group selection
mikethemadbiologist | March 24, 2011Because we are human after all. Jason Collins at Evolving Economics, in response to my post about one economist's misunderstanding of biology, asks a very good question:
On the flip side, did Dawkins or Gould (or their respective supporters) ever concede to the other side that they were wrong and substantially change their world view?
I agree with Razib about what happened:
My own attitude is that both Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould retreated from maximalist positions when it came to the gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium arguments of the 1970s substantively. But rhetorically they…
razib | November 8, 2009In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated:
... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are many cases of women being assimilated into a dominant culture, and their offspring speaking the language, and expressing the values, in totality of their fathers. One inherits 50% of one's genes from one's mother and one's father, but inheritance of cultural traits which are distinctive between parents may show very strong biases. Partitioning…
razib | November 7, 2009I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his argument. One of the pillars of The Faith Instinct is group selection, and one of the scholars who Wade specifically cites is the economist Samuel Bowles. Bowles was an author on a paper I reviewed earlier this week, on the empirical assessment of the extent of heritability of wealth…
gregladen | September 2, 2009Today's falsehood is the idea that individual animals act for the benefit of their own species.
Let me give you an example. When I was a kid, I watched a nature show about cougars. The show 'documented' a single female cougar going about doing cougar-things and being generally cougar-like. At one point she had cute little baby cougar kittens.
Then a flood came. The stream near her chosen lair swelled its banks and threatened to drown the kittens. So, she carried one of the kittens up the hill to a new lair. She went back to get the second kitten, and the flood waters were even higher…
razib | June 4, 2009Classic case of "no free lunch," a new paper in Science, Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?, gives rise to popular press pieces with titles such as Blood and treasure and Altruism's Bloody Roots. If for most of human existence our species has been trapped by the reality of Malthusian conditions, boxed in by fixed resources, then it stands to reason that ingroup altruism and cohesion must be balanced by more vicious between group competition. This sort of process is not necessarily most obvious biologically. Rather, consider the…
jwhitfield | January 27, 2009Science is fun. Now, I know that someone telling you a thing is fun is usually a guarantee that it isn't. And I know that people who tell you science is fun usually do so in strained and pleading tones, and expect you to believe them because they have spiky hair and can play the harmonica. But it's true.
To see what I mean, read chapter 6 of the Origin, 'Instinct'. Despite, or because of, having its share of 'are you sure about that?' moments, it's a delight, because it shows Darwin doing the most fun thing in science: mucking about with reality, sometimes called experimentation.
In this…
mikethemadbiologist | July 21, 2007Again. ScienceBlogling razib discusses some noises various biologists are making about levels of selection (I've touched on this topic before in the context of group selection). Sweet Baby Intelligent Designer, save us from this madness.
I've been through this before--hell, I've even published stuff related to the topic**, and there isn't much there except for intellectual masturbationuninteresting and bad philosophy. If it doesn't provide me with testable hypotheses and the conceptual tools to do so, it's just not useful. That's what happened the last go around with this in the late 80s…
mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2007The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has posted of all of the articles from In the light of evolution I: Adaptation and complex design . It looks pretty interesting. And it's free! I can't wait to see how the creationists bollox this up...
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2007A while ago, Bora referred to a short article about David Sloan Wilson, whose research program examines group selection (among other things). Any discussion of group selection is almost always contentious, largely because there is a fundamental confusion (or conflation) of two different phenomena: the evolution of groups and selection among groups (i.e., group selection).
Evolution of groups is a fascinating and fundamental issue in biology, whether it be the evolution of multicellular organisms from single cell organisms, or the evolution of behaviors that create coordinate group behavior…