June 24, 2012
THE FALSE ALLURE OF GROUP SELECTION
Steven Pinker in Edge:
Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare of the person and his or her kin? If so, does the theory of natural selection have to be revamped to designate "groups" as units of selection, analogous to the role played in the theory by genes? Several scientists whom I greatly respect have said so in prominent places. And they have gone on to use the theory of group selection to make eye-opening claims about the human condition.[i] They have claimed that human morailty, particularly our willingness to engage in acts of altruism, can be explained as an adaptation to group-against-group competition. As E. O. Wilson explains, "In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals." They have proposed that group selection can explain the mystery of religion, because a shared belief in supernatural beings can foster group cohesion. They suggest that evolution has equipped humans to solve tragedies of the commons (also known as collective action dilemmas and public goods games), in which actions that benefit the individual may harm the community; familiar examples include overfishing, highway congestion, tax evasion, and carbon emissions. And they have drawn normative moral and political conclusions from these scientific beliefs, such as that we should recognize the wisdom behind conservative values, like religiosity, patriotism, and puritanism, and that we should valorize a communitarian loyalty and sacrifice for the good of the group over an every-man-for-himself individualism.
I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:33 AM | Permalink
Comments
Dawkins gives reason for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater:
"I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it. [-Richard Dawkins]
...
She later formulated a theory to explain how symbiotic relationships between organisms of often different phyla or kingdoms are the driving force of evolution. Genetic variation is proposed to occur mainly as a result of transfer of nuclear information between bacterial cells or viruses and eukaryotic cells. While her organelle genesis ideas are widely accepted, symbiotic relationships as a current method of introducing genetic variation is something of a fringe idea.
She did however, hold a negative view of certain interpretations of Neo-Darwinism, excessively focused on inter-organismic competition, as she believed that history will ultimately judge them as comprising "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology." She also believed that proponents of the standard theory "wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin – having mistaken him... Neo-Darwinism, which insists on [the slow accrual of mutations by gene-level natural selection], is in a complete funk."
She opposed such competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species."
(Wikipedia: Margulis).
The plot thickens.
Posted by: Dredd | Jun 24, 2012 9:30:57 AM
Has Wilson ever invoked multi-level selection to explain any aspect of human history or morality? I don't believe so, in which case Pinker is constructing a misleading association here.Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Jun 24, 2012 9:36:16 AM
There is a notable comment on the Edge piece:
"... My prediction is that new research in microbial ecology and evolution will change everything in how we think about genes and evolution. Because of the prevalence of "horizontal" gene transfer (by six different ways) in micro-organisms, they don't have Darwinian species, and their evolution looks Lamarckian—traits are acquired on the fly and passed on to offspring.
"Multi-level selection" is likely to extend downward below Darwinian species as well as upward into groups. Like everything in biology it will be messy and squishy. Simplistic Darwinian selection-by-mutation got pummeled by sexual recombination, chromosome doubling and tripling, kin selection, extended phenotype, endo-symbiosis (Margulis), regulatory genes, mitochondrial genomes, transgenic gene flow, and doubtless more to come.
The longer and closer you look, the gnarlier it gets, so far."
(Stewart Brand).
I certainly concur with Brand because too many evolutionary biologists are avoiding the earth shaking research papers being published around human-microbe symbiosis.
The "junk gene" phase of recent natural selection gene theory told us 98% of the human genome was junk.
Now they have reversed themselves, saying "not junk anymore", and we see that 98% of "our genome" is microbial, 2% human.
Quite significant.
Caution is called for.
Posted by: Dredd | Jun 24, 2012 9:54:34 AM
It needs to be recognized that "group selection" does not refer to selection of groups. It has to do with selection of traits that contribute to the reproductive success only of groups (e.g., eusocial colonies). The conventional understanding is that, in all cases, inclusive fitness adequately accounts for fixation of such traits in species. Wilson and colleagues contend that it doesn't. Too often, their critics seem to be saying, "Of course it does. We've already said it does."
Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Jun 24, 2012 11:13:24 AM
Pinker, Dawkins, etc. won't or can't deal with the mathematics which support EO Wilson et. al's hypothesis, choosing arguments about what "they" believe instead. Sounds alot like apostasy to me, with the true church of Dawkins etc. defending against change. Fortunately, no real inquisition any more: words, not torture.
John Garrett
Posted by: John Garrett | Jun 24, 2012 12:30:58 PM
A lot of Pinker's criticism of group selection centers on the idea that groups don't really "replicate" in the same sense as genes. I wonder if we need something like a theory of pseudo-Darwinian systems whose behavior is determined by a type of variation and selection, but which aren't truly Darwinian since they lack the feature of self-replication; some examples might include Hebbian learning in neural networks which reinforces "useful" synaptic connections (and is connected to Edelman's more specific theory of learning via neural darwinism--the wiki article mentions that he also calls this "neuronal group selection"), and the selection process among pheromone trails in ant colonies that allows the colony as a whole to "focus" the wandering of individual ants in directions that will lead them to food sources. Perhaps in systems like this, something akin to "group selection" can play a greater role than it can in systems that are "Darwinian" in the stricter sense of selection among random variations in self-replicators.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Jun 25, 2012 8:55:43 AM
Ken Pidcock wrote:
Has Wilson ever invoked multi-level selection to explain any aspect of human history or morality? I don't believe so, in which case Pinker is constructing a misleading association here.
Apparently he has, in his latest book; there was a review in the latest New York Review of Books but it isn't available online; there's a summary with quotes here. Also, to address John Garrett's comment:
Pinker, Dawkins, etc. won't or can't deal with the mathematics which support EO Wilson et. al's hypothesis
The NYRB review mentions that there was a great deal of technical criticism of the math that Wilson et al. use to defend group selection, in some of the letters in the "brief communication arising" section of the March 2011 issue of Nature in response to the paper by Nowak/Tarnita/Wilson (see here), criticisms briefly summarized in this article from Science Insider (which also mentions that additional technical criticisms appeared in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, summarized here). Pinker is writing an article for the layman, so it's silly to criticize him for not giving a detailed mathematical critique, or accuse him of behaving like an inquisitor.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Jun 25, 2012 9:15:58 AM
Are we done trying to explain human behavior by evolutionary mechanisms yet? I don't know whether Pinker is right or wrong, but I find this newest thrust-group selection supporting the notion that we are inclined to join non-universalistic irrational tribes-to be particularly irritating.
Posted by: Simon | Jun 25, 2012 6:17:24 PM
To Jesse M.
The responses to Nowak et. al seem almost ridiculous. 150 shocked
evolutionary biologist writing to Nature. Brings to mind 'One hundred author's against Einstein'. One is enough if you have some worth while criticism.
The faith of the biologists, in that all explanations reduce to gene level selection, seem to prohibit any novel modes of explanation. Questioning this shocks the orthodoxy of evolutionary biology, which responds in a somewhat irrational manner.
It seems Nowak et. al bring some genuinely new ideas based on the simulation and analysis of simple games. And that there are no good arguments against these. The old explanations based on kin selection do not seem very convincing either. They have been in the works for half a century.
The outrage seems to be motivated by the dismay of the possible shattering of the paradigm or world view, which sees the 'selfish gene' as an all encompassing principle of explanation.
Posted by: Anon | Jun 27, 2012 3:45:26 PM
It occurs to me that Prof. Pinker probably doesn't grow or hunt his own food, nor he personally drills the oil or forges the metal for the car he drives. Probably 80% of his ideas and 100% of the words he uses to express them come from other people he has never met and are long dead. So, being totally dependent on group/society/culture for just about everything, it seems a little untenable to so totally discount the role of the Group in selection. Furthermore, if he defines the gene as "selfish" and bent on replication, using the individual as a vehicle for its purpose, how can he logically deny the possibility of the gene using a group of individuals as a vehicle for its purpose?
The explanation: Genes are information, but they are not the only kind of information that can be passed on by a group to future generations. Even a herd of elephants may have non-genetic information, such as an old female's memory of the location of a water source, which can aid its survival. If she leads the herd to the water, other elephants will remember the source the next time, even after that female dies. Genes that increase the individual's adhesion to a group (e.g. mirror neurons, language recognition etc.) effectively link that individual and the information in his genes to the group pool of cultural, learned information, as well as linking it to nice things like food.
As I see it, natural selection favored those genes in our ancestors that extended the childhood learning period, enlarged the brain and enhanced language and cognition abilities. Those changes increased exposure to and retention of masses of cultural information existing within groups, and that enhanced the survivability of those genes. If that isn't group selection, then maybe this controversy is more semantic than real.
Posted by: aguy109 | Jun 29, 2012 7:45:54 AM
Anon wrote:
The responses to Nowak et. al seem almost ridiculous. 150 shocked
evolutionary biologist writing to Nature. Brings to mind 'One hundred author's against Einstein'. One is enough if you have some worth while criticism.
Of course the number of signers isn't relevant, but have you actually read all the responses in Nature and in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology? I don't have access to them, but the summaries I've read suggest they do respond to the technical details of Nowak/Tarnita/Wilson's paper.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Jun 29, 2012 8:49:08 AM
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