David has a reasonable understanding of cultural evolution as far as I can tell. He has't supported memes very much - perhaps due to his conflicts with Richard Dawkins - but that issue is just terminology, right? No big deal.
David is perhaps best known (at least among evolutionary biologists) for his championing of group selection. I have previously found this to be a bit grating. Like many evolutionists, I generally favor kin selection over group selection. The two ideas seem broadly equivalent in their modern formulations - though there is an ongoing spat about which approach is more intuitive and which causes more confusion. David's group selection advocacy seems a bit foaming at the mouth to me. He argues, for example, that many kin selection enthusiasts missed the 1970s conversion to group selection by Price and Hamilton and are stuck in a 1960s timewarp. That seems ridiculous to me.
Recently David's books have focused more on the topic of this web site - the expansion of the domain of Darwinism into the social sciences. Not just via "evolutionary psychology" and the idea that human nature evolved - but also via the direct application of Darwinian evolutionary theory to cultural variation - the subject area closely associated with memetics.
I generally applaud any and all contributions to this area. David has certainly brought eyes, energy and enthusiasm to the topic. He appears to be good at social networking with other researchers. However to my eyes, there are a few problems with his contributions - things that I don't really like. He seems very focused on the social sciences. Darwinism also needs extending to psychology - with the natural selection of ideas, nerve impulses and synapses. I think David realizes this, but it rarely gets mentioned. Darwinism also needs extending to physics - something I don't think I have ever heard David discuss. David doesn't seem to be expanding the domain of Darwinism anywhere near far enough for my tastes.
Then there's the issues of religion. David, though technically an atheist seems to be a fan of religion. He not only argues that it is adaptive, but has written a whole book about the topic. I tend to regard the Abrahamic religions as ridiculous nonsense - and agents of the forces of darkness and ignorance. Yes it was important to have the "right" religion during the crusades, but times change, and so does what is adaptive. I can't share David's enthusiasm for religion.
An associated issue is Templeton foundation money. David seems happy to take it, and spend it on worthy scientific endeavours. In some respects, I would rather David manage this money than most of the other people in the queue for it. However, the Templeton foundation is on a religious crusade. They seem to far gone in the direction of the afore-mentioned forces of darkness and ignorance. Much of the research they sponsor is biased nonsense. Scientists who take their money inevitably risk being tarred by their sponsor's agenda. In common with many scientists, I am irritated by the influence of a large religious organization on my field of study. The multiple billions of dollars involved has the power to seriously distort small fields of science. One of the ways I can help by pushing back is ignoring the papers they help produce - and to some extent researchers who take their money. That - as it turns out - is a lot of cultural evolution research and a lot of cultural evolution researchers. They have themselves to blame for this. I appreciate that scientists need to eat too. I can't stop people from taking the money, but the influence of religion on science is a serious business. Scientists can fight back with criticism, but ignoring the work in question and outright reputational damage are among the other available approaches. It is fairly common to dismiss science on the grounds of its funding source - I'm not sure that Templeton-funded research is getting enough of this.
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ReplyDeleteI'll probably read this. Group selection is a real thing IMHO. I find D.S. Wilson's application of it to cultural evolution a mixed bag. His groups are poorly defined, and he confuses selection of individuals with selection of ideas.
ReplyDeleteI'll probably read it too when it comes out. I talk about boycotting in the post, but I doubt I will apply that personally to David's book. Compared to most, David is a pillar of enlightment regarding cultural evolution, IMO. I don't know about his groups being poorly defined either. AFAICS, any biological interaction creates a DSW group. If you send an email to your penpal in Australia, the two of you are a group. I'm not on the same page as him regarding the utility of group selection. IMO, group selection is his baby, and he's is probably under the influence of the "endowment effect". However, it is fair to rescue group selection from its post-1960s stigma - and IMO, David should get some credit for being the one to do it.
ReplyDeleteD.S. Wilson has definitely been a significant force in popularizing the notion. As I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, group selection works when the survival of a potential defector is greater in the group compared to it's likelihood of survival out of the group. So long as defection is more expensive than staying in the group, the element's selection then becomes dependent on the overall survival advantage of the group as a whole, and a comparison of similar groups to each other.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking back to "Darwin's Cathedral", which I read over a decade ago. As I recall there were times when he confused genetic group selection with selection with memetic group selection, and then treated individual group members as though they were codes being selected for. Individuals ultimately have a 100% failure rate because we all die eventually. We are the expression of one set of genetic traits, but only the temporary carriers of a variety of different memetic traits that compete for our use and attention. For memetic group selection, it is the memes that have to form the group then, not the individuals in a collection of people. The more individuals the memes inhabit the greater their success, but they all die anyway, so it is the linkage of multiple memes into something like the tenants of a religious cult that creates a group subject to selection. Certain combinations of ideas create more cohesive groups than others. So for example "punishment of those who leave the faith" is a meme that could be linked to "God provides an eternal afterlife to those who follow" might have more survival value than the linkage of "punishment of those who leave the group" combined with "Those who believe in our faith get pizza". A defecting idea might be "steal the pizza". So an individual is a carrier of an idea, and his survival is less important than the survival of the memes. In fact his survival may not enhance the group of ideas at all compared to the effectiveness of a martyr who sacrifices herself for the group of ideas instead.
I also have problems when D.S. Wilson claims that something like a city is a group subject to selection. So for example in America, people might say that Detroit is a failed city and Los Angeles is a successful city. In his book "The Neighborhood Project" he describes the city that he lives in and how it could be treated as a group of ideas that have to cooperate together to make things better. I worked in that same city though for over twenty years, and it is less a group than an ecosystem. 10 years ago when Wilson was writing the book, the mayor was a progressive liberal. That individual got voted out of office and was replaced by a moderate conservative. There are three institutions of higher learning in the city, and while two are state colleges (one a school for 2 years for support trades and the other a four year and graduate school), the third is a Bible college where people hold very different views. There are also competing lifestyles of the academics, the urban poor, and the local middle class, all of whom flow in and out of the city. In that sense, a city is not a group, it's an ecosystem where ideas flow in and out compete with each other. Boundaries are another problem. Is it the city, or the neighborhood, or the county or the state which defines the group? If you use the political bounds of the city, we are already over because the city he lives in actually has one city and at least three villages and multiple towns and school districts which are all overlapping political entities.
I wrote something pretty similar in my review of Darwin's Cathedral (on Amazon):
Delete"David's correctly identifies kin selection at work - though he classifies it as group selection. Since group selection and kin selection are now widely thought to be equivalent, this is a valid perspective. However he doesn't really identify it as a cultural phenomenon. Indeed he seems to identify cultural evolution with the idea of "demonic memes" that act as parasites on humans - and then largely ignores it. Instead he proposes human groups as the beneficiaries of selection on religions. This seems like a muddled way of looking at the situation to me. Instead, the humans genes are weakly kin-selected, the religious memes are strongly kin selected - and the genes and the memes coevolve in a symbiosis. The interests of the memes and genes are somewhat aligned - largely due to the component of vertical transmission of religious beliefs. I felt that David's treatment of the topic muddled together cultural and organic evolution."
However, David's views of culture have matured significantly since 2003, I think.
Cities are fairly nebulous entities, but it's sort-of OK to apply group selection to them, provided you don't expect too much from the results. Cities give birth to other cities - sometimes, though cities can also form spontaneously from non-cities. Cities, grow, shrink, fuse, and vary. Inheritance is part cultural and parly mediated by DNA. There's enough there to apply a high-level form of Darwinism to them. The individuality of cities is a bit nebulous, they contain other smaller groups, and there are plenty of overlapping groups but none of these is an insurmountable theoretical barrier. The term 'ecosystem' is OK for cities - but ecosystems can reproduce, compete and cooperate as well. The different terminology doesn't really make much practical difference.
DeleteMy main beef with group selection is that it is often more confusing than kin selection, while covering much the same set of phenomena. Cultural kin selection and cultural group selection show much the same pattern all over again.
You have a very broad view of what constitutes a memetic or genetic group. I can see how that might work, but I'll have to spend more time thinking about it.
DeleteThat is the conception of the group selection advocates. A group is any collection of entities. For group selection to be any use it helps if they interact in ways that affect their fitness. It is very broad, especially compared to the conception of "group" of group selection critics - such as John Maynard Smith.
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