Proposing an idea heretical to many evolutionary biologists is one of the smaller skirmishes Dr. Wilson has set off. In his 1998 book "Consilience," he proposed that many human activities, from economics to morality, needed to be temporarily removed from the hands of the reigning specialists and given to biologists to work out a proper evolutionary foundation.

Same old naturalistic fallacy.

Sigh. While Wilson is still picking fights within his own area of expertise as to how evolutionary mechanisms really work, he wants to start dictating morality.

Excellent fairness and balance in the NYT article, by the way. Casting Wilson as an innnocent (perplexed!) seeker of truth - who by the way wants to dictate what is moral - and smearing Gould and Lewontin as marxist ideologues. As Gould wrote:

I grew up in a family with a tradition of participation in campaigns for social justice, and I was active, as a student, in the civil rights movement at a time of great excitement and success in the early 1960s. Scholars are often wary of citing such committments. ...[but] it is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences - and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice. Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference.

I always thought that E. O. Wilson got dismissed on grounds that had little to do with what he was trying to say.  This was especially painful as Stephen J. Gould and his column, "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine was the chief reason i subscribed to that periodical for so long.  It seemed to me that he was being accused of reductionism by critics who were themselves reducing his arguments to terms far more simplistic than those he had employed.

The frame seems to be that it must either be genetic or it must be nurture that accounts for the majority of our individual make-up.  It seems to me that it must be both genetic and cultural in order for evolution to have occurred.  Wilson takes an even more complex position when he notes that evolution acts at many levels, including the individual and the group.  He also proposes that the distinct evolutionary processes occurring in the levels of the group and the individual themselves interact.

Wilson is very well respected within his specialty of entomology.  Much, possibly most, of the complexity he describes he had observed in social insects.  Proposing an unnecessary level of complexity is a violation of Occam's Razor--make no unnecessary assumptions.  Denying demonstrable complexity is itself reductionism.  Purely on a level of meta analysis, if such complexity can be shown to emerge in organisms with nervous systems as simple as ants, it is hard to imagine that they would not also apply to humans.  With us, the very reason for the existence of much of our brains is to enable complex social interactions.  

 

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

social-group evolution through biological changes is another thing.. it can not be rejected easily and it can not be demonstrated easily... we just need more data..

on the other hand.. cultural evolution is so clear and obvious and with so many data that social-cohesive grup evolution with a direct biological footprint will always seem small... which does nto mean irrlevant.. we just need more data for data.. and ants are really interesting...

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Darwinmania

An original confession

Let's get rid of Darwinism

You can't be me, I'm taken

Most of history can be reduced to fighting and fucking. Occasionally a bit of art and science falls out, but it's likely to be way outside of the norm, and produced by exceptionally rare individuals who show an exceptionally rare aptitude combined with exceptionally rare training.

Even then, art is a useful signifier of status for its patrons and of exceptional cognitive and motor skills for its creators. It doesn't exist as something which is magically separate from the culture it appears from. Likewise for science, which from the inside is as Darwinian a discipline as any other. If you have money and power, you can create exceptional art and science to order by rounding up and hot-housing the rare individuals who are talented enough to make an original contribution. But most people aren't Einstein or Mozart. Most people not only lack their talents, usually they don't even have any interest in their talents.

What makes human culture unique is that it persists across generations and - to some extent - becomes self-sustaining and externalised. This makes it possible for Mozart and Einstein to be remembered. Without that externalisation process humans would have to relearn to survive in their environment just as animals do. There's not a lot of evidence to suggest that without externalised culture any of us would act differently to animals.

Culture is plastic to some extent, but not infinitely so. No matter how sophisticated people believe themselves to be, certain triggers will create certain responses on demand. The range of possible behaviours varies between individuals and seems to be partly genetic, with expression moderated or enhanced by culture. But the repertoire of human behaviours is really not that wide, and even basic predictive thinking is still rare enough to be exceptional.

If the concept of race is problematic, the notion of intelligence is equally so. Intelligence has never been properly defined, no one knows what IQ tests actually measure, and we are only beginning to identify the genes underlying the myriad attributes that collectively give rise to intelligence. Even if we were to ignore such fundamental issues, however, there remain considerable empirical problems in linking race and intelligence. For a start, there has over the past century been a dramatic rise in IQ scores - the so-called "Flynn effect". Results from every major IQ test, in every age range and in every modern industrialised country, show a continuous and roughly linear increase of about three IQ points per decade from the earliest days of testing to the present - something that clearly cannot be explained in genetic terms and which therefore raises questions about the biological relationship between race and intelligence.

from here

Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.

From the moment the sperm hits the ova, DNA starts whipping through its/their repertoire creating the conditions for Emergent Behavior leading to higher order processes, functions, and states until - should everything go right - a fully functional human being is created after about 20 years, or so.  Each 'jump' in Complexity subsumes the steps before (mostly) in that prior stages keep doing 'Their Thing' while controlling/contributing to higher levels and stages with the possibility of contributing/controlling lower levels and stages as well.

Looking at this, for a second ....

A phrenome comes wafting through the air, hits the nose, is input processed by the brain, shunted to various nuclei, which trigger along neural pathways to the temporal lobe, where an emotion/cognitive process is invoked resulting in a "Holy Cow!" reaction, leading to a decision to engage in conversation, leading to a date, leading to falling in love, leading to marriage.

Our little bio-chemical - purely physical, almost purely stimulus/response - has led to a cultural practice:  getting married.

It works the same way in the other direction:  high order cognitive, culturally based, input can lead to the 'programming' of purely bio-chemical processes -- stress at work to the overproduction of digestive chemicals in the gut.

Or not.  The exact response to any stimulus ultimately rests on the precise state of Body-Mind of the individual during the specific instance qualified by the overall totality of the individual Body-Mind.

(And how's THAT for weasel-wording!  ;-)

Realistically, simplistic reductionism such as "DNA done it" isn't an explanation.  "DNA done it" explains everything and something that explains everything explains nothing.  Ok, in the crudest sense "DNA done it" is "explanatory" as the only time DNA processing stops in a human body is when a person is dead.  

And dead people don't do much.

Not only does the privileging of physical processes (DNA) leads to over simplification it makes testing the thesis impossible.  Unless one can find two or more individuals with the exact same DNA raised in completely different cultures.  Twin studies goes some way to resolving the first problem but, to my knowledge, there have never been a statistically valid study of twins born in one culture and raised in completely different cultures.  

Until we have such studies this discussion must be based on Deduction -- with all the inherent problems of such.


Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bork! Bork! Bork!