E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything

The November 2011 edition of The Atlantic presents E. O. Wilson's "Theory of Everything." Wilson's theory takes into account the "eusocial" status of human animals, something that we share with ants and bees, but very few other species. Eusocial animals build complex societies wherein "individuals specialize in various activities and sometimes act altruistically." Wilson has taken the position that eusociality is not the result of close genetic similarity (the explanation offered by "kin selection"). Rather, he is a strong advocate of "group selection." By the way, E. O. Wilson is no relation to another Wilson who has strongly advocated group selection, David Sloan Wilson (and see here). Here's how E. O. Wilson presents group selection, according to a passage from The Atlantic:

In his new book, Wilson posits that two rival forces drive human behavior: group selection and what he calls “individual selection”—competition at the level of the individual to pass along one’s genes—with both operating simultaneously. “Group selection,” he said, “brings about virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition. “Our quarrelsomeness, our intense concentration on groups and on rivalries, down to the last junior-soccer-league game, the whole thing falls into place, in my opinion. Theories of kin selection didn’t do the job at all, but now I think we are close to making sense out of what human beings do and why they can’t settle down.” By settling down, Wilson said, he meant establishing a lasting peace with each other and learning to live in a sustainable balance with the environment. If Wilson’s new paradigm holds up—“and it will,” he insisted in an e-mail exchange several weeks after visiting Gorongosa—its impact on the social sciences could be as great as its importance for biology, advancing human self-understanding in ways typically associated with the great philosophers he criticized. “Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”
This article is a wide ranging work that offers much insight into Wilson's history and accomplishments, and more. For instance, Wilson, an early outspoken advocate of sociobiology, takes some shots at Stephen J. Gould, who he calls a "charlatan." Several decades ago, it was the now-deceased Gould who led the attack against Wilson regarding sociobiology. This is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it.

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David Sloan Wilson suggests truth and reconciliation process for the group selection combatants

I've repeatedly posted on the concept of "group selection." One of the biggest proponents of group selection," David Sloan Wilson, doesn't believe the concept has had a fair hearing by biologists. He's got a point. Many of the discussions of group selection theory have been marked by name-calling rather than calm scientific discussion. D.S. Wilson has now taken the unusual step of publishing his defense of group selection in a series of posts at Huffington Post. In the first installment (published December 27, 2008), D.S. Wilson advocates for a "truth and reconciliation" process.

It is precisely because I am such an idealist about science that I am calling for a truth and reconciliation process for group selection. Something has to change. The controversy didn't need to drag on for decades and it will continue for decades more unless something deliberate is done. The goal is to be constructive--to heal rather than aggravate old wounds. Yet, even healing can be painful, for scientific conflict no less than political conflict. Another reason to initiate a truth and reconciliation process is because group selection is arguably the single most important concept for understanding the nature of politics from an evolutionary perspective.
I learned of D.S.Wilson's Huffpo series today while attending a lecture by Mark Borello, a historian of science who was giving a talk at Washington University. The title to his talk says it all: "Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection from Darwin to E.O. Wilson." In the post-talk discussion, a general consensus was reached that the pro- and anti- group selection contingents have been talking past each other for decades, yet it is difficult to sort out why they argue so passionately. Don't both groups have access to the same facts? The philosophers at today's talk suspect that the problem is that the different camps come to the debate armed with different conceptions of causation. That seems correct to me too, but . . . still . . . why can't we see eye to eye? Or, at least, why can't we agree on what it is we disagree about? What is the main difficulty with group selection? D.S.Wilson presents it in his second installment at Huffpo:

[C]onsider some standard examples of social adaptations: the good Samaritan, the soldier who heroically dies in battle, the honest person who cannot tell a lie. We admire these virtues and call them social adaptations because they are good for others and for society as a whole--but they are not locally advantageous. Charitable, heroic, and honest individuals do not necessarily survive and reproduce better than their immediate neighbors who are stingy, cowardly, and deceptive.

Do you see the problem? The individuals who exhibit altruism often don't pass on their genes to the next generation. Their good works, which undoubtedly improve the prospects of the others in their group, often fail to benefit the altruistic individual, evolutionarily speaking.

Most behaviors that we call prosocial require time, energy, and risk on the part of the prosocial individual. Most behaviors that we call antisocial deliver an immediate benefit to the antisocial individual. If most antisocial behaviors are locally advantageous and most prosocial behaviors are locally disadvantageous, then we have an enormous problem explaining the nature of prosociality, including the nature of human morality, from an evolutionary perspective.

The above paragraphs are the background of group selection in a nutshell. The contentiousness of the issue suggests why D.S.Wilson is suggesting a "truth and reconciliation process" rather than a calm review of scientific facts. He has already published 14 installments at Huffpo (you can see the list of links here). Or, if you want to get a big dose all at once, consider reading "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology," by D.S. Wilson and E.O.Wilson (no relation). It was published in December 2007 by the Quarterly Review of Biology and it can be found online here. BTW, D.S. Wilson's co-author, eminent entomologist E.O.Wilson, now 80-years old, has made a recent dramatic conversion to group selection, after being a group selection skeptic most of his life. Here is what E.O. Wilson said in an interview published by Discover Magazine:

EOW: I'm taking the idea of kin selection, and I've critiqued it. Kin selection is the idea that cooperation arises, especially in the eusocial insects—bees, wasps, ants, termites—because of individuals favoring collateral kin: not just Mom and Dad or your offspring but, just as important, brother, sister, cousin, and so on.

D: So you cooperate with close kin because it helps get some of your shared genetic heritage into future generations.

EOW: I found myself moving away from the position I'd taken 30 years ago, which has become the standard theory. What I've done is to say that maybe collateral kin selection is not so important. These ants and termites in the early stages of evolution—they can't recognize kin like that. There's very little evidence that they're determining who's a brother, a sister, a cousin, and so on. They're not acting to favor collateral kin. The new view that I'm proposing is that it was group selection all along, an idea first roughly formulated by Darwin.

D: The notion of group selection is heresy, is it not, in the current thinking about evolution?

EOW: Yes. I'm being provocative again, because this is a radical departure.

To jump ahead, the general solution (according to D.S.Wilson and E.O.Wilson) was anticipated by Darwin, and it consists of a

return to the simplicity of the original problem and Darwin's solution. As Ed Wilson and I put it in our recent review article titled "Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology": Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

This battle over the viability of group selection theory is heating up, just as it has been heating up for decades. This is a fascinating topic for the reasons D.S.Wilson suggests: group selection theory is potentially a powerful tool for understanding those two perenially hot topics: religion and politics.

I'll be working my way through D.S.Wilson's Huffpo articles and posting on them from time to time. From my reading of D.S. Wilson's prior works (including Darwin's Cathedral), he is a terrific writer and thinker. Even if he can't hit the grand slam, I'm hoping that he can put his finger on exactly why the opposing camps disagree. That would be a good start, indeed.

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Superorganisms take the limelight

In the Natural History's February 2009 article titled "Could an Ant Colony Read this Book," ecologist Robert Dunn tracks the long-term collaborative efforts of Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, leading up to their new book: The Superorganism. In their new book, Hölldobler and Wilson

. . . have breathed new life into a notion that intrigued scientists before World War I: that a colony of social insects is analogous to an individual. The concept of the superorganism—which compares a colony’s members to a body’s cells and sometimes its nest to the body’s skeleton—fell out of favor as research increasingly focused on the genes of individuals. Hölldobler and Wilson, building on new insights into the evolution and workings of insect societies, seek to bring it back. To them, “superorganism” is more than a metaphor; it is a unit in the hierarchy of biological organization, falling somewhere between an ecosystem and an individual. And, they argue, it is the most useful level of biological organization at which to examine how pieces are assembled to make a whole—be it an association of bacteria, a single creature, or a whole society—as well as to understand what holds all organisms together, even when the pieces struggle toward independent goals.

According to Dunn (and Wilson and Holldobler), ants and other highly social creatures (such as termites, and honeybees) offer a rare opportunity to study the process by which individuals meld into an unified organism. Other examples include the early symbiosis of mitochondria with an early form of bacteria, plant cells ("which arose when a eukaryotic cell . . incorporated a photosynthetic bacterium") and multicellular creatures in general (e.g., human beings). In each of these examples, individuals gave up reproduction "either partially or completely, to work for their overbearing mother." Wilson and Holldobler point to group selection (and individual selection) as a key component of the evolution of highly social species. "In group-selection models, evolution favors the groups whose member cooperate more effectively, regardless of whether such cooperation helps a given individual (or that individual's kin) reproduce." The key to allowing this process is "communication and the division of labor." Apropos for a book that was five years in the making by Wilson and Holldobler.

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Group selection theory attempts a comeback

Over the past few weeks, in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday, we've seen many articles published on the topic of evolution. The November 20, 2008 edition of Nature contains a drawing of Darwin on the cover, and the entire issue is titled "Beyond the Origin." Inside this issue is an article by Marek Kohn titled "The Needs of the Many," an article summarizing current thinking on group selection. Kohn carefully sets out some definitions at the beginning of his article. For instance, he recognizes that modern evolutionary theory is based on the idea that selection "sees" individuals and acts on them through the genes they embody. Compare that to "group selection":

The idea that evolution can choose between groups, not just the individuals that make them up--has a higher profile today than at any time since its apparent banishment from mainstream evolutionary theory. And it gets better press, too. This is in part owing to the efforts of David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York, who argues that the dismissal of group selection was a major historical error that needs to be rectified. And it does not hurt that he has been joined by Edward O. Wilson, the great naturalist and authority on social insects. They and many others have worked to reposition group selection within the broader theme of selection that acts simultaneously at multiple levels.

Buried in the dispute about the extent to which group selection occurs are numerous definitional issues such as the proper way to define "group," "altruism," and "selfishness."

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Scientists who disagree: is religion an aberration or an adaptation?

For many scientists who study it, religion should be placed into one of two camps: 1) religion is an aberration, a mental virus; or 2) religion is an adaptation–that religion enhanced the survival of Believers.  A well-written article by Robin Marantz Henig explores this issue in the New York Times.  The title is “HeavenBound: a Scientific Exploration of How We Have Come to Believe in God.” Henig sums up the alternatives by reference to blood.  A trait might be “adaptive,” like the ability of blood cells to transport oxygen.  On the other hand, a trait might be simply a byproduct, such as the “redness” of blood.

Is blood prominent because it’s red or because it actually carries oxygen?

Several notable scientists and philosophers lead the charge from the first camp (that religion is a byproduct).  One of them is Richard Dawkins, who argues that “religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident.”  Others falling into this camp include Sam Harris, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer and Daniel Dennett. These believers in religion as a “byproduct” would also include Stephen Jay Gould, who proposed the use of the term “spandrel” to describe traits that have no adaptive value of their own.

If religion is a byproduct or a “spandrel,” of what is it a byproduct or “spandrel” of?  Psychologists have looked carefully at several candidates: agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

We see agents everywhere, it turns out, even in inanimate objects.  The byproduct argument is …

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Continue ReadingScientists who disagree: is religion an aberration or an adaptation?