I don’t have time to do a detailed analysis of my group selection survey right now. So I’ve uploaded the raw results for anyone to play with (there is no personally identifying information obviously). You should be able to convert it into an appropriate format for R or something else pretty easily.
I just received a review copy of E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. One of the reasons why this book is “hot” is that Wilson has recently been revisiting the “levels of selection” debates, and significantly downgraded kin selection in the pantheon of evolutionary dynamics (at least in his mind). There has been a lot of talk on the blogs about Wilson’s ideas, in large part because of his partisan position on the Nowak vs. most other biologists debate, in favor of Nowak.
I don’t know if I’ll have time to review the book (a reality I honestly explained already to the people working at the publisher), but, it did get me thinking: what are the opinions of biologists in relation group selection? My personal experience is that opinions actually vary by discipline and by department. It’s hard to get a real sense, because people tend to be in their own “bubble.” With that in mind, I’ve put together a small survey to assess opinions. My core audience here are people who consider themselves biologists, though I can’t prevent someone with strong opinions from participating obviously!
The title is rather loud and non-objective. But that seems to me to be the upshot of Henrich et al.’s The puzzle of monogamous marriage (open access). In the abstract they declare that “normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.” Seems superior to me. As a friend of mine once observed, “If polygamy is awesome, how come polygamous societies suck so much?” Case in point is Saudi Arabia. Everyone assumes that if it didn’t sit on a pile of hydrocarbons Saudi Arabia would be dirt poor and suck. As it is, it sucks, but with an oil subsidy. The founder of modern Saudi Arabia was a polygamist, as are many of his male descendants (out of ~2,000). The total number of children he fathered is unknown! (the major sons are accounted for, but if you look at the genealogies of these Arab noble families the number of daughters is always vague and flexible, because no one seems to have cared much)
There is a new paper in Nature, Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers, which is very interesting. As Joe Henrich observes in his view piece the panel of figure 2 (see left) is probably the most important section.
The study focuses on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania. Their language seems to be an isolate, though there have been suggestions of a connection to Khoisan. Additionally the genetic evidences tells us that like the Bushmen and Pygmies the Hadza do descend from populations which are basal to other human lineages, and were likely resident in their homeland before the arrival of farmers. And it is critical to also note that the Hadza are probably uninterrupted hunter-gatherers in terms of the history of their lifestyle, as agriculture likely arrived in Tanzania on the order of two thousand years ago, and their genetic distinctiveness indicates a separation from groups like Bantus far deeper in time. When it comes to Paleolithic model populations the Hadza are relatively “uncontaminated.”
The fruits of human cooperation
Why cooperation? Why social complexity? Why the ‘problem’ of altruism? These are issues which bubble up at the intersection of ethology and evolution. They also preoccupy thinkers in the social sciences who address fundamental questions. There are perhaps two major dimensions of the parameter space which are useful to consider here: the nature of the relationship between the cooperators, and the scale of the cooperation. An inclusive fitness framework tracks the relation between altruism and genetic relatedness. Reciprocal altruism and tit-for-tat don’t necessarily focus on the genetic relationship between the agents who exchange in mutually beneficial actions. But, in classical models they do tend to focus on dyadic relationships at a small scale.* That is, they’re methodologically individualistic at heart. So all complexity can be reduced to lower orders of organization. In economics a rational choice model of behavior is individualistic, as are the critiques out of behavioral economics.
There are other models which break out of this individualistic box, insofar as they make analogies between organisms at the individual scale to social entities which are aggregations of individuals (e.g., a colony or ethnic group). The society as an organism has an old intellectual pedigree, and was elaborated in great detail by Émile Durkheim. More recently David Sloan Wilson has attempted to resurrect this framework in an explicitly evolutionary sense. Wilson has also been the most vocal proponent of multi-level selection, which posits that the unit of selection can be above the level of the gene or individual. For example, selection operating upon distinctive ‘demes.’ Roughly, a breeding social unit.
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different details come into sharper relief. Though the exterior action may be unaltered, it gains different context, and the interior motive may radically alter, as the nature of subjective perspective matters so greatly in the last instance. In many ways Oren Harman’s The Price of Altruism reads to me like a narrative rewritten from the perspective of a character who was a supporting protagonist in other stories. George Price, almost a novelty act elsewhere, now becomes the primary point of view character.
I could almost say that Harman, a historian of science, has given us a novel from a “shared universe” of stories. That universe is the real world. The other stories are the lives of great scientists, and the plot consists of the working out of their ideas. In the acknowledgments Harman alludes to the wide range of works where fragments of George Price’s life filters through. I have read many of the mentioned works, The Darwin Wars, Defenders of the Truth, and Narrow Roads of Gene Land. In all of these George Price cuts a quixotic figure, mercurial, brilliant and exceedingly eccentric. His plain biography already peculiar. Price began his career as a chemist, shifted to journalism and became what we today would term a professional “skeptic,” then entered into a period of productivity as an evolutionary theorist of some major impact, and finally spent his last years attempting to live the life of a serious Christian who followed God’s commands to the best of his abilities. He died tragically, committing suicide in his early 50s in 1975, homeless, destitute, and serious ill.