February 9, 2010
Category: Evolution Institute
I'm back after finishing the first draft of my next book, titled Evolving the City, which will be published by Little, Brown and is about how evolutionary theory can improve the quality of life in a practical sense. It is based on my own odyssey during the last four years trying to make a difference in my city of Binghamton, New York, and creating the Evolution Institute with my friend and co-director, Jerry Lieberman, who is also president of the Humanists of Florida Association.
Getting involved in real-world issues such as childhood education, risky adolescent behavior, and landlord-tenant relations was the best intellectual decision that I ever made.
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 8:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 16, 2009
Category: Evolution Institute
The year was 2007. The event was the 118th annual meeting of the American Economic Association. The person was George A. Akerlof, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics and newly elected president of the AEA, who stepped up to the podium to deliver his presidential address titled "The Missing Motivation in Macroeconomics". The missing motivation was norms.
Norms? Economists have been the primary advisors on public policy and they're only newly considering a little thing called norms? This is the kind of disconnect between economic theory and reality that makes outsiders rub their eyes in disbelief.
Yet, it is important to resist the facile conclusion that economists are delusional as individuals. Most economists are very smart, very well informed, and very well-intentioned for the most part. We therefore have a mystery to solve that is far more interesting and consequential than mocking economists: What are the social and intellectual dynamics that cause smart, well-informed, and well-intentioned people to ignore something as manifestly important for our species as norms?
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 10:35 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 12, 2009
Category: Evolution Institute
Consider the following proposition: I'll give you 1 million dollars for sure or a 50:50 chance at 2.1 million dollars. What's your choice? If you're like me, you'll choose the certain 1 million. Yet, that is a violation of core economic theory that became known as the "Allais Paradox" based on the pioneering work of Maurice Allais in the 1950's, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1988.
The Allais Paradox provides a nice way to begin understanding the gap between economics and evolution. Using the notation that I introduced in E&E I, if A=the assumption that people maximize their mean expected utility and A'=the assumption that people are also sensitive to the variance in addition to the mean, then A' is clearly superior to A as a description of our species. Call it evolution, psychology, common sense, or whatever you like. If core economic theory is a collection of assumptions (ABC), and if science is an incremental process, then the transition from ABC to A'BC should be straightforward. What Allais established would be progress, not a paradox. Instead, something about A' made A'BC more problematic than ABC, interfering with incremental scientific progress. What was it?
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 9:41 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 7, 2009
Category: Evolution Institute
Meet the Evolution Institute, the world's first evolutionary think tank. The mission of the EI is to connect the world of evolutionary science to the world of public policy formulation. Only three years old, we have already made progress on childhood education, risky adolescent behavior, and the mother of all policy issues--the regulation of human social interactions.
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 11:09 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 5, 2009
Category: Evolution Institute • Truth and Reconciliation in Group Selection
Today's "Science Saturday" at bloggingheads.tv features an interview between Razib Kahn (Gene Expression) and myself. The interview begins with a discussion of multilevel selection, the subject of my recently concluded "truth and reconciliation" series, and ends with a discussion of the Evolution Institute and its mission to connect the world of evolutionary science with the world of public policy formulation. I look forward to making the same segue on this blog, focusing on the many ways that evolutionary theory can be used to understand and improve the human condition at scales large and small.
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 1:44 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2009
Category: Truth and Reconciliation in Group Selection
We have reached the end of the T&R series. In a truth and reconciliation process, truth is required for reconciliation. There must be a consensus on what happened, even if all wrongs cannot be righted. I have had my say on what happened during the group selection controversy. Anyone who wishes to challenge my account is welcome to do so. This period in the history of evolutionary thought deserves the same kind of scholarship that is lavished upon Darwin and his contemporaries. The more scholars the merrier. Much of what I have reported in the T&R series is drawn from my book with Elliott Sober, Unto Others, which was published in 1998 and has largely withstood the test of time. I'd like to think that Samir Okasha, author of the highly respected Evolution and the Levels of Selection (2006), agrees with my account. If not, I hope he will speak up.
Once a consensus is reached on what happened, scientific inquiry can proceed in a more unified fashion than before. I end this series with a summary of what a fully reconciled field of sociobiology will look like. For a more detailed account, please consult my 2007 article co-authored with E.O. Wilson titled "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology".
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 4:48 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 13, 2009
Category: Truth and Reconciliation in Group Selection
August 22, 2009. I am at the annual meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) in Turin, Italy. Twelve hundred evolutionists have gathered to strut their stuff and party over a five-day period. I'm here to speak at a symposium on levels of selection that is being held on the first day. 
The symposium is one of six held concurrently and all of them are preceded by a plenary talk in a room large enough to accommodate everyone.
The plenary speaker is Hanna Kokko, a theoretical biologist from Finland who has risen to the top of her field. I just turned 60 and Hanna seems awfully young to be giving plenary talks, but anyone who worries about women in science should see her lead the huge audience through her theoretical models on diverse ecological and evolutionary topics.
Hanna's first two examples illustrate the fact that evolution at a local scale can be maladaptive at a larger scale and can even lead to extinction. In the first example, a species of fish in which the females are asexual but still need to mate with males of a sexual species for their eggs to develop outcompetes the sexual species and therefore drives itself locally extinct. In the second example, an endangered bird species on a small island evolves large territory sizes, reducing its population size and increasing its chances of extinction. If local evolution favors traits that are so detrimental over the long term, how can more sustainable traits evolve? When Hanna mentions group selection as a possibility, she shows this image of a man so panicked that he's about to jump out the window (thanks to Hanna for providing me the image).
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 1:01 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 11, 2009
Category: Truth and Reconciliation in Group Selection
John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary boldly expanded the symbiotic cell theory of Lynn Margulis to include other major transitions. They were a bit timid in their discussion of human evolution, however, restricting themselves to the genetic basis of language. Now it appears likely that human evolution was a full-fledged major transition. The reason that we are so unique among primates is because our ancestors became the primate equivalent of a single organism or a social insect colony.
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 11:23 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 9, 2009
Category: Truth and Reconciliation in Group Selection
Just as Brutus was a close companion to Caesar but proved to be his undoing, evolutionary theory seemed to provide a rock-solid foundation for individualism-- until Lynn Margulis came along.
Lynn is famous so you might already know her story. In the 1970's she proposed the radical theory that nucleated (eukaryotic) cells evolved not by small mutational steps from bacterial (prokaryotic) cells, but as symbiotic communities of bacteria that became so integrated that the group became a higher-level organism. She was fiercely opposed but carried the day, an accomplishment so great that she was admitted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1983.
The concept of organism as group was generalized in the 1990's by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary in two books titled The Major Transitions of Evolution and The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language. Their theory was multilevel selection theory with a twist. The evolution of group-level adaptations requires a process of group-level selection and is undermined by selection within groups. Now for the twist: The balance between levels of selection is not static but can itself evolve. When between-group selection sufficiently dominates within-group selection, the group becomes a super-organism and the lower-level organisms acquire the status of organs. The evolution of nucleated cells was just one of many major transitions, preceded by the evolution of the first cells and possibly even the origin of life itself as groups of cooperating molecular interactions, and followed by the evolution of multicellular organisms, social insect colonies, and--as we shall see--human social groups.
Read on »
Posted by David Sloan Wilson at 6:09 PM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I am an evolutionist who studies all aspects of humanity in addition to the biological world, as I relate in my book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.
In addition to my academic research, I manage a number of programs and
websites for expanding evolution beyond the biological sciences in
higher education(
