behavior wired directly to our pleasure centers.
One way individual-selection minded theorists explain the obvious presence of eusocial traits in human communities is to argue for "reciprocal altruism" -- all altruism is directly prudential in expectation of a reciprocal reward to the individual altruist. These theories start to bleed into true altruism, especially when you introduce reputation and chains of "pay it forward" altruism in isolated groups. But it seems clear to me that humans are primed for non-selfish altruism.
For example IIRC people tip less (on average) when they are eating by themselves.
Strange argument. They shouldn't tip at all. Can we have a show of hands of Unfogged posters who tip less than 15 percent when eating alone in the U.S.? Perhaps in a location you will not visit again? Feel free to post anonymously.
I think group selection fits neatly with Steve Sailer-ish tribalism, which doesn't strike me as an improvement over Randian economics.
For the record, I think group selection not only fits in with tribalism, it more or less explains it. (However, I don't think it is inherently racist, in that the tribal urge to form communities and punish insiders is not aligned with modern racial boundaries unless it is made so through propaganda). There is a very nasty face to group selection. There would probably be less violence and viciousness in human life if we were all exclusively pragmatic individualist bourgeoise relentlessly calculating the well being of our nuclear family at every point. (This point is well made in the Bowles articles I linked in the last thread). My issue with all this stuff is not picking the nicest most PC explanation of human nature, it's trying to think about the complexity of the situation. My beef with the 'libertarian' element of current pop ev-psych individual selection theories is that I suspect it's a massive ideological oversimplification, which annoys me.
whoops -- second sentence, last paragraph, should have read "tribal urge to form communities and punish OUTSIDERS
so many theoretical and empirical papers
Original discussion was post 11743, 11/15
In many instances, group selection and kin selection are indistinguishable. So the debate is about marginal cases and point of view, I think.
That said, the theoretical papers are not worth much, since it is easy to write models. The empirical papers IMO mostly come up dry (again, I basically will not read about the genetics of human behavior, signal:noise in the literature is unacceptable). There are a handful of people attached to group selection which include EO Wilson, but I'm not convinced about how important this is in nature from their work. Actually, it's clear that MJ Wade, the beetle guy, likes the idea of group selection, but hasn't done that much with it IMO, despite being clearly very good at designing experiments. Also, while I see people using kin selection and the notion of selfish genes to generate useful hypotheses frequently, I can't say the same for group selection. Biased sampling, yada yada, but that's my experience.
In nature, isolated populations of unrelated individuals (living on islands, or beetle-friendly microclimates) that occasionally interbeed could well be an environment for group beneficial traits that cost individual resources. The examples usually put forth involve signalling-- leaf coloring, birdsong, and the like. Propensity to cannibalism is a nice addition. Most isolated populations have nonzero kinship, so these same interesting cases actually observed could can be explained by either perspective.
I honestly think it's near miraculous that complex metazoans have evolved-- some cells get to reproduce but others don't? WTF? The more tenuous and less well specified "structure" of a group of metazoans seems to me underspecified for an entity subject to selection. But huge flocks of starlings and the Hubble telescope actually do exist, so who knows.
Kin selection works very well in bees, which have a freaky haplodiploid genetics whereby all sisters are much more closely related than are mammalian siblings. Kin selection also explains quantitatively sex ratios in haplodiploid animals.
Naked mole rats are the group selection case to examine. I didn't read much about these. I think that colony size is an important question-- dipteran colonies among insects that effectively signal to each other reach millions of individuals. I haven't read much about these.
22: they explain it through kin selection in haplodiploid species (where siblings are extremely closely related, so it makes more genetic sense for them to sacrifice for each other). This is one of the hypotheses by which Hamilton made his name, it's a clear kin selection prediction.
However, per Wilson this hypothesis began to fail over the last two decades and is no longer sustainable by the evidence.
Here, BTW, is the famous/infamous Wilson and Nowak Nature paper in which this point among many others is made. It would be very interesting if one of our resident mathematicians (Essear, Heebie, Cosma) would, in their extensive spare time, check out what Nowak claims is his mathematical demolition of inclusive fitness.
This paper takes a different but also interesting mathematical tack by demonstrating how cross-individual indirect genetic effects mean that at least some genetic selection must take place at the group level. (I was curious as to why lw in this post seemed to only refer people to indirect genetic interactions that took place within the genome of a single individual, when cross-individual effects are so directly linked to group selection).
26: termites are another interesting case since unlike bees/wasps/ants they're not haplodiploid. Though eusociality evolved only once there as compared to multiple times in the wasp clade.
these best layers are more enthusiastic cannibals
Is there a causal relationship? And how does this work? Is chicken feed soylent green for the clucking set or are they actually gnawing on one another?
(You may properly infer that 75%* of this discussion is way over my head.)
*I mean, I did pay a little attention in 10th grade biology.
How does one distinguish the hypothesis of group selection from kin selection in a real case? Even if you had a symbiotic relation between two species A and B, and one of the As sacrificed itself for one of the Bs, you could always say it was for the sake of the related As. In the other direction, isn't kin selection just selection for family survival?
27.3 is theory, not empirical. It's easy to write theories that will predict anything. There is a literature on how to constrain and test theories-- number of free parameters, ROC curves.
29. Unkown. The textbook examples for stuff like this is loci for unrelated traits are physically near each other on the genome, so selection on one carries the other along. I doubt that cannibalism or egg-laying are single-locus traits, so untangling the genetics is going to require a lot more information than is currently available.
30. Usually you can't, so the search is for corner cases where only one theory works. The empirical beetle and plant papers illustrate how hard it is to study isolated populations.
The point of PGD's link is that inclusive fitness is not a "generic" outcome -- it only results from a very special set of assumptions.
The textbook examples for stuff like this is loci for unrelated traits are physically near each other on the genome, so selection on one carries the other along
Fascinating. I didn't know that physical proximity had anything to do with selection. What are some of the textbook examples?
33 finally poses a question I can answer. Because I remember the phrase "genetic linkage" from class.
30: That's pretty much where I get stuck on not quite getting the argument well enough to argue. Obviously altruistic behavior towards non-kin exists in humans and other species; how you'd rule in or out the possibility that it was selected for (and what, exactly, selected for means in that context) I can't quite follow.
I'm here to make the rest of you look smart.
36 to 34 but also pretty much everything.
Usually you can't, so the search is for corner cases where only one theory works. The empirical beetle and plant papers illustrate how hard it is to study isolated populations.
Could you say a little bit more about this, at a bit higher level of abstraction? If you say that one's kin defines a group, how could you find a case where kin selection works but group selection doesn't?
What, in principle, would be a case where you have group selection, but no kin selection? Suppose a political scientist explains why almost all nations have standing armies in the following way: nations that didn't have standing armies were conquered by nations with them.
Nothing is said about the reproductive success of the citizens in the conquered nations. Would that be a case of group selection for standing armies?
30 is exactly right. It is even more complex because one would expect individual and group selection to be operating at the same time. As in many naturally occurring complex systems, it is a big challenge to use empirical evidence alone to pick between theories. Contra lw then, I would argue that you *must* pay attention to theories because people come to the evidence with an implicit theory and there is much room to rationalize that theory. lw (appears to be) a working biologist and I read him as saying that in his work he has not felt the need to expand his theoretical toolkit beyond inclusive fitness to rationalize the evidence he has encountered. I respect that, and respect that he has superior knowledge/experience to me, but am raising examples of other biologists who argue that in their experience you do have to.
29: On chicken cannibalism, I think lw is saying that the exact genetic mechanisms within the chicken are not understood. However, biologists who model social interactions (cross-individual effects on expression of a gene, so-called indirect or associative genetic effects) see chicken cannibalism as a clear example. For instance, chickens in crowded environments would evolve to be more aggressive toward other chickens and even to kill and eat them. Thus, individual fertility (which produces crowded environments) will also select for negative social interactions that decrease group fertility. Individual selection in this case acts at direct cross purposes with group selection. Here is a discussion . It is very important for breeders to understand this to maximize farm productivity. How it works out in nature will be less clear, but it seems that both levels of selection will operate. Whatever genetics evolve within an individual chicken will reflect this selection process.
Whoops -- here is the chicken cannibalism link . First time I have ever typed that sentence.
I read him as saying
I believe that should be ""her".
27: I keep meaning to read that paper in my copious spare time. In the meanwhile, I temporarily outsource my opinion to my friend Jon Wilkins, an actual evolutionary biologist [1, 2, 3]. This does not make me want to rush out and read the paper.
When I click the link in 27 I seem to get a corrupted PDF file -- lots of equations look like they have missing bits in them.
I was originally a physicist, am now basically a computer guy, I work with molecular biology but am not a geneticist myself, so not arguing from authority.
38. Kinship predicts sex ratios in haplodiploid creatures, some aspects of pollen competition in plants.
33. Most of what you can see by just looking at individuals is the product of variation of more than a single gene, so for clarity, obscure single-locus diseases are the thing to talk about. Nail-patella syndrome, a rare genetic diease, is linked to the nearby gene that determines blood type. There are lots of plant examples. Color-blindness, likely a multilocus trait, has at least one contributing gene on the X-chromosome, so is often sex-linked.
39. Sure, not claiming my perspective to be definitive or necessary- like I tried to say, it's a matter of judgement; this is basically recreational reading for me, and I prefer to focus on things where certainty is possible rather than the unknowable. I did want to back off of my initial claim that this phenomenon does not exist, that's wrong. I still think it's peripheral, but I'm not sure of that.
Pleasantly surprised that there are comments.
am now basically a computer guy
I apologize, I realized, immediately after posting 41 that I had been confusing you with somebody else.
(checking I see now that I was getting confusion with "clew" -- I don't think I often confuse the two of you, but, in my defense, it is a short handle containing "l" and "w").
43: If you mean the Wilson/Nowak paper, the link works fine for me, including the Appendix (which is the key part) -- here is the link again:
http://www.ped.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/publications_nowak/NowakNature2010.pdf
It's hosted at Harvard so not sure if one could find a better link.
Here is the second paper link (on IGEs and multi-level selection):
http://labs.eeb.utoronto.ca/agrawal/publications/strpopiges.pdf
||
NMM Anne McCaffrey, Paul Motian, Lynn Margulis... Fuck this week.
|>
Can we have a show of hands of Unfogged posters who tip less than 15 percent when eating alone in the U.S.?
I'll often tip extravagantly when dining alone. (Like $5 on a $10 check: we're not talking about expensive meals, here.)
Maybe I can turn this into a food and dating thread all by myself.
42: thanks Cosma. Your friend's discussion of the paper is a little confusing to an outsider. It's very difficult to figure out whether the insider reaction to this paper is driven by the paper being obvious and correct but insulting in its framing and rhetoric (because the authors claim others do not understand their obvious conclusions), whether it is driven by the paper being incorrect, or by some other issue of interpretation. Note for instance that your friend says that group selection and inclusive fitness/kin selection are properly understood not in contradiction at all and in fact mathematically interchangeable (as I understand it this is the lesson of multilevel selection).
One thing that is relevant to these threads though: he claims that Wilson and Nowak attack a straw man version of kin selection that no one holds to any more. Our whole discussion in the previous thread started because I claimed that Dawkins had led to the popular culture adopting a primitive and misleading version of kin selection which rules out group selection illegitimately. I suspect that what your friend calls the "straw man" theory of kin selection is what I was reacting to as well. For me as a non-specialist, Wilson and Nowak were useful in making clear the shortcomings of that highly simplistic view of inclusive fitness. If that particular straw man is an inaccurate description of the current state of academic evolutionary biology then that's great.
Finally, I found the appendix (which your friend calls "careful and meticulous") to be the deepest and most interesting part of the paper, not the main body which drew all the fire.
23
Let's be clear. We're not arguing about evolution here. I (and I imagine everybody here) thinks evolution produced everything. ...
Maybe not but arguments that individual selection cannot produce certain features observed in the natural world have the same form as arguments that evolution cannot produce these features and are often seem similarly unconvincing to me (and also often seem similarly driven by distaste for the dominant theory).
Strange argument. They shouldn't tip at all. ...
This does not follow. Habit is one explanantion. And you are still being observed when you eat by yourself just not by people as important to you.
I linked to several articles in the last thread with detailed models of how evolution could establish eusocial genes. You don't actually appear interested in questioning your own beliefs in this area, you simply repeat a simple and doctrinaire stance.
And I can create models in which intelligent design produces certain traits. So what? That doesn't mean that is how they actually arose.
As for my beliefs, I find natural selection on individuals quite intuitive and therefore appealing as a theory. It is not clear to me that anything more is required at least in most cases and as I said above I have found most claims to the contrary to be unconvincing in the same way as creationist claims.
Lynn Margulis
Aw, crap. She was a friend of my grandmother's.
46: The link works for me but there are missing symbols in the Appendix; it looks like no minus signs are showing up, and I'm not sure if anything else is missing. This doesn't happen for you? Maybe I should install another PDF viewer besides Preview, but I hate the way Acrobat tries to take over my computer....
I tip generously when eating cheaply, but carefully work out 16-17% of the check at fancy places. I figure out my bill, tax and tip when ordering, so don't look at the bill when it comes, which is the socially awkward part. If I can't do this because of boisterous ad-hoc ordering and drinking, I usually split the bill and round up.
The real social dilemma with some signalling value for me is smoking. Won't smoke in front of my kid, so any adult interaction with beer or coffee is fair game. But I do not want others to think that I am a disgusting troglodyte. The acuteness of the issue was sharpened when a colleague that I'd leave a regularly scheduled meeting with did an imitation of rolling a smoke with a slight shoulder hunch a few years back. If only I had self-awareness.
The Wilson and Nowak paper seems to have a lot of interesting information, but it also seems to be misguided at a philosophical level. I don't have a solid enough grounding to precisely say what they're doing wrong, but the argument seems to be that kin selection is a pointless construct because it only holds in certain limiting situations (in the mathematical sense of "limit") and in those situations it can be derived from a more general theory. But that's always true of "effective theories" (not sure what the non-physics word is for this notion) and it doesn't make them useless!
Oh, weird moment of Upper-East-Side private-school-kid mores the other day. I was taking Sally and a friend from her swim team to a meet the other day, and asked where she went to school. She mentioned a school that was near my public high school, and I said: "I remember you guys, your school used to come sit in our courtyard at lunch and after school," thinking, but not saying, "Sit and smoke in our courtyard," because while that was fairly normal in the eighties, I figured that modern 12-year-olds would be shocked by the normalization of smoking. Then she said, "Oh, people still go sit and smoke in your courtyard." So either they're teaching telepathy in the private schools these days, or smoking has not successfully been stamped out among the affluent youth.
AFAICT, public smoking is most common among upper class teenage girls and grizzled looking older women. And I guess some grizzled looking older dudes. I went to a music industry wedding over the summer and was mildly shocked to see a large crowd hanging out and smoking over drinks, totally shame free and in the middle of the action. Haven't seen that for a while!
N.b. -- I am too stupid to comment on the substance of the post, but it sure is interesting.
54: I think their argument is that people only use the approximation. It's like saying that Ohm's Law is sufficient to understand all of electromagnetism.
It seems like it would take some effort to sort out what all the assumptions are and what role they play. Skimming, it looks like even in their preferred model with fewer assumptions, they make silly-seeming assumptions like that the population size is fixed and only the relative fractions of different subpopulations change. It's not clear to me how much these kinds of assumptions affect the big picture.
I was Googling for arguments about the paper, and I found an essay by Richard Dawkins on kin selection that was so annoying that I'm now convinced that the critics must be completely right.
62 is right, should be Sally if someone wants to correct it before LB is back.
In a shocking twist, the only Google result for Sally's real name is what seems to be the very swim meet mentioned in 55.
Stupid question: how does one use PubMed? The link in the post takes me to an abstract, but I don't see any link there for the full paper.
It varies by publisher and age of paper. If there's no fulltext link visible, expand the LinkOut section, if that doesn't go anywhere, as for the initial chicken paper, follow these instructions to get pdf of the article from your cooperating academic library in a few days. Flash your email if you're interested, I can forward.
I guess my institution doesn't pay for online access to Poultry Science. Who'da thunk? I bet Cornell and Davis do.
Your institution probably does subscribe to Financial Malfeasance Quarterly and The Journal of Despicable Bastardy.
My favorite journal is Peer Reviewed Research With Regis & Kathy Lee.
This thread reminded me that I really like reading about the life sciences (molecular biology, cell biology, paleontology, ecology, evolution, epidemiology especially), but I haven't done it in a rather long time. Does anyone have any recommendations for books? I'm keen on most things but anything requiring a lot of math is probably beyond me.
My favorite authors about the life sciences are Carl Zimmer and David Quammen. Look through their books and see which topics look the most interesting.
This is the best paleontology book I can think of.
69: Not to mention Semi-Homemade Research by Sandra Lee.
Thanks, Ned. I've read all of Quammen and a few of Zimmer's stuff; I've put the linked book on my wish list and will look back at Zimmer's books to see what I've missed. I really adore Quammen; I need to find more like him.
This one about C. elegans is pretty great. This is a classic though it's mostly about human disease.
Last year's "The Tiger" by John Vaillant is very much in the Quammen style. Vaillant has only written one other book so far.
I second the "Your inner fish" recommendation. It's probably not my favorite (either "Wonderful Life" or "The Ancestor's Tale") but its very very good.
70
... Does anyone have any recommendations for books? ...
I liked both "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins and "The Mismeasure of Man" by Gould. I read them some time ago, as I recall there is some math in the Gould book.
I feel slightly bad for liking Mary Roach's books because each of them seems like a collection of things written for GQ and can be read in about two hours. But then you can reread it, and learn things again. The first one, Stiff, is probably the most educational.
This book about olfactory science is absolutely fascinating. The book that Luca Turin himself wrote a couple years later is good too.
I can't think of many others because I just get them out from the library.
OT: what's the protocol if your cat keeps getting attacked by a neighborhood cat who keeps wandering into your yard and starting scraps?
I haven't met the owner, but he appears to be an elderly gentleman who lets the cat live outside permanently and who doesn't keep very close tabs on him. The attacking cat is a bully and not very well socialized. The attacked cat--my GF's--is fat, uncoordinated, passive, and not very clever. She also never ventures farther than 10 feet from the door of the house, so if it's a beef over territory it's very one-sided.
Dealing with the consequences of infections from two of the attacks has led to about $700 in vet expenses.
Thanks, James and Ned and UPETGI. I've read that Dawkins' book and most of Gould's books, as well as Roach's, and liked them all, so you all are definitely hitting the sort of books I like to read - I just need more! Everything you guys have suggested sounds super interesting.
Geology suggestions would also be welcomed!
Quite old and probably out of date in a number of ways (and skip his preachy shit at the end) but I am still partial to Chance and Necessity by Jacques Monod. Also from the '70s Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: An Ecologist's Perspective by Colinvaux. And if you have not read it, The Origin of Species is about the most readable book of primary science ever. And Wilson's Sociobiology really is worth reading or at least skimming through--skip the last (or last 2?) chapters if you want to preserve a more positive image of the book.
For more modern stuff, I like some of Matt Ridley's stuff and Sean Carrol's Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo.
Not life sciences directly but related, Hallam's Great Geological Controversies is a really good read (although $81 for a paperback? I guess it must be used as a textbook).
Another I bet you've read is Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac.
I really adore The Origin of Species and I have read Leopold and Ridley, but I will check out the other suggestions, JP! Thanks!
The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester (about canal builder William Smith's early-19th century map of English Geology) is also quite good.
80: John McPhee's Annals of the Former World (and, in a way, The Control of Nature) for geology.
I know you said no math up-thread, but if you can track down a copy of Karl Sigmund's Games of Life, it's one of the most wonderful books about mathematical biology ever, without requiring you to know math.
J. T. Bonner's The Social Amoebae is great, in a way surprising only if you haven't encountered Dictyostelium before.
Stephen Budiansky's Nature's Keepers and If a Lion Could Talk.
Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home is probably only interesting if you have a garden.
Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History is ancient, but marvelous, and well worth tracking down.
Thanks, JP.
Cosma, fantastic - McPhee and Zinsser I love - I'll check out the others eagerly! And I appreciate the math suggestion, since I realized I just want to read a good book, and so long as I'm not going to be lost in the numbers it'll be fine!
80: John McPhee's Annals of the Former World (and, in a way, The Control of Nature) for geology.
Oooh, totally.
9: The whole individual/group selection argument reminds me uncomfortably of economics, where a field becomes enormously reliant on a superficially appealing model that has some explanatory power but relies on heavy simplifying assumptions
(Now that I'm done with the most annoying day before Thanksgiving ever, which included two long calls with vendors and filling out my assessment of how I did against my 2011 Performance Objectives (and then meeting with my boss for an hour and a half on that lovely topic.))
I think this concern is somewhat akin to a category error. I am reminded of a book that I got per recommendation from a CT thread called The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life by Barry Schwartz. This book presents the view of human nature as entirely governed by self-interest that is shared by the disciplines of evolutionary biology, neoclassical economics, and behavioral psychology. The difference being that the latter two areas of discussion concern themselves directly with models and descriptions of the actual behavior of human beings with its unholy mix of genetically and cultural inputs, while the former is a different thing altogether. Very different things are being "simplified" in the two cases. And of course, the concepts of evolutionary biology can be abused or misapplied to human behavior (an certainly have been), but it is not inherently reductionist in the same way.
86: Of course more occur to me after I post.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form. Also ancient, and mathematical, but again requires no mathematical knowledge, and really beautifully written. But maybe you've read this one already? If not, get the abridged edition.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's books of feminist sociobiology, The Woman Who Never Evolved, and Mother Nature.
Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (despite the title).
Steven Berlin Johnson's The Ghost Map.
Gary Marcus, Birth of the Mind [teaser]
The book in 78 is indeed fascinating, and worth it for the descriptions of how the scents in perfumes work, and Luca Turin appears to be a master of smell, but his theory is highly dubious.
May I recommend Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies , the latest book by EO Wilson. It is visually stunning, a sort of coffee table tour de force, and the text is a fascinating exploration of insect evolution that gets into some of the themes in this thread. The exposition does seem bit overcomplicated and labored at times but the obvious love for the subject, attention to detail, and depth of knowledge shines through.
Bonner and Gary Marcus seconded.
Comparative anatomy is interesting, I'm just starting. Hansen's How Animals Work is good, I thought. I liked Simon Winchester's Krakatoa book, like a triple-length New Yorker article.
This book presents the view of human nature as entirely governed by self-interest that is shared by the disciplines of evolutionary biology, neoclassical economics, and behavioral psychology.
Oh, good grief.
79: I have the exact same problem! my poor cat is afraid to go into the front yard, and she loves it there. my cat is tiny and wimpy--she was a feral stray we rescued from the drain outside and managed to convince another stray (whom we had fed from kittenhood) to foster her. girl x suggests blasting the offending "bad cat" with the hose on full force until she starts to stay out. but she's actually a friendly, only slightly larger grey and black kitty who's very friendly; I can't bring myself to blast her with the hose. girl y's on my side.
79, 94: I am starting to get worried about this, because my cat is not as energetic as she once was, and so other cats are starting to come into the yard, but she's still quite territorial. No fights yet, that I've seen, but it feels like just a matter of time. Of course when she was younger, she'd do things like go into neighbors' houses through their cat doors, boss around their cats, carrying their cat-toys back to my house, and karma's a bitch.
Oh wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound:
--Greville
This thread reminded me that I really like reading about the life sciences (molecular biology, cell biology, paleontology, ecology, evolution, epidemiology especially), but I haven't done it in a rather long time. Does anyone have any recommendations for books?
If you haven't read Zimmer's Parasite Rex, do so immediately. I'd also second Sean Carroll's book. Also, it's not really a book, but BBC Radio 4 has a series on the history of neuroscience at the moment which is available in podcast form.
