Social evolution

So, here I am in Phoenix airport, waiting to go back home, and I read T Ryan Gregory's snark about me and barcoding. Apparently I am to learn only from his blog posts and not from (perish the thought) critics. One should never attend to critics. My crime was, of course, to say that I thought Brent Mishler of UC Berkeley and others (including mein host in Phoenix, Quentin Wheeler, and Kip Will) were correct in their concerns that barcoding was being touted as a replacement for proper taxonomy and that it will draw resources from it. What are the issues? There are three, as I see it. One…
Sorry that I didn't liveblog today. The room was too far to carry my Mac, and I was tired damn it. Blame Lynch, Todd Grantham, Michael Ghiselin and Roberta Millstein among others, who all made me drink beer. No, I swear, they really did. Anyway the final session (below the fold) was very interesting and revived my interest in some work I did ten years back, and even published. Before I get into that, I should note a couple of non-philosophy items. First, the Chocolate Nazi. This way too thin to be a chocoholic gourmand who works a fine foods store in Salt Lake City tried to convince me (…
Bill Wimsatt is somewhat of a hero around here and for good reason. He is perhaps one of the most influential under-published philosophers of biology. Today he's talking about modularity in biological and cultural evolution. Modularity is a recurrent theme in biology and culture. Evolved systems are usually modular. It's easier to make a modular system, because there are fewer part types - polyfunctional parts. They are easier to modify if you can adapt to local circumstances by changing one or a few parts rather than the whole system. Quasi-independent parts A small number of parts…
I (and apparently Jim Lippard) went to see Dawkins' talk based on his The God Delusion, which I have critiqued before. I was impressed at the technique. It was definitely the very best Revivalist Sermon I have seen. I was not impressed by the content, nor by the fact that Dawkins was playing for laughs, applause and identification of Us versus Them. In particular I was annoyed that those of us who do not condemn someone for holding religious beliefs were caricatured as "feeling good that someone has religion somewhere". Bullshit. That is not why we dislike the Us'n'Themism of TGD. We…
A new paper, unfortunately not yet available to nonsubscribers on PNAS's Early Edition, has done some remarkable work on the evolution of canoe designs, putting some meat onto cultural evolutionary models. The paper is nicely reviewed by K. Kris Hirst here, however. And when we mere mortals can get it, the paper is listed at the bottom of that and this post. What Rogers and Ehrlich (yes, that Paul Ehrlich) did was analyse 95 variables in the design of the canoes of the "Lapita Complex", a group of Polynesians regarded as having colonised their islands around 1400-900 BCE. They found that…
Comment Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,A medley of extemporanea;And love is a thing that can never go wrong,And I am Marie of Roumania. Courtesy of Mrs Dorothy Parker
Language Log recently took apart the speech and interview by the Archbishop of Canterbury that the media are, inaccurately, reporting as advocating the introduction of Sharia law into British and by implication other common law jurisdictions. Its conclusion was that Abp Rowan Williams did not advocate Sharia law, but instead suggested that secular law should not have a monopoly on regulating human behavior. As someone once said, of course they would say that. Williams is a religious leader, and wants to have a role in regulating his adherents' behaviour. Tu quoque, he must accept the same…
Here's a comment that represents a widely held misconception about the evolution of religion: Whenever there is an discussion about religions and changes in religions someone always pulls out the argument that religions evolve. I am very sorry but I believe that applying the concept of evolution to religion is not a valid argument. The argument suggests that religions start off as primitive beliefs and then change to become better beliefs. This is not the idea of evolution. Evolution does not necessarily make life forms better. Evolution changes life forms and sometimes these changes…
So, I just found out that I'm teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out some guest lectures or something). The subject is philosophy of the life sciences, but the blurb covers topics I wouldn't have put up myself: This course looks at some of the philosophical issues arising out of the study of the life sciences-primarily biology & ecology. These issues include problems associated with the theory of evolution such as: (i) recent philosophical debate on the unit of selection; (…
Rob Helpy at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, has a post on what postmodernism was and why it came about. In it, he says he thinks it is a dying fad. Is this true? For a start, I doubt that postmodernism was ever a coherent movement, but there were themes that are shared by many distinct schools of thought. One of these is the social influence on knowledge claims. Yes, postmodernists so-called tended to act and talk as if there were only social influences on knowledge claims, but the lesson has been learned that we cannot ignore the social causes of knowledge. Even the most analytical philosopher…
Let's see... what's happening in the world today? Kenya is in turmoil and thousands are displaced and in danger of death by disease, starvation or tribal feuds. Religious moneymaking scam Scientology is accused of threatening those who leave it with sex revelations (I'd believe anything of that cult - they have the track record). Pakistan is in trouble, and it looks like the Americans will start active campaigns there. So what is Australian TV News talking about? A bunch of overpaid crybabies are threatening to take their bats and balls and go home and not play with another overpaid…
The previous Australian junta introduced a "citizenship test" for those wanting to become naturalised Aussies. It includes such gems as who Don Bradman was, who wrote a song that isn't even officially our anthem (Waltzing Matilda - Tom Wait's version is way better), and other fluff. About one in eight failed the first round. Similar tests apply in the US, Canada and the UK, I gather. This raises the question of the title. What must a citizen know? I hold a somewhat spare view of this topic. A citizen must know only that which all citizens are obligated to know, and for my money, that is…
Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters. Because that's what you are, you know, if you don't exactly believe and do what we Inventists do. So to try to save you from your moral malaise of happy lives and families, meaningless rituals that you perform on turkeys several times a year, and other abominations that you make more or less simultaneous with the summer solstice (did I mention that Inventists use God'…
So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts. Humans are animals. They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes. Like other animals, their behaviours are formed, constrained, and in most cases fully dependent upon their biology, but the confounding factor in doing sociobiology is the trap of taking one's own culture, the culture of the researcher, as being "normal" and treating all other cultures as less than normal, or primitive, or in some other manner less than worthy, treating biases…
[The third in a series on a recent paper by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. Post 1; Post 2] In presenting a group selectionist account of sociobiology, Wilson and Wilson argue that alternatives such as kin selection are not really alternatives. Kin selection and multiplayer games Attacking the third leg of the tripod, W&W argue that even genic or individual selectionist accounts implicit include the existence of groups as a factor in evolution. This resolves, as far as I can see, to the view that equivalence classes in genetic selection form a group: if a population is…
Wilson and Wilson begin by reviewing the reasons why sociobiology of the 1970s was rejected. They focus on the arguments against group selection. Levels of selection In the period in which sociobiology was first proposed under that label (from now on, the term sociobiology refers to this period, as outlined in Ullica Segerstråle's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond), there was an ongoing debate over whether gene-level selection was the sole form of selection, or whether some kind of group selection was also in play. W&W argue that,…
It's not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining the nature of sociobiology (Wilson and Wilson 2007). As I have recently (i.e., in the last five years) come to be an unflinching sociobiologist, I think it is worthwhile summarising their argument and making some comments. This is the first in a rambling series riffing on that paper. Introduction Back in the dark ages, when I was a masters student, Kim Sterelny…
The saying that "man is a wolf to man" comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or "Man is either a god or a wolf to man". I'm beginning to wonder if there is a difference between gods and wolves. Ask yourself this: why did we domesticate wolves instead of cats the way we did? Why don't we have pet tigers? The answer has to do with the social structure of wolves. They have a pack-mentality. Each wolf is subordinate to some other wolf unless it is the alpha male. This instinctual behaviour, typical of the species and its…
[This started as a discussion of the debate mentioned below. It got lost somewhere, and became me riffing on my favourite topics. Sorry.] I love it when people I know have a barny* in public, but it presents some delicate choices and sensibilities to be honoured. The case in point today is between Malte Ebach and David Williams in the red corner, and Joseph Felsenstein in the blue. I'm not the referee - I'm just the seasoned journalist in the front row... The issue is what counts when we classify in biology, and why. Malte and David argue that there are some notions of classification…
To summarise: so far we have three general kinds of explanations of religion. There are sociological explanations in terms of the economic, societal and political conditions under which religions develop. There are psychological explanations in terms of experiences, existential dread, need for control and so forth. And there are sociobiological explanations that may or may not incorporate both of these. These latter accounts are founded on some aspect of a shared human nature, but they need not be essentialistic, in the sense that each human shares them, only that any population of humans…