Is the controversy over?

It is also my impression that evolutionists engaged in the purely scholarly study of religion tend to take a hands-off attitude toward the new atheism movement. To some extent this is a personal choice, but if one’s scholarly field is being mis-represented by people with a policy agenda, there is also an obligation to do something about it.

As a 100% atheist trying to apply evolution to public policy for a range of topics, I have nothing against an activist agenda, as long as it is ethical, based on the best current science, and suitably humble about the limitations of current knowledge. When this is not the case, I feel a special need to do something about it. The application of science requires mutual monitoring, no less than science itself.

EVOLUTION: THIS VIEW OF LIFE strives to be both a medium of communication for the general public and an intellectual forum at the professional level. This article is a good example of how it can function in both capacities.

I have dedicated the last five years of my life to demonstrating this claim, by getting involved in my city of Binghamton and by co-founding the Evolution Institute, the first think tank to formulate public policy from an evolutionary perspective. I also chose to write about my adventures in The Neighborhood Project as they were unfolding, rather than waiting for some kind of final proof. After all, there was an entire paradigm to convey, I was trying to apply evolution to many policy issues at once, and years might be required for any single project to reach fruition. As a result, reviews of The Neighborhood Project almost invariably wish me well, but note with varying degrees of optimism and pessimism that the proof is not yet in.

It is therefore with considerable pride that I can offer proof for one project; a program for at-risk high school students called the Regents Academy that the Binghamton City School District started in 2010 and invited me to help design. My consulting relationship with the School District began in 2006 and has led to several academic publications, but this was my first opportunity to help build a program from the ground up, using my evolutionary toolkit.

The problem was daunting. Improving the academic performance of at-risk students is difficult at any age, but especially for teenagers, whose habits, attitudes, and social networks are already established. Our program was targeted for 9th and 10th graders who had failed at least three of their classes during the previous year and would be very likely to drop out of school if nothing were done. Other successful programs for at-risk high school students appear to succeed only by expensive measures, such as extending the school day and year, which would be unavailable to us. We could do little to address the problems that most of the students faced outside of school, which were sometimes heartbreakingly difficult, as I would learn.

What were some of the tools in the evolutionary toolkit that might help to solve such a daunting problem? A school program is first and foremost a group of people that must cooperate to achieve certain objectives. Evolution has a lot to say about the dynamics of cooperation in all species and the uniquely human capacity to cooperate, based on our particular history as a species. Then there are the effects of existential security on psychological functioning. Finally, there is a need to make long-term learning outcomes reinforcing over the short term. Working with one of my graduate students, Rick Kauffman, and the dedicated staff of the Regents Academy, we tried to design the optimal social environment for cooperation, trust, and learning. We also employed the gold standard of assessment, the randomized control trial. Of 117 students who qualified for the program, 56 were randomly selected and the others were tracked as they experienced the normal high school routine.

What happened? The RA students responded so quickly to their new social environment that their grades rocketed up by the first marking period. The dropout rate plummeted. The most stringent test came at the end of the year with the state-mandated exams. Not only did the RA students greatly outperform the comparison group, but they performed on a par with the average Binghamton High School Student. These results have recently been reported in the Public Library of Science’s online public access journal PLoS ONE. They provide proof that a policy informed by evolution–in this case educational policy–can succeed at solving problems that have appeared difficult or impossible to solve from other perspectives.

When Thomas Huxley first encountered Darwin’s theory, his response was “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!” The Regents Academy has the same kind of obviousness-in-retrospect. All of its design features are familiar and within the repertoire of normal school practices. Yet, a certain theoretical perspective was required to bring them together. In the chapter of The Neighborhood Project devoted to education, titled “Learning From Mother Nature About Teaching Our Children”, I observe that policies are like the wishes that people are granted in folk tales, only to end up regretting. All policies make sense based on their underlying assumptions; otherwise no one would be tempted to formulate them or carry them out. Yet, they often have unforeseen consequences that lead to very different outcomes than the ones imagined. Worse, unlike the characters in folk tales who end up realizing their mistake, the unforeseen consequences of policies are typically diffuse and indirect, therefore difficult to trace to their causes. In this fashion, we become lost in a maze of unforeseen consequences. Only a comprehensive theory and rigorous scientific assessment procedures can help us find our way out.

Time will tell whether the RA continues to succeed as well as (or better than) its first year, but its initial success is a hopeful sign that evolutionary theory can be as useful for public policy formulation as it is for the study of biology and the academic study of humans.

To help launch the magazine, we are trying to raise $5000 through Kickstarter, which will be used to support the central office and purchase equipment for video and audio recording. Contribute $50 or more and get a cool t-shirt with this logo designed by illustrator Kevin Cannon. Pledge $80 or more and we’ll record a videocast with you, so that you can share what evolution means to your view of life.

With one major exception, Sociobiology was regarded as a triumph. The main bone of contention among evolutionists who studied social behavior concerned ownership. Other authors had the same vision, and even used the term sociobiology, but none of them had Wilson’s gift for branding new fields of inquiry.

The exception, of course, involved the inclusion of our own species within the new synthesis. The single chapter that Wilson devoted to this subject resulted in a storm of controversy. It might seem that the battle might pit evolutionary biologists against human-oriented scientists and scholars bent on preserving their cherished notion of human uniqueness, but that’s not what happened. Instead, the charge against Wilson, a Harvard professor, was led by two other evolutionary biologists at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, whose academic specialties were paleontology and population genetics, respectively.

This episode in the history of science reveals a more general fact that can be easily documented: The apartheid separating the study of human behavior and culture from the study of the rest of life, which has been in place since before most of us were born, is largely respected on both sides. Many evolutionary biologists, who fully accept the thesis of Sociobiology for all other species and put it to use in their own research, draw the line at humans, sometimes passively and sometimes vigilantly, as in the case of Gould and Lewontin.

What reasons did biologists and non-biologists alike advance for not including humans in the grand synthesis? It’s too dangerous. We’re too ignorant. It’s too complicated. The science is bad. And our rich behavioral and cultural diversity can’t be explained by our genes. In a word, STOP!

This chorus of objections succeeded in stigmatizing the word “sociobiology” for many people. Even my colleagues who study the social behavior of nonhuman species often avoid the word, like timid people who hope to avoid being associated with a relative who committed a heinous crime. The whole process repeated itself when evolutionary psychology was announced as the next big thing in the 1990′s, only to be shouted down by the same chorus of objections, albeit a little less loud.

Mind you, I’m not saying that Ed Wilson in the 1970′s and evolutionary psychologists in the 1990′s got everything right. I wrote one of the first critiques of evolutionary psychology in 1994 and have been working to broaden its conception ever since, which is a major theme of The Neighborhood Project. But there is a difference between a constructive critique that results in scientific progress and a critique that is the rhetorical equivalent of a STOP sign.

Here we are in 2011 and here I am as part of the most recent effort to include humans in the grand synthesis, as part of Darwin’s tangled bank, as I put it in The Neighborhood Project. Unsurprisingly, objections will be raised, and Jerry Coyne has stepped forward to fill the shoes of Lewontin and Gould. Jerry and I were born in the same year and Jerry was present at Harvard as Lewontin’s PhD student during the great clash over Sociobiology. I wasn’t Ed’s student but he did sponsor my first publication on group selection in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was also published in 1975. I don’t regard Jerry as a clone of Lewontin, however, and no one should mistake me for a clone of the other Wilson. For that matter, Lewontin and Wilson are not clones of their former selves. Thirty six years is a long time, and if scientists haven’t changed their views during the interval, then science is not what it is reputed to be.

I am therefore willing to examine Jerry’s views on their own merits, and the last two chapters of his book Why Evolution Is True affords a priceless opportunity. The purpose of Jerry’s book–which is excellent in many respects–is to provide an extended argument against religious creationism and its born-again cousin, intelligent design. The penultimate chapter discusses human origins and displays Jerry’s talents in constructive science mode. The final chapter discusses evolutionary psychology and the relevance of evolution for contemporary human affairs, and displays Jerry’s talents in rhetorical STOP mode. The difference is there for all to see.

Piecing together the fragmentary evidence for human origins is one of the most speculative–but also one of the most exciting and worthwhile–scientific enterprises imaginable. The fossil record is so sparse that every new find results in a major revision of the story. Nevertheless, at an appropriately course scale, there’s no doubt that we have discovered the fabled missing links connecting us to our primate ancestors. Moreover, our genomes provide a new kind of fossil record that can be surprisingly detailed and convincing in reconstructing the past. In the following passage, Jerry eloquently describes how evolution can be rock solid true at one scale and still admit great uncertainties at finer scales.

Evolutionary biology is teeming with questions and controversies. How exactly does sexual selection work? Do females select males with good genes? How much of a role does genetic drift (as opposed to natural of sexual selection) play in the evolution of DNA sequences or the features of organisms? Which fossil hominins are on the direct line to Homo sapiens? What caused the Cambrian “explosion” of life, in which many new types of animals appeared within only a few million years?

Critics of evolution seize upon these controversies, arguing that they show that something is wrong with the theory of evolution itself. But this is specious. There is no dissent among serious biologists about the major claims of evolutionary theory–only about the relative roles of various evolutionary mechanisms. Far from discrediting evolution, the “controversies” are in fact the sign of a vibrant, thriving field. What moves science forward is ignorance, debate, and the testing of alternative theories with observations and experiments. A science without controversy is a science without progress.

Hooray for science! But now let’s follow Jerry as he turns his attention to evolution in relation to human affairs. He begins by quoting Nancy Pearcey, a conservative American philosopher and advocate of intelligent design, who expresses a common fear.

Why does the public care so passionately about a theory of biology? Because people sense intuitively that there’s much more at stake than a scientific theory. They know that when naturalistic evolution is taught in the science classroom, then a naturalistic view of ethics will be taught down the hallway in the history classroom, the sociology classroom, the family life classroom, and in all areas of the curriculum.

Note that Pearcey is arguing against evolution on the basis of perceived negative consequences. This is illogical. A theory can be true or false and can have positive or negative consequences in all four combinations. Noting its consequences says nothing about its truth or falsehood.

Jerry correctly observes that Pearcey’s concern is not about evolution per se, but about two worldviews that are part of science as a whole: naturalism and materialism. I cannot improve upon Jerry’s wording:

Naturalism is the view that the only way to understand our universe is through the scientific method. Materialism is the idea that the only reality is the physical matter of the universe, and that everything else, including thoughts, will and emotions, comes from physical laws acting on that matter. The message of evolution, and all of science, is one of naturalistic materialism.

Pearcey should be just as concerned about knowledge that our planet is a speck in the universe as that we evolved from the apes. As an aside, evolution provides an alternative to materialism–ultimate causation–that is permitted but not caused by physical matter. But that’s another story.

Jerry is a naturalistic materialist, but thinks that Pearcey need not worry. Why?

But Pearcey’s notion that these lessons of evolution will inevitably spill over into the study of ethics, history, and “family life” is unnecessarily alarmist. How can you derive meaning, purpose, or ethics from evolution? You can’t. Evolution is simply a theory about the process and patterns of life’s diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. It can’t tell us what to do, or how we should behave.

In other words, Jerry Coyne, evolution’s champion against creationism and intelligent design, provides the functional equivalent by claiming that evolution has no relevance for human history, family life, sociology, and “the rest of the curriculum”.

Jerry isn’t talking about the naturalistic fallacy, the venerable claim that you can’t derive “ought” from “is”, for which there is an extensive literature from an informed evolutionary perspective. Granted that what “is” does not automatically become “ought”, but it certainly informs “ought”. Every ethical statement must be combined with facts about the world to prescribe action (what we should do) in the world. The firewall that Jerry builds to keep evolution out of human affairs includes a denial that it has anything to say about our species, beyond our physical bodies and a few basic urges such as to eat and have sex. I wish I could report otherwise, but the final chapter of Why Evolution is True, is a tired rendition of the chorus of objections to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

One problem is that it is all too easy to make up an evolutionary reason why modern human behaviors should have been adaptive in the EEA [environment of evolutionary adaptedness]. For example, art and literature might be the equivalent to the peacock’s tail, with artists and writers leaving more genes because their productions appealed to women. Rape? It’s a way for men who can’t find mates to father offspring; such men were then selected in the EEA for a propensity to overpower and forcibly copulate with women. Depression? No problem: it could be a way of withdrawing adaptively from stressful situations, mustering your mental resources so that you can cope with life. Or it could represent a ritualized form of social defeat, enabling you to withdraw from competition, recoup, and come back to struggle another day. Homosexuality? Even though this behavior seems the very opposite of what natural selection would foster (genes for gay behavior, which don’t get passed on, would quickly disappear from populations), one can save the day by assuming that, in the EEA, homosexual males stayed home and helped their mothers produce other offspring….None of these explanations, by the way, are mine. All of them have actually appeared in the published scientific literature.

There is an increasing (and disturbing) tendency of psychologists, biologists, and philosophers to Darwinize every aspect of human behavior, turning its study into a scientific parlor game. But imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories. Stephen Jay Gould satirized them as “Just-So Stories” after Kipling’s eponymous book that gave delightful but fanciful explanations for various traits of animals.

Only a few pages earlier, Jerry was waxing eloquent about evolutionary biology teeming with questions and controversies and the power of science to shed light even on the remote past, such as human origins and the Cambrian explosion. Suddenly, the very same process of “ignorance, debate, and the testing of alternative theories with observations and experiments” is described as an idle parlor game–mere stories, not science. Jerry has switched from constructive science mode to rhetorical STOP mode.

All scientific fields of inquiry contain examples in which a given hypothesis remains untested, but Jerry is leveling the claim against the entire application of evolution to modern human affairs, with only a few begrudging exceptions:

Yet, we can’t dismiss all behaviors as having no evolutionary basis. Surely some of them do. These include behaviors that are almost certainly adaptations because they’re widely shared among animals and whose importance in survival and reproduction is obvious. Behaviors that come to mind are eating, sleeping…a sex drive, parental care, and favoring relatives over nonrelatives.

I am quoting Jerry at length because I do not assume that he is a clone of Lewontin and Gould in the 1970s’. I’m willing to read and evaluate his work on its own terms. Having done this, I am now in a strong position to say that Jerry has indeed remained unchanged after all these years. His claim that evolution explains our physical bodies and a few basic instincts, but has nothing to say about our rich behavioral and cultural diversity, is like going back to the 1970′s in a time machine. Apart from a few sensible statements about gene-culture coevolution, he still associates “evolution” with “genes” and regards “culture” as outside the orbit of “evolution”, as in these passages.

It’s almost impossible to reconstruct how these features evolved (or even if they are genetic traits)…

There is no reason, then, to see ourselves as marionettes dancing on the strings of evolution. Yes, certain parts of our behavior may be genetically encoded, instilled by natural selection in our savanna-dwelling ancestors. But genes aren’t destiny…

…these acts are largely a matter of choice, not of genes…

None of this has anything to do with evolution, for the change is happening far too fast to be caused by our genes…

Evolution tells us where we come from, not where we can go…

Jerry concludes Why Evolution Is True with an ode to social constructivism uninformed by evolution, about how we can rise above the Hitlers and Stalins to make symphonies, poems, and books to fulfill our passions and emotional needs. No other species has accomplished anything remotely similar. We are a special creation after all.

In The Neighborhood Project, I show that social constructivism isn’t wrong–it just needs to become evolutionary social constructivism. The human capacity for open-ended change, and especially the capacity for symbolic thought that makes us so unique, is a product of genetic evolution and an evolutionary process (employing non-genetic inheritance mechanisms) in its own right. We need to understand our capacity for open-ended behavioral and cultural change in the same detail that we understand the vertebrate immune system, another product of genetic evolution with an impressive capacity for open-ended change (antibody formation and selection). When we do, we’ll be able to make statements that are less idiotic than Jerry’s Scala Naturae account of Hitlers transforming into poets and composers.

Another purpose of The Neighborhood Project is to show how the evolutionary paradigm can be useful for improving the quality of life in a practical sense. It’s time to put Darwin’s theory to work in the real world. In one chapter titled “Learning from Mother Nature About Teaching Our Children”, I describe how an Evolution Institute workshop on childhood education held in 2008 revealed a disagreement among the evolutionists. One school of thought, represented by David Geary, treats modern knowledge such as reading and math as so different from ancient knowledge such as hunting and social relations that different teaching techniques are required. Another school of thought, represented by Peter Gray, maintains that all cultures have bodies of knowledge comparable to reading and math, which can be learned largely without formal instruction in the way that learning and teaching takes place in hunter-gatherer and many traditional societies. Both are reasonable hypotheses informed by evolution. They can be tested by observation and experiment in a large number of ways and the answers can be hugely consequential for how we teach our children. The research is not ethically problematic because everyone wants to improve the quality of education. Evolutionary theory is merely competing with the 1001 flavors of other educational theories in prescribing an effective set of practices. If ever there was a case of science moving forward by “ignorance, debate, and the testing of alternative theories with observations and experiments”, this would be it. Yet, in his review of The Neighborhood Project, Jerry actually criticizes examples of science in progress, such as this one, as “rife with problems”, as if anything short of all evolutionists singing the same tune is a shortcoming. I am operating in constructive science mode, and Jerry is operating in rhetorical STOP mode.

In Jerry’s own book that is excellent whenever he operates in constructive science mode, he misses an important reason why so many people claim to disbelieve evolution. Pearcey is right that people are prone to reject beliefs that they find threatening, as illogical as that might be. The human tendency to accept beliefs when they are useful, regardless of whether they are true, follows directly from evolutionary theory. It follows that when the evolutionary paradigm is shown to be useful for improving the human condition, it will be accepted as readily as the facts of physics and chemistry. I didn’t set out to defend evolution against creationism in The Neighborhood Project, but by demonstrating the tremendous utility of evolutionary science in relation to human affairs, I might just succeed as much, or even more, as Jerry’s effort in Why Evolution Is True.

Therein lies the problem. When Jerry steps out of his role of practicing scientist and into his role of spokesman about evolution for the general public, it’s like Clark Kent transforming into Superman. Suddenly he’s an authority on every subject and rounding up the criminals who don’t agree with him left and right.

The temptation to act like Superman (or oracle, or priest–choose your metaphor) exists for any scientist who writes for the general public. Most of the safeguards that hold scientists accountable for their factual claims are removed, leaving them free to say whatever they please to an undiscerning public. Some resist the temptation but others succumb, often without knowing that they have succumbed.

This is a genuine dilemma with no easy solution. Writing about science for the general public is an important role in society, now more than ever. Writers who are not trained as scientists must be prepared to do a lot of homework. The best of them develop a professional level of knowledge to combine with their writing skills. Scientists must often struggle to become gifted writers. In addition, even scientists must do a lot of homework if they are going to write about topics outside of their own academic specialty. The fact that Jerry and I are both evolutionists doesn’t mean that I’m an authority on speciation or that he is an authority on group selection or cultural evolution. We would need to do our homework, no less than a journalist writing about the subject.

What happens when a scientist who writes for the general public doesn’t do his or her homework on a particular topic? Unlike an academic article, which would be quickly rejected by the peer review process, the piece written for the general public tends to be accepted on the strength of the scientist’s general reputation. So-and-so (insert Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Sarah Hrdy, P.Z. Myers, Joan Roughgarden, or myself) is a well-regarded scientist, so they must be telling the truth, or at least the closest that modern science has come to the truth.

Actually, not. The scientific process doesn’t work that way, and writing about science for the general public won’t either. The collection of cultural norms and practices loosely called the scientific method expects the individual scientist to be as conscientious and objective as possible, but also realizes that this is an impossible ideal, similar to the impossible Christian ideal of being as perfect as Jesus. That’s why an entire cultural system is required for science to exist, including the peer review system. Even then it’s a clunky process, like making laws and sausages, but it’s the best method we have for apprehending the real world. And make no mistake–there is a real world that we distort with our beliefs at our own peril.

Against this background, we can return to a particular scientist who writes for the general public, such as Jerry Coyne. When I criticize him for his statements on group selection or cultural evolution, I’m not being mean. I’m just acting in scientific mode and expecting him to do the same. If he tried to say in an academic article what he’s saying to the general public, it would never make it through the peer review process. He hasn’t done his homework. If I ever write something on speciation that needs to be corrected, I hope that Jerry will volunteer to set me straight.

Now to the subject at hand. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the current state of scientific knowledge about cultural evolution.

1) Darwin’s theory of evolution originally said nothing about genetics. It was framed in terms of heritability, which is a resemblance between parents and offspring. Any proximate mechanism that results in heritable variation enables organisms to adapt to their environments.

2) Genetics is the first inheritance system to be worked out in detail–so much detail that many people, professional evolutionists included, reflexively equate evolution with genetic evolution. There is no conceptual warrant for this assumption, however.

3) There is a long history of theorizing and research on evolution as a substrate-neutral process, based on the three fundamental ingredients of variation, selection, and heritability. What “substrate-neutral” means is that there can be many proximate mechanisms underlying heritable variation. Genetic algorithms in computer science provide an example.

4) An excellent recent book on this topic is Evolution in Four Dimensions, by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. In clear language that any reader with sufficient interest can understand, they show how epigenetic mechanisms, learning, and symbolic thought count as inheritance systems, which interact with each other and with genetic inheritance. They also recount the history of why genetic inheritance became so dominant for the study of evolution that many people reflexively equate evolution with genetic evolution.

5) Non-genetic inheritance systems evolved by genetic evolution and have complex architectures insuring that the outcome of evolution is genetically adaptive, on average. For that matter, genetic inheritance has a complex architecture that evolved by genetic evolution, a topic that is often called “the evolution of evolvability” (type this phrase into Google Scholar for more).

6) The vertebrate immune system provides a model for understanding other inheritance systems that evolved by genetic evolution. On one hand, it is elaborately genetically innate, as anyone who has tried to learn immunology knows. On the other hand, it is elaborately open-ended, thanks to the capacity to generate app. 100 million antibodies and select those that successfully bind to antigens. We should be thinking of our capacity for open-ended individual and cultural change as like the immune system, which is a major theme of The Neighborhood Project and some of my academic articles.

7) B.F. Skinner described operant conditioning as a product of genetic evolution and itself an evolutionary process (see his classic paper titled “Selection by Consequences“). This part of behaviorism was on the right track, however much the tradition failed in other respects. Bizarrely (in retrospect), the brand of evolutionary psychology associated with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby set itself apart from the open-ended capacity for change associated with behaviorism. Creating a broader vision of evolutionary psychology is part of the serious work attempted in The Neighborhood Project and my related academic work.

8) The study of human cultural change as an evolutionary process has a long history that dates back to before Darwin–linguistic phylogenies existed before biological phylogenies. Some of the early conceptions were mistaken in retrospect, such as cultural evolution as a linear progression from “savages” to “civilization”. Dawkins’ concept of memes got some things right but other things wrong. The current state of play is represented by books such as the aforementioned Evolution in Four Dimensions, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (by Pete Richerson and Rob Boyd), War and Peace and War (by Peter Turchin), and Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior (by Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown). Although much remains to be discovered, the consensus view is that genes and culture have been co-evolving for a long time, so that the study of humans must be based on a firm foundation of biocultural evolution.

9) While individual learning and a degree of cross-generational social transmission takes place in many species, the human capacity for symbolic thought places us in a league of our own as far as cultural evolution is concerned. Symbolic systems have the same kind of combinatorial diversity as genetic systems–and every “symbotype” has a corresponding phenotype. The analogy between genetic evolution and cultural evolution is anything but superficial.

10) The subject of cultural evolution intersects with the subject of group selection in a number of ways. A major evolutionary transition was probably required for our capacity for symbolic thought to evolve in the first place. Given our current capacity, cultural evolution is a multilevel process, no less than genetic evolution. In other words, a cultural trait can spread by virtue of benefitting some individuals compared to others within groups, or by virtue of benefiting whole groups, compared to other groups. It can also spread without benefitting human individuals or groups, a legitimate possibility suggested by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Most authors who contribute to the academic literature on cultural evolution accord a strong role for cultural group selection.

Against this background, what does Jerry have to say on the subject of cultural evolution? Beginning with his review of The Neighborhood Project:

Wilson further undermines his case by repeatedly counting as “evolutionary” any human activity involving “variation and selection”…But these issues have nothing to do with biological evolution: they are superficial and meaningless parallels with natural selection’s winnowing of genetic variation.

There goes Superman again, rounding up the criminals with his mighty powers. Jerry acts as if I am the outlier, when in fact it is Jerry who is excessively gene-centric and hasn’t done his homework.

The final chapter of Jerry’s book Why Evolution is True shows that he has a dichotomous view that sets “evolution”, “biology”, and “genes” apart from “culture”, “learning”, and “choosing our own destiny”. This view is common enough, but it fails to reflect developments during the last few decades, which place our open-ended capacity for change inside the orbit of evolutionary theory. Jerry’s views on cultural evolution are as outdated as his views on group selection.

There’s something else about Jerry. He repeatedly uses uncertainty in science as a call for inaction. That will be the subject of my next post.

So it is with Jerry Coyne on the topic of group selection. Jerry is a highly respected evolutionist who writes for the general public in his book Why Evolution Is True and his blog of the same name. When it comes to his research area of speciation, Jerry is a world-class authority. He’s also a staunch defender of evolution against creationism and its born-again cousin, intelligent design. When it comes to the topic of group selection, however, he hasn’t written a single paper and there’s little evidence that he’s read the literature. Yet, that doesn’t prevent him from holding forth on the topic and scolding others like a schoolteacher wagging his finger at truant students who haven’t learned their lesson.

Jerry’s most recent lecture on group selection is in his review of my new book The Neighborhood Project, but a glance at his blog reveals that he trots it out again and again. Group selection is controversial. Modern evolutionary theory emphasizes natural selection acting on genes and individuals. Between-group selection is inefficient compared to within-group selection. There is little empirical evidence for group selection. There are plausible alternative theories to explain behaviors that appear “for the good of the group”. Only a few benighted zealots advocate group selection.

For me, this is like hearing Rip van Winkle mumbling in his sleep. With my former PhD student Omar Eldakar, I wrote an article for people like Jerry. It’s titled “Eight Criticisms Not To Make About Group Selection” and it’s published in an obscure journal titled Evolution. Here’s the abstract:

Group selection, which was once widely rejected as a significant evolutionary force, is now accepted by all who seriously study the subject. There is still widespread confusion about group selection, however, not only among students and the general public, but among professional evolutionists who do not directly study the subject. We list eight criticisms that are frequently invoked against group selection, which can be permanently laid to rest based upon current knowledge. Experts will always find something to critique about group selection, as for any important subject, but these eight criticisms are not among them. Laying them to rest will enable authors to openly use the term group selection without being handicapped during the review process.

Jerry is the perfect example of a professional evolutionist who does not directly study group selection and perpetuates outdated views about it. Two of the invalid criticisms that he employs in his lecture are that group selection is theoretically implausible and that little empirical evidence exists for group selection. Read the article for more. The journal Evolution doesn’t publish articles like that when they’re written by benighted zealots.

While you’re at it, read the “Instant Expert” feature of New Scientist magazine titled “The Evolution of Selfless Behavior“, which explains the long history of group selection in as short a space as possible. I was pleased when New Scientist asked me to write this article. Now if only experts on other topics, such as Jerry, will pay attention.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, then read some of the excellent recent books, such as Oren Harman’s The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, Mark Borello’s Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection, or Samir Okasha’s Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Or type the search term “group selection” or “multilevel selection” into Google Scholar for a sample of academic articles.

What Jerry doesn’t seem to realize is that even the most severe critics of group selection nowadays, who know enough to publish in peer-reviewed journals, accept that group selection occurs. All they can say against it is that they prefer to think about natural selection by averaging the fitness of individuals or genes across groups, rather than by comparing selection differentials within and between groups. The strong critique that between-group selection is invariably weak and that there are alternative ways to explain “for the good of the group” behaviors has become a wimpy “I don’t like to think of it that way” (see I,II,III, IV, V).

One victim of Jerry’s scolding is Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose next book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, will be published early next year. Jerry works himself up into a lather of rhetoric that would do a member of the Tea Party proud: “bogus…a few miscreants…this is evolutionary psychology of the most noxious and misleading sort…he simply asserts without proof…this is not only foolish, but positively misleading…I wish that there was at least one op-ed editor at the New York Times who knew something about biology.”

Give me a social psychologist who does his homework over an evolutionist in righteous indignation mode any day. If Jerry were functioning in scientific mode, he’d acknowledge that Jon’s thesis is based on the work of mainstream evolutionists such as John Marynard Smith and Eors Szathmary in their books The Major Transitions in Evolution and The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language, as far back as the 1990′s, and dozens of evolutionists today, whose credentials are every bit as good as Jerry’s. A few miscreants indeed. Jon’s new book goes a long way toward explaining why otherwise intelligent people such as Jerry are prone to go off on such rants.

This post is blunt, but some people evidently need to be whacked on the head with a 2×4 to get their attention. Being a scientist or an evolutionist, and becoming an authority on one particular topic such as speciation, does not quality someone to hold forth on other topics without doing their homework. Science works because people hold each other accountable for their factual statements about the world. I’m here to hold Jerry accountable on the subject of group selection. Someone who titles his blog “Why Evolution is True” needs to keep himself in scientific mode to avoid becoming false.

Kevin’s review is my favorite so far, not just because it is laudatory, but because it correctly identifies The Neighborhood Project as comparable in scope to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, and the revolutionary claims of evolutionary psychologists such as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the 1990′s. All of these authors were reaching for a comprehensive vision of humanity from an evolutionary perspective, and so am I. The general themes are enacted in the story of how I am trying to make a difference in my city of Binghamton (which tragically has just suffered the worst flood in its history) but the story should not mask my serious intent, which I also convey in my academic articles.

Kevin, whose academic specialty is cultural evolution, observes that some readers are likely to approach The Neighborhood Project with trepidation, given the controversies that engulfed the previous efforts. Yet, he is optimistic: “Will Wilson be more successful than his predecessors? One reason he might is his rich, well-informed interpretation of evolution, encompassing biological and cultural evolution, multilevel selection and a sophisticated understanding of how learning and culture build upon genetic predispositions.” He stresses (as I do) that my efforts to make a difference in Binghamton are preliminary, but concludes that “If Wilson succeeds, it will be a triumph for science, pluralism, and common sense as much as for evolutionary biology.”

Jerry Coyne, whose academic specialty is speciation, is more pessimistic. He wishes me well, but sees my enterprise as “rife with problems”. Some of our differences might be temperamental. If you’re familiar with the Winnie the Pooh books, then I’m like Tigger, who can’t stop bouncing, and Jerry is like Eeyore, whose firm opinion is that nothing will turn out well. But Jerry’s review raises two substantive issues that go beyond optimism and pessimism. The first concerns group selection, which I will save for my next post. The second concerns the explanatory scope of evolutionary theory.

Here’s how Jerry begins his review: “My undergraduate students, especially those bound for medical school, often ask why they have to study evolution. It won’t cure disease, and really, how useful is evolution to the average person? My response is that while evolutionary biology can explain, for example, the origin of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we shouldn’t see evolution as a cure for human woes. Its value is explanatory: to tell us how, when and why we got here (be “we” I mean “every organism”) and to show us how all species are related. In the end, evolution is the greatest tale of all, for it’s true.”

Jerry hasn’t even gotten to my book yet, and he’s emphasizing the explanatory inadequacy of evolution. It explains some things, but then a curtain falls and evolution shouldn’t be expected to explain anything on the other side, including anything that might provide a cure for human woes. I must confess that I am mystified by this position. Jerry could be right, but I need his position spelled out in more detail. What is there in the biological sciences that evolution can’t explain, for example? How about Jerry’s home turf of speciation?

Given Jerry’s limited expectations for evolution in general, his reaction to my book is a foregone conclusion: “Wilson further undermines his case by repeatedly counting, as “evolutionary” any human activity involving “variation and selection” including committees that have to decide between alternative plans and children who learn to discard those behaviors that don’t bring them rewards. But these issues have nothing to do with biological evolution; they are superficial and meaningless parallels with natural selection’s winnowing of genetic variation.”

Jerry seldom strays beyond his specialized topic of speciation as a practicing scientist. Perhaps he’s unaware of the large community of evolutionists who study individual learning and cultural transmission as products of genetic evolution and evolutionary processes in their own right. Or what evolutionary game theorists call the “replicator dynamic”, whereby any process that causes the most successful strategy to increase in frequency counts as an evolutionary process and results in (roughly) the same phenotypic outcome as genetic evolution.

Jerry’s pessimism even causes him to bias the facts. He under-reports the number of publications that have resulted from the Binghamton Neighborhood Project and says that one project (Design Your Own Park) went belly-up when it is alive and well. Whatever. I cheerfully admit that I’m just getting rolling, and I look forward to the day when even Jerry credits me with success.

Matt Ridley, the author and journalist with a professional-level knowledge of evolution, has different things to say about The Neighborhood Project that I will address in a separate post. A book like The Neighborhood Project serves as an excellent Rorschach test for the cognoscenti.

My main objective in writing the book is to show how evolutionary science can be used to improve our lives in a practical sense, at scales both small and large. This has been the thrust of my own research over the past five years, both locally in my hometown of Binghamton, New York, and globally through the formation of the Evolution Institute, the first think tank for formulating public policy from an evolutionary perspective.

I use my personal odyssey as a narrative vehicle, but The Neighborhood Project is written as much for my academic colleagues as for the general public. Some of the foundational issues that I address include rethinking evolutionary psychology, cultural change as an evolutionary process, evolution as a new paradigm for economic policy, and how the meaning systems of the future can combine the best of current-day science and religion.

The trade-off between basic and applied science is typically imagined to be negative, as if the most interesting research isn’t very practical over the short term and the most practical research isn’t very interesting. I have discovered that for human-related evolutionary science, the trade-off is positive: The best basic scientific research is on people from all walks of life, as they go about their daily lives, which is also most relevant for solving real-world problems.

Putting evolution to work in the real world might even cause more people in America to accept it. Science is accepted when it becomes engineering. The reason that everyone accepts physics and chemistry is not because they are supported by more facts than evolution, but because we use these sciences on a daily basis. We can’t build the physical infrastructure of our society without them. Once we realize the utility of evolutionary science for improving our personal and social infrastructures, it will be accepted just as easily. This is not just an optimistic wish but my experience on a daily basis. When I sit around a table with others to solve a practical problem in my city of Binghamton, we don’t care about each other’s religious or political beliefs. We care about our commitment to solving the problem and the resources that we bring to the table. My business card reads “Evolutionist” and most people are happy to have me sit at the table, because I’m committed to helping out and bring useful tools for the job.

A mug with a crow on it–the species that Anne studies–gets paired with Coast Guard mug bearing a quote from one of my father’s books. An earthenware mug with a fox on it–which Anne doesn’t study–is nevertheless used only by Anne and is paired with an earthenware pot bellied mug that is used only be me. Other mugs aren’t used at all, especially the glazed ones without images. Past favorites with their handles broken line the back of the shelf. We don’t use them, but we don’t get rid of them. Why?

Then there is a set of four mugs bearing the images of folk art farm animals; a horse, a cow, a sheep, and a pig. Not only do Anne and I use these mugs interchangeably, but we make a game of who gets what on any particular day. Does she want to be the fleet horse or the productive cow? Do I want to be the pig wallowing in happiness, or the contentedly grazing sheep?

We also use different mugs for coffee and tea. I probably spend several hours a year thinking about my mugs–a small but significant entry in my time budget.

Why can’t I just grab any two mugs for the morning coffee? I don’t think that there is any function to the complex system that Anne and I have created. Instead, I think that the human mind imposes meaning on anything that it turns its gaze upon. Sometimes the meaning-making results in something useful, sometimes in something capricious, but there is no way to turn it off. We’re a meaning-making species and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Religions are meaning systems far more elaborate than the meaning system that I have developed for my mugs. It might seem silly even to compare them, but evolutionists who study religion ask the same basic question about whether it is functional or a byproduct of mental operations that evolved for other reasons. Of course, there is no single “it” when it comes to religion, which is an exceedingly fuzzy set of beliefs and practices.

In my 2002 book Darwin’s Cathedral, I argued that most enduring religions are eminently functional for the community of religious believers, much as Emile Durkheim postulated over a century ago. Unlike the meaning system that I developed for my mugs, religious meaning systems are pounded into shape by the anvil of natural and cultural selection. At the time, I was outnumbered by evolutionist colleagues who favored a byproduct interpretation of religion and the positions were argued in an either/or fashion. Now I think that we are reaching a consensus that leaves room for both positions, as described in this recent review by Scott Atran and Joe Henrich.

Most enduring religions generate deep commitments to prosociality within the religious community, but they are cobbled together from genetic and cultural adaptations that often originally evolved for other purposes. Francois Jacob famously described evolution as a tinkerer that builds new structures out of old parts, and this is true for the cultural evolution of symbolic meaning systems, no less than genetic evolution. The meaning of my mugs has no meaning, but it says a lot about meaning systems that do.