I’m on my second read, and I think that this is quite an underappreciated book. While it doesn’t have a lot of practical advice about methods to overcome bias, its general philosophy is (IMNSHO) both deeply true and quite rare. It takes the logic of Dawkin’s Selfish Gene and unflinchingly explores the logical implications of the genes’-eye view of the world in which humans are lumbering robots constructed by coalitions of immortal genes for the sole purpose of copying those genes. The idea that humans, the conscious, apparently self-directed actors in our world, are robots – in the sense of having been constructed by something very different for its own ends – is for me profound, unintuitive, and deeply unsettling.
If you check out the 7 billion human beings, you will see that valuing genes highly is a ubiquitous phenomenon. That is hardly surprising considering the long history of success at genetic reproduction by our ancestors. Few humans say that they value their genes highly - but many of them are hypocrities, signalling one thing and doing something else.
I have read Snooks' Collapse of Darwinism and I tend to agree with Stefan King on this. Snooks makes a very cogent argument for thinking about evolution in a different way. As Stefan notes, his theory is quite unique - if you like a universal theory for the social and life sciences. He appears to be making some inroads into the mainstream with publication in well respected journals like Complexity, Advances in Space Research, Social Evolution and History etc.
It is interesting that some posters are so quickly dismissive of the work without having spent any time reading it. I thought the goal of this forum was 'overcoming bias'.
I will take it up again in the next open thread. I have already lowered my certainty in Snooks model to 40% after Tylers Island explanation. Snooks claim that his model explains punctuated equilibria was a big factor in me being convinced. I have to think about J. Thomas' explanation more, because IIRC Snooks talks about it differently. I wonder that if any mutation spreads 'rapidly', then you still have to explain why some only a small percentage gets selected, and by 'whom': the environment or the individuals in the population.
My understanding of evolution before I read Snooks was college level (Psychology and Cognitive Science). It was thouroughly covered in some classes, from a biological perspective and for machine learning applications.
BTW, it would speed up discussion if you guys would at least leaf through the book. I'm not Snooks in person, you know.
p.11: "Natural selection is built on the totally untenable assumption that all organisms at all times and in all places attempt to maximize the number of their offspring". That's not true. Natural selection is simply differential reproduction of genotypes as a result of their effect on phenotypes.
p.46: The "critical assumption that all individuals in all places and at all times tend to procreate at a geometric rate" is simply not a tenet of Darwinism in the first place.
Regarding discussion of western birth rates in my references - try Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution: Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, p 169-187.
They claim culture produced the effect, that it is maladaptive (from the POV of nuclear genes) and offer this mechanism, among others:
High-status people have a disproportionate influence in cultural transmission, so beliefs and values that lead to success in the professional sector will tend to spread. Because these beliefs will typically lead to lower fertility, family size will drop.
I.e. they claim humans copy other successful humans, and that in a mass-media culture, the apparently successful have often got that way by sacrificing their reproductive goals - and so copying of them spreads the effect.
IMO, Richerson & Boyd play down the effect of affluence on r vs K selection strategies in contributing to this effect far too much.
[repost - original version didn't make it past TypePad's antispam filter]
You are reiterating suspicion and implausibility, without responding to the alternative explanations of evolution.
You reminded me that we were off-topic; hence I tried to keep my last reply short. I don't think you've provided any explanations at all, frankly, since you tend to assume rather than explain what organisms will do. I don't want to waste much more space in this thread. But some questions for you to think about:
<ul><li>What does it mean to "prosper"? Why is life driven to "prosper"?<li>You write about what would "make sense" for an animal, or what an animal is "likely to prefer". Can you give a proper causal explanation for how these preferences came to exist? In other words, can you explain the existence of these preferences using only facts about the past (not the future effects)?<li>Does the theory apply to plants and asexual life, which together make up the bulk of the Earth's biomass, but which don't select mates, and don't think?<li>You seem to imply that organisms reproduce to benefit themselves rather than their genes. Do these benefits outweigh the costs? (I think you'll find that in most species, there are no benefits at all - except to the genes.)</ul>
One last thing I'm genuinely curious about: did you have a reasonably good understanding of the mainstream theory of evolution before you rejected it?
You are reiterating suspicion and implausibility, without responding to the alternative explanations of evolution. Why can't individuals select mutations? If, for example, a new predator enters the environment the prey species is likely to prefer mates with good weapons of offense/defense, like bigger scales and horns. When resources are abundant, fertile females are optimal, to increase your resource control. When another species waste is your food, commerce / symbiosis makes sense, etc.
Yeah, we're off topic. But the theory seems suspect when you use phrases like "intrinsically desirable" and "inherently motivating resources".
it is the individuals doing the selecting of mutations
This is highly implausible.
To return to the actual topic, I quite enjoyed The Robot's Rebellion: the main point of the book is to drive a wedge between what's good for your genes and what's good for you.
As I recall, it also criticises the view that biases given to us by evolution aren't really problematic. They certainly are problematic when they cause us to engage in behaviour that goes against our actual goals.
Natural selection is the explanation of why organisms often seem to be doing their damndest to produce as many offspring as possible
I guess that with the p.11 criticism Snooks means that natural selection is the wrong explanation for evolution, since his own model explains evolution with strategic selection (see below). IIRC, in that part of the book he rants about how natural selection has become gospel, and is now assumed by Darwin’s successors.
natural selection has resulted in humans having desires for things like a mate (or several), sex, food, status, and so on. These desires actually mean that people produce children pretty well.
In Snooksian evolution, your line would be rephrased as: strategic selection has resulted in humans having desires for things like a mate, sex, food, status (=resources: Snooks calls it food, shelter, protection, status, sex, support, companionship). These things are intrinsically desirable. Producing children is an secondary effect in the quest for these inherently motivating resources which help the individual survive and prosper.
Note how this moves the process of evolution away from genes, toward the individual competing for resources to survive and prosper. There is no need to explain the behaviour with a genetic perspective if you view genes as passive instead of active agents.
You need to explain why organisms are extracting energy from the environment.
According to Snooks, extracting energy (from the environment) is the reduction of acquiring resources. The intrinsically good resources are the ‘why’, the purpose, and the genes are the slaves that support it. Food is direct energy, and the other resources reduce to it through their scarcity. The objective is resources for survival and prosperity, not copies of genes. Genetic fitness is an externality of resource/energy extraction.
There are in fact tantilising hints that the mutation rate might be increased in certain sections of some organisms' genomes at certain times.
This is issue is secondary in Snooksian evolution, since it is the individuals doing the selecting of mutations (strategic selection), instead of the environment/nature (natural selection). During times of speciation, it would sure make sense to mate with more mutated individuals, for this would improve your chances of getting children better adapted to the new environment (children more useful for your survival and prosperity). This explains why Westeners have less children: we don’t need that much to support our resource acquisitions; technology takes care of that better.
I hope you can appreciate the explanatory simplicity of reversing the traditional master-slave relationship between genes and individuals. Maybe we should save this debate for the next open thread? It's starting to run long...
But the geological record squeezes the horizontal axis until those slow subtle changes look like they're instantaneous. Because 1000 years is pretty much instantaneous on that scale.
These graphs will still look all wrong unless you have a fixed font. Life is too short to put a lot of time into ascii art.
How does the genetic perspective explain punctuated equilibria in the fossil record?
There's nothing to explain there. It's a non-issue.
Imagine a mutation which has been established (enough individuals so that it won't be lost by accident, but less than 1/10,000 of the population. Call it fixed in the population when all but 1/10,000 have the mutation. Say it takes 1000 generations for it to go from established to fixed in a population of size 1 million, 10^6. Then it will take 2000 generations to do the the same in a population size 1 trillion 10^12. We're talking about the change happening in 1000 generations or so unless something special happens to slow it.
But in the geological record, 1000 generations is not much. A normal, natural, utterly simple situation will in the geological record look like:
***********************************************
It's predictable that in a large population (and you won't get enough samples to do much unless it's a large population) a given mutation that has an effect which can be seen in fossils (which is a small minority of mutations) will go from too few to notice to so many you don't notice anything else, so fast you probably won't find fossils from the intermediate stages when it's partly taken over.
When you do find them both together, chances are they are occupying different ecological niches, and then when one disappears it disappears because its niche is gone and not because the other has outcompeted it.
The interesting question here is why did the media continue for so long to talk as if there was a punctuated equilibrium problem, when every competent evolutionary biologist knew that there was not.
Snooks' p.11 criticism of natural selection is completely backwards. Natural selection is the explanation of why organisms often seem to be doing their damndest to produce as many offspring as possible (or more correctly: to maximise their genetic fitness; a distinction I won't worry about here). The theory does not assume it.
Note that it's sometimes not obvious what some natural animal behavior has to do with reproduction.
I don't see Western humans maximizing the number [of] their offspring
Eliezer's post Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers is good on this.
It's true that natural selection has not resulted in humans having a very strong desire to have as many children as possible. Instead, natural selection has resulted in humans having desires for things like a mate (or several), sex, food, status, and so on. These desires actually mean that people produce children pretty well.
Obviously, since things like the pill and sperm banks were invented only recently, natural selection has not had time to deal with them.
[Snooksian evolution] deals with the 5 ways individuals can extract energy from the environment.
You need to explain why organisms are extracting energy from the environment.
You suggested I read about the "Laws of Life". Sadly, Google Books won't let me read everything. But here's a quote from Law 3:
Genetic change, in other words, is a dynamic strategy that is deliberately pursued by organisms, but only when circumstances are favorable.
There are in fact tantilising hints that the mutation rate might be increased in certain sections of some organisms' genomes at certain times. See Jablonka & Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions, chapter 3.
But if there are indeed mechanisms that allow organisms to "deliberately" change their DNA, you need to explain how those mechanisms got there. Jablonka and Lamb see these mechanisms as being a result of natural selection. What's Snooks' explanation?
p.11: "Natural selection is built on the totally untenable assumption that all organisms at all times and in all places attempt to maximize the number of their offspring". That's not true. Natural selection is simply differential reproduction of genotypes as a result of their effect on phenotypes.
p.46: The "critical assumption that all individuals in all places and at all times tend to procreate at a geometric rate" is simply not a tenet of Darwinism in the first place.
Regarding discussion of western birth rates in my references - try Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution: Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, p 169-187.
They claim culture produced the effect, that it is maladaptive (from the POV of nuclear genes) and offer this mechanism, among others:
High-status people have a disproportionate influence in cultural transmission, so beliefs and values that lead to success in the professional sector will tend to spread. Because these beliefs will typically lead to lower fertility, family size will drop.
I.e. they claim humans copy other successful humans, and that in a mass-media culture, the apparently successful have often got that way by sacrificing their reproductive goals - and so copying of them spreads the effect.
IMO, Richerson & Boyd play down the effect of affluence on r vs K selection strategies in contributing to this effect far too much.
I can try to explain it briefly, but I doubt it will be to your satisfaction. It deals with the 5 ways individuals can extract energy from the environment: Genetic/technological change, family multiplication, commerce, conquest. A forced selection of (a combination) these strategies makes the individual select partners with characteristics that support that strategy. Having offspring with similar characteristics is subsidiary to having the useful partner. These selections of characteristics shape evolution, as a response to the demand for resource aquisition.
I would start in the back and ask myself whether his "laws of life" make sense. They deal with motivation, competitive intensity, strategic selection and optimization, struggle, collapse etc.
Ok, I like the 'Island' explanation and will reduce my certainty to 40% until I have reviewed the work on your list. Meanwhile I'll assume that they will explain why the p.11 and p.46 criticisms are wrong, because now I don't see Western humans maximazing the number their offspring; they have less babies because technology better supports their living standard than children do. Or maybe this illustrates the success of a "Don't have babies."-meme?
Anyway, seems got some evidence processing to do. Thanks for the refs.
If you check out the 7 billion human beings, you will see that valuing genes highly is a ubiquitous phenomenon. That is hardly surprising considering the long history of success at genetic reproduction by our ancestors. Few humans say that they value their genes highly - but many of them are hypocrities, signalling one thing and doing something else.
Riiight. So what? Perhaps come the memetic takeover one of these memes will reach fixation.
I have read Snooks' Collapse of Darwinism and I tend to agree with Stefan King on this. Snooks makes a very cogent argument for thinking about evolution in a different way. As Stefan notes, his theory is quite unique - if you like a universal theory for the social and life sciences. He appears to be making some inroads into the mainstream with publication in well respected journals like Complexity, Advances in Space Research, Social Evolution and History etc.
It is interesting that some posters are so quickly dismissive of the work without having spent any time reading it. I thought the goal of this forum was 'overcoming bias'.
I will take it up again in the next open thread. I have already lowered my certainty in Snooks model to 40% after Tylers Island explanation. Snooks claim that his model explains punctuated equilibria was a big factor in me being convinced. I have to think about J. Thomas' explanation more, because IIRC Snooks talks about it differently. I wonder that if any mutation spreads 'rapidly', then you still have to explain why some only a small percentage gets selected, and by 'whom': the environment or the individuals in the population.
My understanding of evolution before I read Snooks was college level (Psychology and Cognitive Science). It was thouroughly covered in some classes, from a biological perspective and for machine learning applications.
BTW, it would speed up discussion if you guys would at least leaf through the book. I'm not Snooks in person, you know.
p.11: "Natural selection is built on the totally untenable assumption that all organisms at all times and in all places attempt to maximize the number of their offspring". That's not true. Natural selection is simply differential reproduction of genotypes as a result of their effect on phenotypes.
p.46: The "critical assumption that all individuals in all places and at all times tend to procreate at a geometric rate" is simply not a tenet of Darwinism in the first place.
Regarding discussion of western birth rates in my references - try Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution: Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, p 169-187.
They claim culture produced the effect, that it is maladaptive (from the POV of nuclear genes) and offer this mechanism, among others:
High-status people have a disproportionate influence in cultural transmission, so beliefs and values that lead to success in the professional sector will tend to spread. Because these beliefs will typically lead to lower fertility, family size will drop.
I.e. they claim humans copy other successful humans, and that in a mass-media culture, the apparently successful have often got that way by sacrificing their reproductive goals - and so copying of them spreads the effect.
IMO, Richerson & Boyd play down the effect of affluence on r vs K selection strategies in contributing to this effect far too much.
[repost - original version didn't make it past TypePad's antispam filter]
You are reiterating suspicion and implausibility, without responding to the alternative explanations of evolution.
You reminded me that we were off-topic; hence I tried to keep my last reply short. I don't think you've provided any explanations at all, frankly, since you tend to assume rather than explain what organisms will do. I don't want to waste much more space in this thread. But some questions for you to think about:
<ul><li>What does it mean to "prosper"? Why is life driven to "prosper"?<li>You write about what would "make sense" for an animal, or what an animal is "likely to prefer". Can you give a proper causal explanation for how these preferences came to exist? In other words, can you explain the existence of these preferences using only facts about the past (not the future effects)?<li>Does the theory apply to plants and asexual life, which together make up the bulk of the Earth's biomass, but which don't select mates, and don't think?<li>You seem to imply that organisms reproduce to benefit themselves rather than their genes. Do these benefits outweigh the costs? (I think you'll find that in most species, there are no benefits at all - except to the genes.)</ul>
One last thing I'm genuinely curious about: did you have a reasonably good understanding of the mainstream theory of evolution before you rejected it?
You are reiterating suspicion and implausibility, without responding to the alternative explanations of evolution. Why can't individuals select mutations? If, for example, a new predator enters the environment the prey species is likely to prefer mates with good weapons of offense/defense, like bigger scales and horns. When resources are abundant, fertile females are optimal, to increase your resource control. When another species waste is your food, commerce / symbiosis makes sense, etc.
I suggest you get the book from the library :)
Yeah, we're off topic. But the theory seems suspect when you use phrases like "intrinsically desirable" and "inherently motivating resources".
it is the individuals doing the selecting of mutations
This is highly implausible.
To return to the actual topic, I quite enjoyed The Robot's Rebellion: the main point of the book is to drive a wedge between what's good for your genes and what's good for you.
As I recall, it also criticises the view that biases given to us by evolution aren't really problematic. They certainly are problematic when they cause us to engage in behaviour that goes against our actual goals.
Natural selection is the explanation of why organisms often seem to be doing their damndest to produce as many offspring as possible
I guess that with the p.11 criticism Snooks means that natural selection is the wrong explanation for evolution, since his own model explains evolution with strategic selection (see below). IIRC, in that part of the book he rants about how natural selection has become gospel, and is now assumed by Darwin’s successors.
natural selection has resulted in humans having desires for things like a mate (or several), sex, food, status, and so on. These desires actually mean that people produce children pretty well.
In Snooksian evolution, your line would be rephrased as: strategic selection has resulted in humans having desires for things like a mate, sex, food, status (=resources: Snooks calls it food, shelter, protection, status, sex, support, companionship). These things are intrinsically desirable. Producing children is an secondary effect in the quest for these inherently motivating resources which help the individual survive and prosper.
Note how this moves the process of evolution away from genes, toward the individual competing for resources to survive and prosper. There is no need to explain the behaviour with a genetic perspective if you view genes as passive instead of active agents.
You need to explain why organisms are extracting energy from the environment.
According to Snooks, extracting energy (from the environment) is the reduction of acquiring resources. The intrinsically good resources are the ‘why’, the purpose, and the genes are the slaves that support it. Food is direct energy, and the other resources reduce to it through their scarcity. The objective is resources for survival and prosperity, not copies of genes. Genetic fitness is an externality of resource/energy extraction.
There are in fact tantilising hints that the mutation rate might be increased in certain sections of some organisms' genomes at certain times.
This is issue is secondary in Snooksian evolution, since it is the individuals doing the selecting of mutations (strategic selection), instead of the environment/nature (natural selection). During times of speciation, it would sure make sense to mate with more mutated individuals, for this would improve your chances of getting children better adapted to the new environment (children more useful for your survival and prosperity). This explains why Westeners have less children: we don’t need that much to support our resource acquisitions; technology takes care of that better.
I hope you can appreciate the explanatory simplicity of reversing the traditional master-slave relationship between genes and individuals. Maybe we should save this debate for the next open thread? It's starting to run long...
Sorry, HTML destroyed my graph. It should have gone like:
........................****************************........................*...................................................*...................................................*...................................................*...........................*************************...........................
If you sample year by year or decade by decade you might get something that looks like this:
.................................*****............................*..................................*....................................*....................................*.....................................*....................................*....................................*..................................*...................**************........................
But the geological record squeezes the horizontal axis until those slow subtle changes look like they're instantaneous. Because 1000 years is pretty much instantaneous on that scale.
These graphs will still look all wrong unless you have a fixed font. Life is too short to put a lot of time into ascii art.
How does the genetic perspective explain punctuated equilibria in the fossil record?
There's nothing to explain there. It's a non-issue.
Imagine a mutation which has been established (enough individuals so that it won't be lost by accident, but less than 1/10,000 of the population. Call it fixed in the population when all but 1/10,000 have the mutation. Say it takes 1000 generations for it to go from established to fixed in a population of size 1 million, 10^6. Then it will take 2000 generations to do the the same in a population size 1 trillion 10^12. We're talking about the change happening in 1000 generations or so unless something special happens to slow it.
But in the geological record, 1000 generations is not much. A normal, natural, utterly simple situation will in the geological record look like:
***********************************************
It's predictable that in a large population (and you won't get enough samples to do much unless it's a large population) a given mutation that has an effect which can be seen in fossils (which is a small minority of mutations) will go from too few to notice to so many you don't notice anything else, so fast you probably won't find fossils from the intermediate stages when it's partly taken over.
When you do find them both together, chances are they are occupying different ecological niches, and then when one disappears it disappears because its niche is gone and not because the other has outcompeted it.
The interesting question here is why did the media continue for so long to talk as if there was a punctuated equilibrium problem, when every competent evolutionary biologist knew that there was not.
Snooks' p.11 criticism of natural selection is completely backwards. Natural selection is the explanation of why organisms often seem to be doing their damndest to produce as many offspring as possible (or more correctly: to maximise their genetic fitness; a distinction I won't worry about here). The theory does not assume it.
Note that it's sometimes not obvious what some natural animal behavior has to do with reproduction.
I don't see Western humans maximizing the number [of] their offspring
Eliezer's post Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers is good on this.
It's true that natural selection has not resulted in humans having a very strong desire to have as many children as possible. Instead, natural selection has resulted in humans having desires for things like a mate (or several), sex, food, status, and so on. These desires actually mean that people produce children pretty well.
Obviously, since things like the pill and sperm banks were invented only recently, natural selection has not had time to deal with them.
[Snooksian evolution] deals with the 5 ways individuals can extract energy from the environment.
You need to explain why organisms are extracting energy from the environment.
You suggested I read about the "Laws of Life". Sadly, Google Books won't let me read everything. But here's a quote from Law 3:
Genetic change, in other words, is a dynamic strategy that is deliberately pursued by organisms, but only when circumstances are favorable.
There are in fact tantilising hints that the mutation rate might be increased in certain sections of some organisms' genomes at certain times. See Jablonka & Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions, chapter 3.
But if there are indeed mechanisms that allow organisms to "deliberately" change their DNA, you need to explain how those mechanisms got there. Jablonka and Lamb see these mechanisms as being a result of natural selection. What's Snooks' explanation?
p.11: "Natural selection is built on the totally untenable assumption that all organisms at all times and in all places attempt to maximize the number of their offspring". That's not true. Natural selection is simply differential reproduction of genotypes as a result of their effect on phenotypes.
p.46: The "critical assumption that all individuals in all places and at all times tend to procreate at a geometric rate" is simply not a tenet of Darwinism in the first place.
Regarding discussion of western birth rates in my references - try Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution: Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, p 169-187.
They claim culture produced the effect, that it is maladaptive (from the POV of nuclear genes) and offer this mechanism, among others:
High-status people have a disproportionate influence in cultural transmission, so beliefs and values that lead to success in the professional sector will tend to spread. Because these beliefs will typically lead to lower fertility, family size will drop.
I.e. they claim humans copy other successful humans, and that in a mass-media culture, the apparently successful have often got that way by sacrificing their reproductive goals - and so copying of them spreads the effect.
IMO, Richerson & Boyd play down the effect of affluence on r vs K selection strategies in contributing to this effect far too much.
@Allan Crossman
I can try to explain it briefly, but I doubt it will be to your satisfaction. It deals with the 5 ways individuals can extract energy from the environment: Genetic/technological change, family multiplication, commerce, conquest. A forced selection of (a combination) these strategies makes the individual select partners with characteristics that support that strategy. Having offspring with similar characteristics is subsidiary to having the useful partner. These selections of characteristics shape evolution, as a response to the demand for resource aquisition.
I would start in the back and ask myself whether his "laws of life" make sense. They deal with motivation, competitive intensity, strategic selection and optimization, struggle, collapse etc.
Ok, I like the 'Island' explanation and will reduce my certainty to 40% until I have reviewed the work on your list. Meanwhile I'll assume that they will explain why the p.11 and p.46 criticisms are wrong, because now I don't see Western humans maximazing the number their offspring; they have less babies because technology better supports their living standard than children do. Or maybe this illustrates the success of a "Don't have babies."-meme?
Anyway, seems got some evidence processing to do. Thanks for the refs.
Snooks is a crackpot. This does not refute his elegant model, though.
I find it hard to understand Snooks' model, since it looks like gibberish to me. Can you explain it briefly and in simple language?