Evolution of Cooperation

[cos]

Reading "E. O. Wilson's Theory of Everything" in The Atlantic, I ran across this:

Indeed, while we sat in camp chairs talking about conservation and ants and countless other subjects, a dispute was raging among evolutionary biologists half a world away, one of the most hotly contested in that field in years-and Wilson was at its center.
[...]
The current controversy results from another bid by Wilson to overturn conventional scientific wisdom. For more than four decades, evolutionary biology has been dominated by a school of thought known as "kin selection," which postulates that some species arrive at cooperative behavior and a complex division of labor as a matter of reproductive strategy among close relatives.
[...]
The furor erupted with the publication, in the scientific journal Nature in August 2010, of an article written by Wilson and two co-authors, Martin A. Nowak and Corina E. Tarnita, both of Harvard. Titled "The Evolution of Eusociality," it amounted to a frontal challenge to a key concept of kin-selection theory, called "inclusive fitness."

Which reminded me of a talk I went to with satyrgrl in 2008, at Harvard, about "the evolution of cooperation", in which a Harvard scientists who described himself as an evolutionary mathematician (or something like that) described his mathematical models of cooperation and what kinds of cooperation they lead to, ending with the most powerful sort based on a model of group cooperation.

I'm pretty sure that was Martin Nowak, which means that we saw a presentation of the very same ideas that ended up in this paper. Indeed, his math did explain the evolution of group cooperation without depending on arguments based on kin relationships. He just showed that group cooperation could outcompete others and provided an advantage to each individual in that group, regardless of the advantage it might also give to other members of the group, given certain models.

Since biology, evolution, and etc., are not at all my fields, it feels kinda surreal to read about a major scientific controversy in the Atlantic and partway through realize "hey, I saw that guy talk about this stuff before they published the paper, and didn't even realize it was going to be controversial".

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

I think you meant to have a /em not a /a after "the atlantic"

[cos]

Normally I proofread and fix every LJ post I make immediately after I make it, but this time LJ was not allowing me to get through, so I couldn't even see my post to notice the problem. Whatever the problem was seems to be resolved now and I can get through to LJ again.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

cool. yeah, I think there are elections happening in Russia, so livejournal is being twitchier/sketchier than usual.

interesting post. thanks.

thanks

[zuma.livejournal.com]

very interesting, very pertinent. thank you for posting this. in these adverse times where contentiousness as a model framework seems exclusively accepted, the very concept of cooperative behavior at all, for it's own sake, itself seems a third rail. OWS for obvious example, etc.

interesting and pertinent post to me indeed, i really appreciate it.

[emp42ress.livejournal.com]

So, as someone who actually studies this, a lot of this has been presented so as to make it more controversial than it actually is. While there are some exceptions on both sides, these days, most people who study the evolution of social behavior would agree that it has been driven by some mix of kin-selection and group-selection. We don't necessarily know which aspects are more important at which stages, but it is definitely not an either or situation.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

In my junior year of college I discovered Marder's Law: Any big binary argument in biology will end up with "both are correct" (a historical example being electrical vs. chemical for how neurons transmit information).

(BTW, I named this law for the professor who pointed this out in the narrow example mentioned above; AFAIK there isn't an general law about this, which could mean that I'm wrong about how often this happens)

[emp42ress.livejournal.com]

I do think it happens a large proportion of the time. There are so many arguments like this. The worst of them are equivalent to holding up a cue-ball, with one person saying "it's white!" and the other saying "no, it's not. It's round!". So many arguments where people are fighting each other and not really even talking about the same thing.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Hee! Works also for color perception -- the trichromatic theory theory vs the opponent-process theory.

I caught Wilson in Toronto in 2007.

[flinx.livejournal.com]

I was aware of him well before that, however, but it was a great joy to catch him give the keynote address at the ASM general meeting that year. He offered up his very sincere regret that he'd followed entomology when he started in science, when if he'd only known about the looming breadth and depth of microbiology, he'd have been a much happier fellow. Which was surprising to hear, given that some of his seminal works on bugs have significantly influenced a lot of work about evolution and social behavior in, well, bugs.