Bora made two quick references to “group selection” today. I don’t have much time…and shouldn’t be blogging, but I want to make a few quick points before this topic goes down the memory hole (I know, unnecessary caveat, but I am driven by personal guilt in expressing it, not public shame). For those “not in the know” (e.g., most readers), Bora and I have a history.
Update: Robert Skipper’s ruminations are worth a read, as always. And of course I was just making shit up about his political views and draft….
My problem with Bora comes down to assertions like this:
And I have realized that opposition to multi-level selection is now reduced to a few die-hards who have either invested too much of their careers opposing it to be able to now back down, or people like Razib who oppose it for ideological reasons.
First, let us constrain the field here, “levels of selection” isn’t really of interest to many (most) areas of biology. This is an issue that crops up in evolution and genetics, and it is not trivial, but if you aren’t the type of person who enjoys books like Defenders of the Truth or some of Elisabeth Lloyd’s papers you probably won’t get worked up over this. But here is a concrete reason why I get worked up over this: I was discussing some of Robin Dunbar’s ideas about the evolution of cranial capacity with a graduate student in anthropology and he mentioned that “selection happens to groups.” I was like, “wait up here, selection doesn’t happen to groups,” and he was like, “Yes it does, evolution selects on groups,” and I was like, “Nope, the dominant view is that selection occurs mostly on individuals, or, at least lower levels than groups, though groups are part of the extended context in which selection occurs.” Long story short, I know this guy well enough to know that he isn’t really conversant in the details of the levels of selection debate, and wouldn’t be able to tell you who David Sloan Wilson is. But, he was expressing an intuition that many individuals possess that it is groups which are being selected up by natural selection. The most common manifestation of this is the “for the good of the species” type talk which peaked with VC Wynne-Edwards work in the 1960s.
At this time there was a “revolution” in evolutionary biology and W.D. Hamilton and George C. Williams shifted the focus and methodological bias from group to individual level selection. Roughly speaking these workers simply contended that there were all sorts of problems with “for the survival of the species” style arguments, the most simple one being that it seems that such behaviors are vulnerable to being exploited by cheaters who invade a social system. A more technical objection is that intergroup variance is simply too low when compared to intragroup variance on a trait for between group level variation to be competitive with within group variation over the evolutionary long haul.
But these are details and nuances you can explore if you have an interest in the field, I want to speak to two of Bora’s points which I believe are disputable and/or bizarre.
First, I do not believe that “opposition to multi-level selection is now reduced to a few die-hards” as a matter of fact. I haven’t seen a survey, and I’m a scientific small-fry so perhaps the big boys just aren’t telling me what’s going down (it isn’t like philosophical debates about levels of selection are part of typical lab-chat), but just to check if the sky wasn’t purple I did email a few friends who do graduate work in evolutionary biology and they don’t think multi-level selection is the dominant paradigm either. This does not mean that Richard Dawkins style gene-level selection is universally accepted, and even Dawkins himself admits that higher levels of selection do occur. And I tend to concur, the point is whether scientifically this is a fruitful field of study with a vibrant empirical and theoretical research program. My impression is that it isn’t vibrant, and when I read Unto Others I recall Wilson even admitting that unfortunately there was simply too little experimental work being done in this area (he was writing in the late 1990s). So, the issue here is not (for me) whether multi-level selection is correct or not, it is simply whether it is the dominant conceptual paradigm in evolutionary biology (I wouldn’t bet on this), and whether it is even a vigorous one (I am sketchier here, but my impression is no, it isn’t that vigorous). An important bigger issue, but one I won’t address here, is whether generalizations like “most selection is on the level of the gene” or “selection is pluralistic” are really important aside from selling semi-popular press books and giving rise to a reasonable literature in philosophy of science (I do think that Dawkins style “gene selectionist thinking” is pretty weird and revolutionary to many people, and it is worth understanding and internalizing even if it isn’t as revolutionary or ubiquitous as Dawkins might have you believe).
The second issue is Bora’s attempts to make connections between these particular scientific ideas and a particular politics. Myself, I was a libertarian before I became interested in evolutionary biology, and I remain a libertarian despite my varied levels of emphasis on a “Fisherian” world-view over time (that is, individual level selection upon additive genetic variation as the prime driver of biological evolution). In fact, if you wanted to plot “libertarianism” and “individual selectionist” on the same graph as level of personal intensity the former would probably show a steady drop since circa 1997, while the latter would have peaked circa 2003. In terms of the bigger picture, consider the adaptionist evolutionary biologists who I believe Bora has in his sights, the school which began with R.A. Fisher, an Anglican Tory eugenicist, J.B.S. Haldane, an atheist Communist for most of his life (the Lysenko affair soured him on active participation) and W.D. Hamilton, an agnostic Thatcherite. Finally, there is the great popularizer, Richard Dawkins, who has taken gene level selectionism to the people, but is a confirmed Laborite militant atheist. In contrast, both Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould would be in the multi-level selection camp, and would be considered men of the Left, though I do not know where David Sloan Wilson would be slotted politically, and he has been the genuine evangelist on this issue for the past generation. I have pointed out that one Wilson’s “followers” in extending group level selection is Kevin MacDonald, a noted intellectual anti-Semite who promotes the idea that Jews have been shaped by selection as a group over the past 2,000 years, and that European gentiles are vulnerable to parasitism by selfish groups because of their excessive altruism due to weak intergroup selection. The point which that bizarre digression speaks to is that correspondences between political and scientific orientations can be a fun parlor game, but it must be done judiciously, and in many esoteric areas (and levels of selection is one) there just isn’t much there to work with because the topic is at too far a remove from public policy and political concerns.
Addendum: Note that one of those posts is rather old, so I don’t know if Bora holds all those positions in the details at this point. But, I will say that I am tempted to make some argument about how Robert Skipper’s line of reasoning about “genetic draft” is ideologically driven by beliefs as a conservative Democrat 🙂
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