Martin Nowak - resources

Martin Nowak is one of those who has an appreciation of the Darwinian evolution of culture.

He has a recent book which deals with the subject: "SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed". One review is here

Nowak achieved some not-so-desirable publicity recently with his role in the "Kin Selection debacle" in Nature.

Nowak discusses cultural evolution near the start of the first video, but - as with most writers on the subject of cooperation - Nowak seems to be more interested in game theory than symbiosis and cultural evolution.

Here's Martin_Nowak's Wikipedia page. It says - among other things - that he's a catholic, has received Templeton Foundation grants and ran the Evolution and Theology of Cooperation program at Harvard University.

Videos

Supercooperators: The mathematics of evolution, altruism and human behaviour

Martin Nowak on Game Theory in a Hyper-public Life

Martin Nowak - Emergence

Richard Dawkins on religious memes in 2010

This video shows that Richard Dawkins was still going strong on memes in 2010.

At 08:25, Richard points out that genetic advantages are not the only possible explanation for the existences of religions - they could also exist for the benefit of the memes, or due to differential reproductive success of religions themselves.

Learning tricks from religions

Alain de Botton proposes importing educational strategies, pilgrimmages, preaching (and numerous other things) from traditional religions into secular life.

Many people have already imported key technologies like yoga, meditiaion and group chanting from the world of traditional religions and into the secular realm.

It does look as though there will be other types of secular "religions" which have nothing to do with theology. Some of the modern end-of-the-world cults closely resemble secular religions.

I expect we will see more religious-style cults based around creating/worshipping future artificial intelligences fairly soon.

Religion is probably not maladaptive

I don't usually write very much about memes relating to sex or religion. Sex and religion are major areas to which memetics can be usefully applied - but writing about sex seems somehow cheap - while writing about religion probably means that my writing will get dated. Also, both areas have already been covered well by others.

However, I should probably offer my 2 cents on the issue of whether religion is good for those who are religious.

Being religious is certainly correlated with health, life satisfaction, having kids and many other fine traits. Corrleation is not causation - but this isn't an area where it is easy to perform randomised, controlled trials.

Susan Blackmore is one of those who has pointed this out recently - in her article: Why I no longer believe religion is a virus of the mind.

Most religion has probably been adaptive for most of its believers in the past. However, there's also another possibility to consider: that religion might be adaptive for a minority of those who promote it - but not so much for average believers. This is a picture of religion as manipulation. Not so much manipulation directly by memes, but rather manipulation by other humans using memes. We know of many cases in which religious influences have been used by those in power to help prevent violence and revolutions. In the past, rich English folk gave a lot of money to the church - and the church used this money to build cathedrals - where the poor could go to feel grand - and where they could be told how stealing from the rich people was wrong. Turning down requests for donations may not have been so wise - the church was a powerful and influential force. A similar situation led to the promotion of Buddhism within China - if happiness lies within, then you don't need to steal the rich people's stuff. This picture still has religious memes spreading because they are adaptive to DNA genes - but it would be more like smoking or obseity - where the benefits accrue to only a few. The beneficiaries may not necessarily have been priests - they could also have been "friends of the church" - politicians, royalty, the rich, etc.

It also seems obvious that - in societies dominated by a single religion - there would have been immense pressure to conform. Not being religious under such circumstances would typically have been very, very bad for both you and your DNA. If this is a parasite it is a pretty weird one - since it makes infected hosts punish the uninfected. The movie Shivers portrayed such a parasite - so it's not totally impossible, I suppose. However, even then, lacking "religious" cultural symbionts is still bad for you - if you are in an environment where there are may others who have "religious" cultural symbionts.

It looks as though most major religions have been beneficial to some religious humans historically in at least one of these ways. Maybe these religions will become maladaptive in modern times - but that's a bit of a different issue.

Ben Cullen pointed out that many religions can be expected to be beneficial - on grounds associated with parasite ecology - long ago, in a paper entitled: Parasite Ecology and the Evolution of Religion. Ben pointed out that a lot of religion is transmitted with a significant vertical component. Vertically-transmitted memes tend to coevolve with their hosts to become more benign. The hosts adapt to ameliorate their negative aspects, and both benefit from host reproduction - so their interests become more aligned. Of course, some religions spread horizontally better than others - this argument applies with reduced force to ones that are good at spreading horizontally.

All this is not really news. David Sloane Wilson has been pointing out that religions show every sign of being adaptive to their hosts for a long time.

Anyway, I think that the Dawkins speculation that major religions are like deleterious viruses - that spread because they spread - has been proven wrong - so wrong that Dawkins should probably recant. It was an interesting idea - but an incorrect one.

References

• Richerson, P. J., & Newson, l. (2007) Is Religion Adaptive? Yes, No, Neutral, but Mostly, We Don’t Know.
• Dawkins, R. (2008) Dawkins on the evolutionary advantage of religious belief.
• Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion. London, UK: Bantam.
• Thomson, J. Anderson (2009) Why We Believe in Gods - "byproduct" theory of religion
• Cullen, Ben (1998) Parasite Ecology and the Evolution of Religion Blackmore, Susan (2013) Religion as meme and virus? Blackmore, Susan (2010) Why I no longer believe religion is a virus of the mind

Richard Dawkins on David Sloane Wilson

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.

E. O. Wilson and D. S. Wilson have written a few papers on the topic together: Evolution “for the Good of the Group” and Survival of the selfless.

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.

Mark Earls - resources

Mark Earls is the author of "Herd", and co-author of "I'll Have What She's Having".

Videos

I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping social behaviour.

Mark Earls - How Stuff Spreads - London, 2010.

Mark Earls - The Social Context.

Mark Earls - Copy, Copy, Copy.

Mark Earls - Introduction to homo mimicus.

Mark Earls - Understanding How Behaviour Shapes Strategy.

Daniel Dennett - The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews

Richard Dawkins interviews Dan Dennett for "The Genius of Charles Darwin", the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008. The first 20 minutes of the interview has a lot about cultural evolution.

Peter Corning - resources

Peter Corning has written three books on synergy in evolution and is an expert of symbiosis and cooperation.

Videos

Podcast

Links

• Wikipedia
• Culture of Empathy

Matt Ridley - The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

At this event, held at the Mercatus Center, Ridley discusses his book and answers questions from the audience.

Does monogamy support cultural group selection?

The latest paper from Henrich, Boyd and Richerson is called "The puzzle of monogamous marriage". It ponders the puzzle of monogamous marriage - how monogamy has spread while wealth inequality has increased.

Much of the paper is devoted to showing that monogamy is good for society-level fitness. They invoke cultural group selection to explain monogamy's spread.

Slavery seems like a suitable point of comparison. This is also widely banned - despite the fact that the richest might be expected to benefit most from it.

Wife inequality is seen as more of a moral issue than wealth inequality - and technological growth independently fuels wealth inequality.

Is the spread of spread of monogamy down to cultural group selection? I'm sceptical. It is true that in the democractic, religious and political revolutions and invasions that have spread monogamy a whole buch of memes gets supressed at once. However, describing this as being a form of group selection seems a bit controversial. A whole bunch of birds went extinct at once when mammals reached New Zealand. However, few would describe that as being a form of group selection. The invading animals wiped out the natives bacause they were fitter than them - not because of group-level effects.

Looking at large groups of memes going extinct during a major mass extinction event isn't terribly good evidence for cultural group selection, IMHO. In general, one group of organisms systematically wiping out their neighbours is just evolution as usual. Group selection - at least of the type that is controversial among biologists - is a more demanding concept than this.

The outcome shows that the monogamy meme bacame fitter as civilization progressed. If it could additional be shown that monogamy lost out to polygamy within groups, that would then qualify as evidence for group-level selection. However, the paper doesn't do that, and the idea that the polygamy meme wins within groups is probably simply false. In which case, group selection is not clearly needed as a hypothesis to explain the results.

A simple explanation for monogamy is democracy. Monogamy is deleterious for 90% of males and probably most females too. The few males it benefits may be powerful, but they are simply out-flanked by the rest of society. This explanation is simple, obvious - and it doesn't invoke group selection.

Memetic altruism is the most obvious thing to look for if looking for evidence favouring cultural group selection. At the moment, people see things that aren't explained by existing theories of altruism, and then invoke forms of group selection. However, it seems to be that this happens largely because they don't have a decent list of the known causes of human altruism. That seems to be largely because of a widespread incomplete understanding of memetics. Account properly for the existing known causes of altruism and group selection theories have a lot less work to do.

Update 2012-01-31: Razib Khan is sceptical about the group selection too.