Bombshell?
- From: "Jim McGinn" <jimmcginn@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:16:28 -0400 (EDT)
Robert Karl Stonjek wrote:
The idea that group selection (or multilevel selection) could have any
validity is sometimes dismissed in rather derogatory terms on this list.
Group selection is generally dismissed for reasons that are
subconscious and ideological to those that dismiss it. There is no
shortage of empirical data/observations that prove the validity of
group selection. Even the existence of multicellular organisms (in the
context of the assumption that they evolved from single celled
organisms) proves the validity of group selection.
It
may therefore come as a surprise that one of the main "fathers" of ev psych,
Edward O. Wilson, now theorizes that kin selection is NOT the why of the
evolution of eusocial insects, as widely accepted, but rather group
selection -- and the same seems to hold true for humans.
There has never been any empirical evidence for kin selection (as it is
described by Hamilton). Its acceptance--as I've demonstrated here in
this NG--is based only on the confusion associated with the rather
loose (specifically, semantic ambiguity) terminology of the current
paradigm. It's hard for me to imagine that this isn't obvious to a guy
as smart as Wilson. But then maybe he's as much a victim as anybody
else.
In an interview in the June 2006 Discover Mag (pp. 58-61), Wilson says that
one reason he now rejects the "standard theory" he helped develop is that
there's very little evidence that ants and termites in the early stages of
evolution could determine who's a brother, sister, cousin, etc. He says:
"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."
Not much of a bombshell.
The key to Wilson's new theory is the relatively recent recognition that
genes can be plastic in their expression, in response to different
environmental conditions.
Recent?
"So consider a gene that has plasticity such that
in one setting an individual carrying that gene becomes reproductive. Maybe
this individual was the ant or wasp that arrived first, maybe it was the
biggest one, or maybe it was the one to just by accident start laying eggs
first. The important thing is that the reproductive role can shift from one
colony to next and from one generation to the next. The group forms, and
some individuals by circumstance become workers. Their cooperative behavior
and the division of labour confer superiority on that group, with that
particular gene, over other groups. It could be as simple as that."
It is as simple as that.
Wilson explains that altruism is normally discouraged due to the fitness
advantages of individual survival and reproduction, but it could pay for
individuals to subvert their own interests to those of a group if the group
is able to defend and exploit a very valuable resource (such as a hollow
stem that could be a nest site).
The tendency to reside in enclosures is what set the stage for social
insects to begin to be group selected.
And once ants and termites became "fully
social" they went on to dominate the world.
As for humans, Wilson agrees with Darwin that our evolution was largely a
matter of "tribe against tribe"
Tribe against tribe? Nah. Human evolution clearly indicates something
different: community against community. (The differences being
communities also involve territory and the resources therein.)
Strangely enough this competition did not originally involve much of
any direct conflict between communities. Rather the competition was
economic (as described in my hypothesis in detail).
-- which might explain the endemic warfare
Yes, it involved warfare as a means of preserving resources (economic)
in a community's territory. It was part of a strategy to survive
seasonal dessication. Communities that failed to preserve the
resources in their communal territory were, essentially, massacred by
predatory feeding frenzies during the depths of the dry season.
AND
altruism in which humans have engaged since prehistory. "The genes that
favour this type of group cohesion would also favor an innate sense of
morality and group loyalty. It would explain how so often group or tribe
loyalty overrides even family loyalty." Seems like there's already a ton of
proposals along those lines....Wilson is presumably working on clarifying
why group selection, and not kin selection, is the more significant
mechanism (but at the end of the interview he says his theorizing is still a
work in progress and formal presentation on humans might take a couple of
years).
The best he can hope to do is to recast the hypothesis that I've
already established.
The full interview can be viewed (but subscription required) at:
http://www.discover.com/issues/jun-06/features/e-o-wilson/
Note: The "bombshell" in the title of this post is how Discover Mag refers
to the contents of the interview
In a discipline so thoroughly ensconced in sematic confusion it's hard
to imagine anything being considered a "bombshell."
Jim
.
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