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

[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.