Collects the most advanced work in the consilience movement
Demonstrates how far science has gone toward unifying knowledge about the human species, and what still needs to be done
Each chapter takes a different disciplinary approach to the question of "human nature"
Features expert perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, the humanities, social sciences, and more
The book seems quite focussed on Wilson's concept of consilience. There doesn't seem to be much about cultural evolution, though a few of the contributors are knowledgeable about it. Wilson doesn't seem to have got to grips with cultural evolution yet - still favoring the 'it all boils down to DNA genes' version he was promoting in the 1980s. This seems like a head-in-the-sand approach to me, ruling out the possibility of a memetic takeover on a-priori grounds. The main mention of memes is some meme FUD from Massimo Pigliucci. Initial impressions lead to low expectations for this volume here, though perhaps some of the contributions will be of interest.
It will be held at the University of Missouri, St. Louis and will be hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences. It will take place April 26-28 at the J.C. Penney Building/Conference Center on UMSL’s North Campus.
Edward O. Wilson has a new book coming out on the topic of social behaviour: The Social Conquest of Earth. It seems to focus on human social behaviour.
The Wilsons seems to have got hold of the idea that eusociality involves group selection. In a sense it does, but group selection doesn't have a monopoly on viewing colonies as individuals. Social insect colonies can also be seen as the product of kin selection and manipulation (by queens and/or workers). David Sloane Wilson delights in claiming that kin selection is a special case of group selection. However, models of the two ideas are equivalent. However, shared genes and differential reproductive success of groups still seem to be pretty different explanations for why cooperation takes place - and kin selection between close relatives seems to account for most of the observed effect, while distantly-related group members are relatively insignificant.
Quietly muddling together kin selection and group selection seems to be a common problem. In Unto Others, David Sloane Wilson claims the evolution of virality to be one of the best documented cases of group selection - yet this heavily involves kin selection. The other example given there - female-biased populations - also seem to have been convincingly explained as cases of kin selection between close kin. The usual examples that are trotted out - slime molds, social insects, chickens, multicellularity - all seem to be better explained as cases of kin selection acting between close kin. There do not seem to be any examples of group selection in nature that are not better explained as cases of kin selection acting on close kin.
If you give group selection credit for kin selection's moves, then no wonder group selection looks as though it is important. The real issue here is surely whether a theory of group selection adds anyhing - after kin selection acting on close relatives is taken into account.
The blurb for the new book says:
Refashioning the story of human evolution in a work that is certain to generate headlines, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to show that group selection, not kin selection, is the primary driving force of human evolution.
The "primary driving force of human evolution"? What's that, then? Human culture, perhaps?
Kin selection is a proven and important theory, explaining important phenomena such as parental care - while group selection is still a fringe theory that has hardly been proven to be responsible for anything. Unless of course you redefine the term "group selection" - to refer to kin selection, reciprocal altruism, virtue signalling, manipulation - and a bunch of other things - in the manner that David Sloane Wilson advocates - in which case this turns into more of a fight over terminology than one over facts.
Looking at the paper with Nowak, it looks as though Wilson is not doing much more than claiming that multi-level selection theory is more general than kin selection - which is usually regarded as not being correct. More usually the "new" group selection and kin selection are regarded as being broadly equivalent.
I have mixed feelings about Wilson's work in this area. Some of the "group selection" points seem correct, other ones seem more dubious. The group selection controversy is interesting material. However, I am inclined to side with Stuart West (2009) on this whole issue: the "new" group selection is already covered by the math of conventional inclusive fitness theory.
Update 2012-04-02: The book is now out. Here it is on Google Books.
I looked at the section devoted to kin selection:
Wilson starts off with what appears to be a misquotation from Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter (2002):
Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reproductive gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfsh motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism.
Of course, such patterns could be explained by cultural kin selection. Or the theory that kin selection could have given us these instincts while our ancestors were in small tribes. These folk also have a relavant explanation of why humans are so generous, even in one-shot interactions: The evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters by Andrew W. Delton, Max M. Krasnow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby.
Wilson then goes on to say:
Kin selection, as I have pointed out, cannot be the solution to this paradox. It might be thought to have worked in the bands of the early hunter-gatherers, where because of small numbers, kinship of the members was close. But mathematical analysis has revealed that kin selection of itself is inoperable as an evolutionary dynamical force. When closely related individuals come together such that cooperators are more likely to meet other genetic cooperators, the result will not, by itself promote the origin of cooperation. Only group selection, with groups containing more cooperators pitted against groups containing fewer cooperators, will result in a shift at the level of the species towards greater and wider instinctive cooperation.
So, it seems that Wilson is relying on "mathematical analysis" - and apparently from an unspecified source - for his critique of kin selection. OK - so: which mathematical analysis.
In fact, I think - even without seeing the analysis - that it is pretty clear that Wilson's claim that "kin selection of itself is inoperable as an evolutionary dynamical force" is false. As is the claim that "Kin selection is wrong." For example, it really does make a difference if you find out that someone is a relative.
One remaining question is whether being spectacularly wrong is a good way of selling a lot of books.
Wilson's position on the topic of kin selection looks very shaky to me in this interview. It appears as though he is stuck in a bit of an intellectual bubble. He probably shouldn't be criticising Richard Dawkins like that - Richard is really just stating the conventional position here.
I'm going to be a little bit strong worded about the 40 years - the four decades that we have laboured and spun our wheels with kin selection theory - and I'm guilty of that too because in my first books on sociobiology I adopted it as a good genetic expanation - and those words are:
We now have got to clear the wreckage of kin selection off the road so we can move ahead. Now that that's being done what I have now written here will be much more likely to come to pass.
This is just nonsense. Wilson doesn't seem to know what he is talking about. The critique offered in the FORA TV is revealing. Wilson just doesn't understand the issue. My assessment is that group selection enthusiasts are rather unfortunate to have Wilson, Novak and Tarnita on their side.
What does E. O. Wilson think about cultural evolution these days - or at least in 2002? He still sees potential for the twain (the natural and social sciences) to meet.
In this video (titled E. O. Wilson: Synergism Between Science and the Humanities) he discusses cultural evolution explicitly 49 minutes in. Wilson seems to be saying that he is looking forward to increased insights from scanning technologies.
I've dragged myself into the group selection debate a little recently - because of the scale of the level of interest in cultural group selection among other scientists in the field of cultural evolution.
I think cultural group selection is probably mostly irrelevant fluff that distracts people from what is actually going on. I have no argument with multi-level selection theory. However, the problem is the old one - the conditions under which the idea can generate group-level adaptations are rather rare in sexual species - due to migration and breeding. However, I do think that cultural group selection is almost certainly one of the most interesting attempts to revive group selection for quite a while.
Today, I was amused to find a video of Richard Dawkins on the topic of the group selection revival - from 2010:
Dawkins says of E. O. Wilson and D. S. Wilson (20 munites in):
I think they are just confused
...and...
The so-called "new group selection" is just kin selection or in some cases reciprocal altruism under another name. For reasons best known to himself (which I can't understand) D. S. Wilson thinks it's helpful to rephrase it in terms of group selection. How it can be helpful when he's reviving a word which has been debunked and is simply grafting that word onto the very thing that did the debunking - namely kin selection and reciprocal altruism and various other things - it seems to me be to be utterly unhelpful, to be totally misleading to students and it's deeply regrettable that E. O. Wilson should have teamed up with him in this way.
Hah! I think D. S. Wilson may be getting this response because he regards kin selection and reciprocal altruism as being a special case of his form of group selection.
These papers appear to be mainly about ordinary group selection - not Wilson's "trait group selection". These papers are very confused, incidentally. I'm not sure where to begin with them - but the Ed Wilson material seems to be missing the concepts of parental manipulation and offspring manipulation as alternative mechanisms to group selection for creating eusociality.
The second paper invokes group selection caused by cultural effects - saying:
Group selection is an important force in human evolution partly because cultural processes can create variation between groups, even when they are composed of large numbers of unrelated individuals. A new cultural “mutation” can quickly spread within a group, causing it to be very different from other groups and providing a decisive edge in direct or indirect between-group competition.
Cultural group selection is not vulnerable to the criticism Dawkins gives. That is a straight-forwards revival of Wynn-Edwards-style group selection - though possibly applying the idea to cultural symbionts. It is definitely not genetic kin selection or reciprocal altruism dressed up in misleading clothing.
Dawkins winds up saying (at 26:40):
Everything in Darwinism is gene selection - and it's just unhelpful and confusing for somebody as influential as Ed Wilson to suddenly turn around and say he's started thinking about group selection again. What was he thinking of - confusing the issue like this?
That looks like a kind-of fatal statement to me. Sureley nobody who understands multi-level selection would dream of making a statement as strong as that.
Group selection could be illustrated by finding genes that are deleterious to the individuals possessing them but good for the groups they are in - or by finding adaptations caused by genes like that. Group selection does not contradict gene selection. The idea that gene selection and group selection are mutually exclusive is just a simple fallacy.
Hi! I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book: Genes, Mind and Culture by Lumsden and Wilson.
Genes, Mind and Culture was one of the first books published by scientists on the topic of cultural evolution. It came out about five years after Richard Dawkins had published The Selfish Gene - in 1976.
The book is pretty dated, and most people buying it will probably be doing so in order to get a historical perspective on the topic.
The book has over 400 pages. These are pretty densely packed with mathematical models, which render much of the book pretty unreadable by most of its audience. The models are not well presented. In some cases they may be acting partly to create a veneer of respectability.
Lumsden and Wilson make the case for a scientific study of culture based on biology. The book introduced the concept of a "culturegen". They define this as follows:
A culturegen is a relatively homogeneous set of artifacts, behaviours or mentifacts (mental constructs having little or no direct correspondence with reality) that either share without exception one or more attribute states seelcted for their functional importance or at least share a consistently recurrent range of such attribute states within a polythetic set.
From this you might begin to detect something of Lumsden and Wilson's style. While their own definition of a culturegen is awful, readers can understand its usage in the rest of this review by considering it to refer to memes or meme products - in the form of socially transmitted behaviours or artefacts.
The book then focused heavily on the epigenetic rules by which genes influenced what culturegens were adopted by their hosts. Like modern evolutionary psychologists, the authors were interested in the factors that make cultures similar everywhere. However, they did try to go beyond these commonalities and account for cultural differences. Their approach is based largely on population genetics.
One thing their book became known for is its "leash" metaphor. They write on page 13:
genetic natural selection operates in such a way as to keep culture on a leash.
In a subsequent section titled "Can culture have a life of its own?" they claimed that the establishment of deleterious culturgens in the population for extended periods of time could be demonstrated to be impossible - suggesting that epigenetic rules favouring the adoption of beneficial culturgens would be violated and that they would exert some kind of pressure which would alter the culturgens into a more favourable form. This idea was subsequently identified by some opponents as pinpointing where Lumsden and Wilson had gone wrong in their analysis.
The authors also wrote: "Culture slows the rate of genetic evolution". We now know that this is not correct either.
In one of the best parts of the book, the authors offer an analogy for understanding cultural evolution based on island biogeography. In this analogy, islands represent human minds and archipelagos represent societies. Culturgens act like organisms colonising the islands. The reader is thus invited to transfer their knowledge of the dynamics of island biogeography into the cultural realm. This idea is an excellent one - although picturing brains as islands makes them seem rather passive and picturing ideas as colonising organisms makes them seem perhaps too active and agent-like.
Island biogeography might seem as though it is an esoteric subject - but many students of evolutionary biology pick up a smattering of knowledge about the topic as part of the process of learning about evolution. Islands represent natural evolutionary experiments, and so are of particular interest to evolutionary theorists. Darwin's famous visit to the Galápagos islands has also helped to put island biogeography in the limelight.
However, although they do have a chapter devoted to it, Lumsden and Wilson don't do very much with this (excellent) analogy. Had they based more of their work on it, their book might have been a lot better.
Part of the book's problem involves failure to apply the principles of reductionism. Lumsden and Wilson obsessively pursue the idea of a gene-cultural cycle - corresponding to a series of cycles of ontogenetic development followed by acculturation. Only by looking at this complete cycle can the whole process be understood, Lumsden and Wilson apparently believed. Most others divided cultural evolution from organic evolution and treated these as two separate but partly-interacting processes. Because Lumsden and Wilson don't divide the topic up in this way, they get rather bogged down with the enormity of trying to understand everything all at once. The result is that they make relativelty little progress in actually understanding how cultures evolve.
Another way of looking at the book is as an attempt to shore up sociobiology against its critics. Sociobiology seemingly tried to explain everytrhing in terms of genes. Of course, that approach doesn't work too well for culture, which is not inherited via DNA genes - and culture is an important determinant of behaviour. So: sociobiology needed fixing, by applying a patch to deal with culture. However, the authors attempted to apply standard sociobiology strategies to the topic - by tracing how everything was affected by genes. While this approach is not a totally unreasonable one, it seems like a rather biased research strategy. Instead of looking at culture and considering how best to explain it, the researchers used their existing sociobiology toolkit and attempted to apply it to culture. While it is perfectly possible to ask after the basis of social learning in DNA genes, it turns out that there's another highly-productive approach to studying how culture evolves = which involves considering culture as a partially independent instance of an evolutionary process, following the rules of universal Darwinism. Lumsden and Wilson totally missed this approach - apparently through their eagerness to apply their existing sociobiology toolkit and look at the genetic basis of cultural phenomena. Much the same approach was used by Cosmides and Tooby a decade later, with much the same messed-up result.
These problems put Lumsden and Wilson's work off the main path that lead to the modern understanding of how cultures undergo Darwinian evolution and coevolve with human genes. The models Lumsden and Wilson presented did not do much useful work. Most subsequent authors have not built significantly on their efforts - and those that did mostly went off the rails in a similar way.
This review will stop here. If you want a more in-depth review than this one, the late John Maynard-Smith wrote a good review of this book in 1982, which was republished in his book "Did Darwin Get It Right?" You can probably find his review online.
Hi, I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book: Promethian fire
by Chales Lumsden and E. O. Wilson.
I'll try to keep this brief, because this is an old book, which is
largely of historical interest these days.
The book was published in 1983. Two years earlier, the pair had published Genes, Mind and Culture, one of the early pioneering work on cultural evolution. This book was intended as more of a popular work. The topic is: the evolution of the human mind. The book contains multiple illustrations, autobiographical passages and narratives concerning the lives of our distant ancestors.
The book is not terribly well written and gets boring in places. The autobiographical bits are about the sociobiological controversy and about how Lumsden and Wilson wrote their last book, and this content is not that great. The narratives about the lives of distant ancestors also get painful. There's a large section about aliens who learn everything and other aliens which have entirely genetically-specified behaviour. There is some science, but it is often fairly loose and references are rare.
Lumsden and Wilson define their notion of a culturegen, go into their idea that genes hold culture on a leash, and discuss gene-culture coevolution. They complain about how difficult the whole subject is.
Their theory boils down to the idea that genes predispose organisms to acquiring particular sorts of culture and culture in turn goes on to affect the genes. This is fine as far as it goes. However, the book only mentions the fact that culture is transmitted once and doesn't mention that it is inherited at all. The book doesn't mention the idea that cultural evolution might resemble organic evolution - the key idea which most subsequent work is based around.
Lumsden and Wilson do cite Dawkins, Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, Boyd, Richerson, Durham and Campbell. However, their citation doesn't go far beyond listing their names - Lumsden and Wilson don't seem to have grasped that most of these authors had a much more significant and well-developed theory than their own.
The last two chapters are the best. The penultimate one goes into the author's ideas and looks in some detail into the ways that culture might influence genes and the ways that genes might influence culture. The last chapter proposes a unified science of humanity. Perhaps read those chapters first if you want to avoid being put off. Or, perhaps skip this book unless you have a particular interest in the thinking of the authors. This book probably isn't going to teach you much that you couldn't get more easily elsewhere.
A new book on social applications of Darwinism is out:
It's listed on 
Edward O. Wilson has a new book coming out on the topic of social behaviour: 
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