The argument is about kin selection. It’s easier if you imagine a gene as having a brain, will, and it wants to survive and reproduce. So when an organism behaves altruistically, the reason for that behavior is that it ensures the survival and procreation of another organism that shares many of those same genes.
The subtlety is that altruism is itself the result of a gene. So how does a species pass on a gene for altruism when that gene kills you?
The answer is predictable: the gene for altruism will spread if the cost to the individual is less than the benefit to the recipient x the fraction of relatedness. But a more intuitive way of understanding it is to say that altruism will occur if the cost to benefit ratio is less than relatedness.
EO Wilson believes that kin selection is “a gimmick” and “wrong.” He says the model sometimes doesn’t fit reality. In particular, if we’re talking about altruism on an individual level, then the cost and benefit have to be determined for that individual. What individual is going to see the benefit (to the gene’s propagation) as greater than its cost (his own head?) The only way to sensibly use that equation is to apply it to his group.
Wilson proposed an different model: group selection.
There’s enough debate about the theories, but I can make some important observations about the form of the disagreement.
1. Wilson and Nowak’s paper isn’t about why group selection is right; it’s about why the prevailing story is wrong. There are some typical “red flags”: arguing over definitions and semantics; claiming a lack of predictive value. There is also distraction by volume (photos and diagrams that do not actually contribute to the theory.) The purpose of the article is its iconoclasm.
2. The rebuttals to Nowak and Wilson are almost all of the form, “you’ve misunderstood kin selection theory,” or, said generally, “that’s not what we meant!” They resort to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority (“evolutionary biologists know…”) These are typically the defenses of a paradigm unable to critique itself from the outside. The result in these cases (when/if they happen) is not the gradual modification of theory (e.g. scientific method) but a full fledged Kuhnian shift.
3. The main disagreement is only nominally about kin vs. group selection. The true source of the disagreement, found not in the paper but in the attached supplement, is about which provides a better model: population genetics or game theory. This is important, because though Nowak and Wilson seem to be writing a paper about bugs, they are, in fact, not writing a paper about bugs:
We have not addressed the evolution of human social behaviour here, but parallels with the scenarios of animal eusocial evolution exist, and they are, we believe, well worth examining.
That’s the game. Wilson is talking about humans. Is human altruism and cooperation understandable and predictable as a function of genetic relatedness, or is relatedness the result of group dynamics, of competition between groups?
The ultimate question becomes: at a certain stage of evolutionary development, do organisms go beyond natural selection?
No related posts.
TLP writes two different kinds of post: Either an overly-detailed analysis of a simple point or an oversimplification of a complex issue. This is the second kind.
In other words, you believe in Social Darwinism, which is something that is ‘not even wrong’.
Hmmm. I hesitate to make any assumptions at all about the worth of these guys’ work based on the form of some objections to it. Maybe that’s what it looks like when a bad paradigm is under legitimate assault, but that’s also what it looks like when informed people reply to some loon who has completely missed the point. You don’t see a lot of serious scientific papers refuting young earth creationism; rather, you see people trying to explain to YECs where they’ve misunderstood evolution. And you see varying degrees of patience and good manners in those explanations.
The form of the objections may be a straw in the wind, but it is a lousy proxy for correctness. If you rely on that kind of thing, you will very often back the wrong side. One of Larry Niven’s Laws stated that no cause is so right you won’t find a moron backing it.
One place to go for further reading on the actual content of this dispute is John Hawks’ initial response to the paper. You’ll notice that, yes, his response is essentially that they’ve missed the point… but of course, that’s precisely what he would say if they really had.
Maybe Wilson and these other dudes are right, I dunno. But in forming your own opinion about that, there’s no need to fall back on reading tea leaves or parsing the rhetorical forms used by the participants in the controversy.
Yeah, Stage 12, it’s right on the chart. We’re scheduled to get there on July 12, 2045, just before lunch. Bumble bees got there last June. Didn’t you notice the timer going off?
Bloody hell…
There’s probably better sources than Hawks, but that’s the one that sprang to mind offhand.
I read one of Nowaks books:
http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304444268&sr=1-2
I wasn’t particularly impressed. He comes up with mathematical models then compares them to biological situations. There are all kinds of ways to tweak a model though. There was a lot less chunky stuff than I had hoped for. It seemed a lot like the chaos/complexity studies: a lot of promise that never really lives up to the promise.
The problem with this “form of the disagreement” approach is that you could say exactly the same thing about the responses to Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, but those responses are exactly right. I’m with Dravot.
Since I’m not going to pay to read this paper, is there an observable situation that Wilson has come up with that cannot be explained by gene selection?
Here, now you don’t have to pay:
http://bio.fsu.edu/~miller/HOMEPAGE/docs/Nowak%20et%20al.%202010.pdf
Judging a debate by its form rather than its content is useful (if not necessarily valid in a ‘scientific’ sense) in many circumstances. American political debate is a good example: you can infer a lot of what’s going on by noticing how both sides tend to make more statements about each other than about whatever issue they’re nominally talking about. Positions are defined relative to the other parties involved instead of relative to the substance.
This is also a dead giveaway in academic debate: once different schools of thought have crystallized in reference to a given issue, the debate tends to turn inward and relate to the state of knowledge/discipline politics, and the substantive issue that unleashed any debate in the first place gets lost in the mutual recrimination.
Another tell in this particular instance is that E.O. Wilson is an/the elder don of sociobiology. When such figures start disciplining their colleagues/heirs rather than producing new research, it’s a sign than the debate has reached a stagnant phase.
I can’t say whether TLP is right about the content of Wilson’s agenda, but it’s pretty plausible a) that Wilson is pursuing some kind of agenda with this piece and b) that the form of the debate is not a bad indicator to infer that it’s shifted beyond/beneath science to the field of ideology/identity.
Pingback: gladiator