Re: Laughter as an individual fitness advantage
- From: "John W Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 16:43:41 -0400 (EDT)
verulam <johnhewitt22@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:-
Alberto,
First, I should say that, while I did not altogether follow John
Edser's posting, number 3, what I did follow I rather agreed with.
JE:-
The bugaboo of evolutionary theory was and remains, group selection. It was
firstly proposed by A. R. Wallace, the contemporary of Darwin who read his
theory of evolution by natural selection (Wallace independently invented
these same terms) with Darwin to the Royal Society after, amazingly, sending
his theory to Darwin for appraisal. It was Wallace and not Darwin who
included group selection in his theory. It remains a mystery as to why
Wallace sent his theory to Darwin because Darwin had been working on
evolution by natural selection using these very same terms for many more
years but had kept this to himself and just a few trusted confidants. None
of them had any contact with Wallace who spend most of his time collecting,
well away from the U.K. While Darwin was a member of the upper middle class
Wallace was working class, battling away to earn a few pounds collecting
animal and plant specimens in inhospitable places all over the world. I
think it was Wallace's social perspective that led him to group selection
which interestingly enough (I will argue) is a mirror of Marxist theory.
What remains unappreciated to this day is that any additive group fitness
(any group fitness which is just the sum of its parts) cannot constitute a
selective entity that can compete and win against its own, additive, parts.
Groups of Darwinian selectees (fertile forms) simply cannot be selected to
reduce their fitness via group selection if a group fitness is just the
simple sum of each individuals fitness. This is because long before the
groups can contest, their "parts" (Darwinian Individuals) _have already_
contested. It is all over and done with long before group selection can act.
The net result is that group selection can only go with and not against
individual selection, i.e. group selection remains the same thing as
individual selection where selection at either level must increase mean
individual fitness per adult per group and not decrease it (no matter how
you define fitness) otherwise you just end up with a group of losers. I have
been posting this basic argument here for over ten years (it has remained
ignored for the same period of time). More exactly, group selection used to
predict fertile organism fitness altruism is just invalidly employing _two
contradictory frames of reference_ within the _one, same, proposition_. Marx
made the same nonsensical rationale when he proposed that individuals must
pay most of the costs while groups of individuals can receive most of the
gains. In other words individuals AND/OR groups of them can have costs and
payments accounted to them and not just one OR the other, representing a
hopeless contradiction. In reality, wherever Marxism was applied, what the
socialists prefer to deride as "State Capitalism" (which is communism)
inevitably resulted because a contradiction has no reality. Communism is
just group selection without the socialist contradiction only allowing
individuals OR groups of them to act as an accountable frame of reference
(deleting the AND). Because these groups remain additive in wealth no
selectable (independent) communist group even existed. So Communism
comically ended up with a gigantic vacuum employing only a non existent
group as its critical frame of reference, leaving only the individual of
capitalism to do this job. Exactly the same result eventuated within
evolutionary theory when Wallace's group selection proposition was allowed
to contest and not just compliment Darwinian fertile organism selection,
only falsely allowing the prediction of fitness altruistic individuals.
This error has been ongoing and became compounded when no discrimination was
made within Neo Darwinistic models between costs which provided a _total
fitness gain_ to individuals and costs which didn't. This error occurred
because Neo Darwinism does not recognise so it cannot provide any total
fitness, per selectee per group as its _critical frame of reference_, e.g.
Hamilton's rationale which has no frame of reference what so ever.
I think the general problem of laughter and humour should be viewed as
related to human social evolution and the evolution of social
knowledge. I say this because we are knowledge animals, par
excellence, and humour, fully developed humour, does seem unique to
humans.
JE:-
Framing laughter as a fitness mutualised gain within a social context
provides an interesting problem in evolutionary theory building. As just a
start, chimps grin, but this supposed to represent fear.
Regards,
John Edser
Independent Researcher
edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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