Ideas On The Fringe 3- E O Wilson (OEB)- The Supoerorganism

okay well welcome everybody to the third ideas on the fringe event those of you who've been to the first two with steven pinker and michael sandel know the general format tonight's gonna be slightly different I want to start off by making some introductory remarks but I'm going to turn over to add who wants to make a few remarks of his own and then we'll engage in the conversation that's been typical for the previous two so as many of you will know has been teaching here for a very long time in the department of organ at why i see there's a publication misprint last year in the department of orgasmic by evolutionary biology and it's so stuck in my head and i can't pronounce it anyways and so ed of course has had a wonderful career engaging with many different aspects of biology conservation biology island biogeography and of course what many people know who most for it was the early pioneering work in the field of sociobiology which he synthesized in his 1975 book and tonight what we're going to be doing is going into some discussions of a recent about to be published book with his longtime collaborator Burt hall Dobler called super organisms and it will sort of travel across a variety of topics but as a way of introduction I want to start off with a personal story that took place in 1976 when i was a freshman undergraduate my first course in animal behavior and the books was do wilson sociobiology so this is really a hot off the press and I can remember reading page at the page and thinking these ideas were incredible the predictive power of the ideas the scope of the problem looking at all sorts of non-human animals and human animals and it was a very nursing course because the professor Douglas candland was a comparative psychologist gave us only one graded assignment and the assignment was a final exam one question the question was you've heard about a variety of figures in this field of sociobiology both people pro and con and you're now throwing a dinner party and you get to invite 10 p to this party what will they talk about what will they argue over so I had ed facing off against win Edwards discussing the merits and virtues of different levels of selection and having ed argue in favor of selection at a level of either the individual or the gene arguing against when Edwards at the level of the group and it was a fierce battle and a at some point I had maybe f throwing beer at win Edwards or something we got very very kind of creative and I got a very good great bye wait but there was a real issue at that time and it's an issue that we're going to basically stew be starting off with tonight which is how to think about questions like the evolution of all tourism the evolution of human morality cooperation in terms of levels of selection and what level or levels the selection operate such that we can account the kinds of social behavior we see in a variety of organism so I want to do now is I just want to turn it over to add for a few minutes give us a few words on some of the ways in which his own thinking has changed over the last several years where things stand today and then we'll get into topics having to do with the notion of a superorganism the evolution of morality questions that bear on issues of conservation biology and we'll be off around ed you're good yep my on yes good thank you for letting me speak first because this is a now once again fast-moving subject the controversies then now involved in group that is among a specialist of theory on sociobiology they have to do with the origin of altruism and of advanced social behavior and particularly in the insects where we can deal with the problems substantively and in fact I'm looking now the manuscript to finish Lana script with the editing going on of the book the super organism which is focused on the insects where we have an enormous amount of new information and i have not this time ventured forth into humans not because i fear the controversy but because we have now before us a task of reexamining the entire issue of level both the level selection and of the origins of altruism and group loyalty and all of these things that concern us in the study of human behavior but require major modifications and and new issues examined particularly with reference to what could be called gene culture coevolution but we'll leave that for next year right now i want to talk about social insects because as i'll make clear and just these a quick introductory remarks here is where we can possibly for the first time ever see clearly what emergence is and what happens when you go from one major level of biological organization through what's called the great transitions then this one is the organism to the super organism to the haight tightly organized colony whose organizational structure is based upon altruistic behavior how did it happen where did it come from but before I do get into this I want to stress why this particular subject however we dress it address it and how whatever pairs of organization levels we investigate to study these transitions we are headed now I think in the 21st century toward the possibility of a genuine unification of biology as a science and I would like to be so bold as in fact to this suggests that we now have two laws of biology and of course that will get me in immediately into a controversy but let me just say this and then because I want to make a point with it and then we'll go on around that the first law of biology is that all entities and processes of life are ultimately obedient know ultimately obedient for the laws of physics and chemistry and this is the foundation of molecular and cell biology the second law of biology is that all the entities and processes unique to living organiz organisms are the products of evolution by natural selection that in turn is the foundation of evolutionary biology very broadly defined however these that this may turn out to be the case that we can call these authentic laws these generalities can only take us so far the unity of biology depends on something else a full cause-and-effect explanation of the major transitions in the levels of biological organization molecule to organelle to celled organism the population the ecosystem the units of each level at any of biological organization is an aggregate of the unity of level below it with the lower unit operative with one another to some degree they're cooperating aggregates are the units of the next level above it well that's a simple enough idea but it's simple only in initial statement the attention of biologists is turning increasingly to these transitions and the progress is very rapid the research is by definition interdisciplinary it consists of systems analyses with a higher of any adjacent pair levels for example of organism two cells being the system to the extent that the transition analysis succeeds the century biology will become deservedly deservedly known as the age of synthesis not all of the transitions always I indicate between levels of organization are equally penetrable the most accessible as I just said may well be that between the organism and the youth social insect colonies which can be treated as a form the college can be treated as form a form of organized populations a youth social colony such as that characterizing ants bees wasps and termites is one in which reproducing members as a reproducing cast a set of members in the colony are supported by a cooperating non reproducing members in the rearing of offspring so this has to go on for more than one generation the binding force of a youth social collie is glue is the altruism displayed by the non-reproductive members usually call the worker to understand the origin of a youth social colony and the transition it represents it is necessary to understand the origin of altruism now I'm going to explain very briefly what the evidence suggests about the origin of algorithm and thereby the earliest stages of youth social evolution in the insects that we can now address a little more confidently from the very large amount of information newly synthesized this reconstruction which has only recently been made possible by empirical studies differs in some ways radically from the standard explanation that has prevailed for the last 40 years for reasons that I'll give very shortly differed you can say as primarily in perspective and the point of entry of the theory building and the models let me then let me just tell you briefly what the standard theory is or what at least it's often perceived as being the case although not necessarily precisely that form that is used by the the most creative mathematical theories theorists it's getting very abstract and rather remote from reality but originally and this is what made sociobiology one of the things that made sociobiology attractive intellectually was this standard way of looking at it and the standard way is that in addition just to parents and offspring and the Darwinian evolution that occurs from the generation of offspring maximize the optimal my what genetic fitness which is the combination the multiple of survival time and the number of offspring produced per unit time that in addition to that that you can reproduce your genes by favoring relatives that are collateral and collateral relatives would be uncle's hands they would be cousin they'd be sisters they'd be brothers and other than direct offspring no collateral kin selection it was called was introduced and became a powerful theoretical tool and conception that interested people if you could increase the fitness of your relatives and that's the close of the relative the better then you would be sharing genes with these so you could be altruistic and if the algorithm you showed was more than compensated for that is how much you gave up how quickly you gave up your life or how quickly how fewer offspring you had was more than compensated for by the offspring of the survival and offspring of your relatives especially a close relatives then you actually could have the evolution of a society with altruism and that was sort of it's a very nice seductive idea but that particular view of it has turned out to be well incorrect and now I have to move to what in my judgment is from empirical studies alone not from a priority model building of this kind that has prevailed but what the evidence seems to show and then I'll proceed to show that this leads to a very different perspective about multi-level selection as natural selection going on at the level of the colony versus the level of the individual in particular but first let me just say that the origin of youth social colony life what you saw just go outside and see going on in ants and bees and wasps panter mike has been quite rare and evolution this is an extremely important fact that we haven't given a lot of soccer it never occurred so far as we know never wants any evidence that it ever occurred this kind of algorithm may use social organization in the first great insect radiation of the late paleozoic and later in the mill avoid when the second great radiation was beginning of insects you know diversification ah it was again didn't it come up until the mid measles oh and again was scarce now this in frequency is due to to circumstances and I will now tell you what they are because now we begin the in empirical based explanation of what happened in the social insects which are provide for us as I think so different from human beings yet exhibiting altruism and the like system so different in origin the communication used and everything else that they represent a wholly different experiment in higher social organization there what you might expect to find the sort of thing you might expect to find on another planet as having evolved there in frequency is due to two circumstances the first is that the origin of eusociality requires a very specialized form of pre adaptation that is Darwinian evolution has during the radiation of the insects in all these different directions has to hit upon one this is Darwinian that is off to the parent offspring no collateral altruism or selection going on it's not incite a very far of tree adaptation which is the construction of a nest by the parent followed by progressive provisioning of the young by the parent in the nest you know like birds once this pre adaptation is achieved and now we're still strictly Darwin instill individual level selection only a single small genetic change even the substitution of a single allyl arm is sufficient to set the stage to the transition a great transition from organism to colony and this is why the article that I have coming out in bioscience in January is entitled one great leap how altruism and higher colonial life originated in the insect one small step for a loss one giant leap for the hymenoptera okay um the prescribing allyl must cause at all it's easy to achieve this it's just you don't this is the kind of thing you can achieve with a single Ally all actually ah must cause the parents at all Springs to linger at the nest and it must be and this is something that's been missed by so many mathematical theoreticians who are get all tangled up in in trying to devise theory that can explain it otherwise it must be plastic in expression that is to say the allyl must have a phenotype that can produce depending on circumstances either a worker or a queen you know or a royal mail ah and they either reproduce or do not reproduce while continuing progressive care of the young he noticed plastic plasticity of this client actually was visualized clearly by Darwin that's how he finally solved the problem of the social insect and the end he said if I can't explain the altruism of these insects and my theory is is is toast and he spent a lot of time worrying about either tell you I'm going to use up too much time but I'm going to tell you a funny story about it Darwin is told by one of his maids at down you know she's looking out the window and there's Darwin looking at an anthill for a long long period of time and she comments to a member of the family is it any faculty the novelist is a close neighbor and she said what a pity mr. Darwin cannot find something useful to do like mr. Thackeray any rate he understood well the second reason and that's so you've got to have just that you've got to have the set the stage which is not that common the second reason that you sociality has been a rare event and evolution is that the incipient group you know once the step is taken which possesses the altruism altri all a leo has to do better than solitaires which do not possess the plastic algorithm a Leo the allyl the evidence suggests that this selective superiority occurs when the nest site itself happenstance is situated so us provide a rare persistent bulwark against predators and other enemies while lying within foraging distance of a relatively rich persistent food source in other word here we have an allyl that isn't going to work unless the group is superior over the other solitaire and this is the circumstance under which it works but it apparently works only rarely now notice we're not talking about ten selection here in the usual sense we're talking about competing alleles in a way in what is almost traditional lineal Darwinian evolution so the whole situation may be that simple so that's it the bottom line which does run counter to the conventional wisdom is the group selection the competition between groups is the primary driving force of altruism and eusociality and this is also important close kinship among the colony members which undoubtedly occurred close kinship among those members in the early stages is the consequence not the cause of the origin of you so she allottee now defenders of the standard theory which has persisted for 40 years starting with the and I was the one that really made it popular and sociobiology insulin Richard Dawkins came in and made it very popular but I was the one that seemed that I put a scientific basis to it any rate defenders of standard period starting with the inclusive fitness of individuals it possessed the altruism them gene or do not possess it covers the case just cited but it does so at the price of changing relatedness and ship to mean as little as the probability of multiple individuals possessing the altruism allele and further of including direct offspring in the calculation of inclusive that you do that yes you can the standard gene centered inclusive fitness calculation of which addresses the dynamism how fast that allele is increasing or decreasing works but then when you do that you cover all cases of evolution in a trivial exercise you have a very high abstract way of describing the dynamic of free gene frequency change but you are no closer to explaining the agents of selection and exactly what has happened we're predicting the control conditions the conditions of the real world in which algorithm has arrived risen the mathematical model generated by the standard gene centered theory are internally consistent they can be translated with the right you know definitions and operations to the model that I'm just digested but they are unproductive they have done very little they've given us very little in 40 years they are well they're just the wrong model to use the wrong way to think about it and they use the wrong poor a point of entry I believe in to the theory now the standard theory which 40 years ago looks so promising as proved v in my opinion retarding and its effect researchers on the bile on the biology of social insects who have paid actually little attention to it although it attracts a huge amount of attention and broader circles and science and public they pay very little attention to it except for a courtesy reference once in a while have enjoyed meanwhile outstanding success in exploring the fundamentals of you social evolution in communication and division of labor colonie population lifecycle ecology phylogeny all of which are reviewed in the forthcoming book the fall for the fall next year the super organism by Burt holdover learn myself and these fundamentals of empirical study of intuitive guidance of experiment and field study by large numbers of investigators these not the the standard theory has provided the means to track the origins of altruism and eusociality so I'm going to be real harsh now what has a standard theory contributed over 40 years actually as I said very little it's the following a prediction of conflict but within colonies over sex ratios of investment in the production of new reproduction reproductives under certain condition it predicts that if you think that's terribly important the and also is predicted the lessening of aggression among competing reproductives within colonies when they are closely related that you could do I think intuitively it has also stimulated a large number of measurements of pedigreed of relatedness that would not have otherwise occurred it's enriched that field it has created a small industry of model building otherwise it has added very little if anything to the mainstream of social insect biology well I'll often be being erroneously in the popular literature represented as the mainstream in textbook and popular accounts so with that I realize that this has been something of a gauntlet thrown down and it has between call fatigue from those who whose work is you know built into the standard theory models and so on we shall see what happens over to you mark so it seems to me there's there's sort of couple ways in which we can sort of take on what you've just said one is an arrow an arrow position which is that the standard kind of kin selection models looking at the genes I've you are not going to be sufficient to account for you social insects so just for tonight's as we only have half an hour left and I want to maximize it let's give you that okay it seems to me though that in some of the writings especially some with David Sloan Wilson that you've written recently that you've gone way beyond that which is to say the views that were espoused in sociobiology we're not just about youth social insects it was about the use of the sort of the Hamiltonian Williams triggers views about looking at a level of a gene to account for social behavior writ large it's from those ideas that things like Perrin offspring conflict parental investment theory various aspects of mating decisions game theory reciprocal altruism spawn not just theoretical ideas but mountains and mountains of research on all sorts of organisms so as a student in those days to me the exciting part was all the work that could be done that had just begun to kind of crest in the in the 70s that now when I say be careful ecology sociology is dead because you know the theory was right so one reading of is that kin selection was right it was so right in fact there's not much left to do right that where people working in social behavior of drawn is integrate molecular phylogenies look at the neurobiology of decision making the economics decision making but the basic idea is about adaptation at lil gene were so powerful predictively you know dining lines crossing T's were done so can you can you deny that yes okay so what's wrong with the impure so well you know the Google word yes what you're talking about is actually modifications of traditional Darwinian evolutionary theory they did not really explain how prison okay say more oh they just didn't explain how let me give you an example me way okay let me back up for a minute boss Sherman's classic example of squirrel alarm calls the question is why would an individual give a costly alarm call drawing attention to itself risking opportunities for survival when that really goes against Darwinian thinking no it doesn't it what it is it's an example of group selection you know in the social insects we have innumerable cases of that just that kind of behavior it's group selection group meaning king group it means that alleles that cause the individual to respond this way are the cause the group to which it belongs to survive better than the solitaires and as a consequence the alley will spread let me go back for just a minute and clarify by saying that it's it's useful I think it's almost all inclusive now to recognize three forces of evolution let me back up before that and say let's make sure that we understand that the unit of selection is the gene this has caused innumerable confusion because with the forces of selection in multi-level selection the the gene can be selected say in a completely solitary cross-species strictly by what we call individual level selection or individual direct selection parent to offspring whether or not the parent takes hair they all spring and it might and it might use be very altruistic toward the offspring and so on that is Darwinian individual of selection the next level at the that's the target and you see is the individual in its offspring then the next level up and that's what we've been talking about the whole time here is the group and the G the aliens affect the evolution not just of individual selections of select properties but also group-wide properties these are the emergent properties which we now are beginning to understand pretty clearly in the social insect what they are and how they come about so part of the phenotype is for an emerging group social group with altruism is that ah the third possible selection force is a collateral kin selection in this you within a group you get together within a group you form an alliance with and become altruistic toward all those individuals that are most closely related to you the evidence is all in those social insects anyway is is running so strong against collateral Ken's selection and that's what most people think of you know when they think of the origin of sociality or biased toward the origin of how true istic sociality is that collateral kin selection but now even the major theorists who do mathematical modeling don't buy that anymore so now we're down as David Wilson and I showed too it seems that the best way to explain evolution and and we'll all be we're all using multi-level models is to recognize that the unit is a gene but the the target of evolution is at the elect the in multi-level is the individual and the properties the emergent properties of the group okay so let's let's go a little deeper on that and I want to shift this up in something slightly different reading reading the paper with David Sloan Wilson the quarterly review paper which is a much more large view of the one in the New Scientist what you say is the evidence for group selection comes largely from microbial organisms kind of social intro and social ignorance but if you look at the early writings in sociobiology by yourself and Williams and Hamilton and Traverse microorganisms we're definitely not the target of inquiry nor was that where the predictive power seemed to have come from him as a student it was wow so I can't I can't explain why this individual would do a lot goes but I thinking about kinship I can set up experiments so I have I put you next to kin and non-kin I should be gay different kinds of behavior so the prick that power was extraordinary now give me something back there for how to go forward with non you social insects and non microbial organisms that's going to change the face because that's what the argument seems to be in kalihi pilot it's a change in the zeitgeist that's going to really change how we do our work that I'm not seeing that you're what that I am not seeing I'm not seeing how the change in my total worldview in 1975 which got me to think of thousands of experiments how group selection is going to get me to do something similar or he's gotten any bites do something similar with non microbial organisms or insects okay well I'll tell you how it's going to what the hell is going to change things it's going to focus attention now by comparative studies and by perhaps the utilization of masses of information available on hunter-gatherer societies and the Paleo anthropological evidence and so on on the the free adaptation when we say why did human beings become what started the whole process the answer is going to lie if we ever have it in the discovery of the pre adaptation okay now the other thing that the new view provides an emphasis on that has left pretty much undone maybe in as I said I'm not prepared to go into human biology right now so fully although I think maybe the approach I'm talking about would be heuristic the second is what are the pressures what are the emergent properties and what were the selection pressures on them as humans evolved and I don't think we have that answer we're beginning to get it for the social insect but so what we're talking about really are two approaches to two perspectives that lead us into the study of the origin of altruism by that I mean collateral algorithm not to your offspring and I grant you immediately that tremendous advances have been made on studies of the differences toward immediate offspring and also torg you know cooperativeness among people but the explanations of them have been faulty of just what is happening that's what I'm suggesting you can come in through the individual the inclusive fitness come in there and the theory tells us about what conditions the Arts that's what it tries to address you know under what conditions the gene frequency in multi-level selection is moving positively or negatively and positively perhaps for the formation of a cooperative group but it tells us very little else only by distinguishing as the key players of the key forces individual level selection and that includes a lot of what you know you've done versus group level selection oh that we really begin to ask the questions that matter and can be addressed empirically okay so let's even though you're not yet ready to go to humans let's let's go to human tonight well David will for those and I had to go along with him enough to you know let him make that suggestion in the in the paper that maybe we better have a closer look at the same thing for humans yes so take means so take for example arguments resemble that Sarah her tea has made that one of the ways in which we evolved nucleus perhaps as kind of cooperative readers we're a kind of cooperative reader and in various areas of now behavioral economics where people have used kind of traditional economic games to look at how human strategize and make decision making some people have argued that whereas reciprocal autism in the trevor sense turns actually to be very rare in the animal kingdom very little good empirical evidence for a super cool altruism humans show in perhaps show it in a very unique way so people have argued that for example humans in a situation where they can observe two players playing a game where one is given the other one a bad deal and a third observer can punish an individual by incurring your personal costs that humans will do that they will do what people like ernst arab described as altruistic punishment I'll incur a personal costs to punish you even though in theory I will never know who you are yeah ok so that would be an argument people say for group level selection because there's really no kinship to be explained there it would yes but that's consistent with group selection but you could also imagine is very consistent with kin selection all right we need to disentangle them as we've done with a social insects so doing yeah so I mean one thing that seems to be elegant about these social insects stories is as you and Bert have not shown is that you can get you sociality evolving without strong kinship basis right I mean someone one argument in favor of group selection is that you don't need kinship to evolve eusociality not collateral and collateral against election obviously you need direct selection and you can explain it all by the emergent properties even at a very primitive level that come about by the appearance of an allyl that allows plasticity and that's the plastic building on progressive provisioning and then you have it all in human beings we you know I I thought you'd made important contributions yourself like this on the origins of altruism by group selection that is to say that maybe we are inherently moral just as we are inherited Lee a ferociously territorial and easily given to to group contest not because we are distinguishing Ken so much but because we are reacting to the ways in which our altruism of rose by group selection in other words the if you look at how groups are formed in humans and who can turn on whom and we see that the what the big question in human evolution now i'm outside my field but a big question is the way boundaries are defined so if if we recognize that in Nazi fascism the boundaries were done by some idea of geography and race in others it is done by a common religion and others it is done by the idea of a nation and so on and that once these group boundaries are formed then people can they tend within the groups to become quite altruistic cooperative toward each other and I shall it say at least very on guard and suspicious of other groups right down to the National Football League right so so I mean at that level mean what what kind of parallel can you draw here between then let's say view social insects and humans may for example one things ones could say is that it's only in these social insects and humans that you see large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals now as you mentioned i think in one of the articles with davis lon wilson is that humans readily form humans are animals rarely form ways of identifying and distinguishing among groups well it's sure that humans do that but animals don't do that so well and what humans seem to do relentlessly is create identity badges to identify who's in your own group and who's not near pretoria and those badges are imbued with powerful emotions and beliefs when you look at traditions and animals you don't see anything of the kind so a chimpanzee grooms this way in one population and grooms this way another population but nobody really cares right may if you do it this way it's fine but it's kind of like in Sweden changing which side of the lane you drive on as long as everybody agrees we're okay you know go go to Israel and tell them that they should now be Muslim that's not going to go over very well right okay so humans have created a way of marking badges of identity that isolate groups which can then create this very strong intergroup competition so void richerson have many models of cultural evolution where the identity badges and conformity are psychological ingredients that will propel this kind of between group effect what did the insects do oh it's this is fascinating oh they do it first of all they have policing and when you read the super organisms I think you will be astounded by how sophisticated it is but they police mainly workers who are trying to reproduce and this is not Ken related it is colony fitness-related if workers decide they're not going to work anymore and decide they're going to reproduce then they are reducing the colony workforce and they are also adding unneeded offspring which probably in most cases because this is an apple of diploid system going to produce males not more workers so they're very strict polluting techniques which are used it's not based on kinship although the studies as I just mentioned show that if you are closely related euro bill in some cases at least you'll be a little less care a little less severe about policing but that's a minor consideration policing is based upon the chemical evidences that the person is that the ad is turning or the ants we know best is turning into a reproducer and when it start turning into a reproducer we now know the neural in different pathways and we know what happens what exocrine organs now generate changes and we know what the changes are in this in the epic cuticle in the hydrocarbon mix which change and identify with a flick of the antenna on that individual and one that is trying to become a reproductive is a reproductive as a failing reproductive or as a good faithful worker and they pounce on them let me tell you how they I answer to it too so it's it's a very generalized highly genetic hard-wired way of responding ah the group what are the group labels I'm glad you brought that up certainly one of the real differences is the one you just mentioned which is you know the other as i said the arbitrariness almost of group boundaries and then the labels we use to to identify them reflecting probably an ancestry in which group versus group was the driving force of evolution that had to do with intelligence altruism heroism and so on but the ants identify a group in a very simple way and missing this I think forgetting are never knowing the literature is what through some of the mathematical theorists in off on the wrong track um they imprint on the first odors that they encounter in the first day or so of their life after they come out as an adult and it's possible in experiments to take ants of different species or even different Jenner and let them come out from the pupae at the same time and they form the colony and that's they fight any anything including their own real sisters that you put their them but there will be you know walking along it looks like the scene out of Star Wars they'll be walking along some monstrous large thing that would radically different feeding each other and so on because they went into that imprinting process very early no it's it's a powerful mechanism and it it portends or it suggests that there's a very powerful selection mechanism and that the targets of selection are these properties that allow identification of group which are in and also what to do about cheaters sony ask this one last question and open up with some questions here yeah I one of the one of the added ingredients this story that seems to me of interest in comparing the ants with humans is all the extra psychological gear that humans seem to have been had to evolve to get the kind of high level of cooperation we see which of course the ants didn't so one thing that seems to be necessary at least in some of the models that people like Rob void have written for the evolution of cooperation among non-relatives and large groups is that you not only need punishment sheeters ie your aunt policing you need punishment of those who don't punish cheaters so if I was a net and said you should be punishing that guy and you're not I'm going to come clobber you because that's why I avoid Free Riders okay so that's kind of punishment type of punishment the second thing which I noticed myself doing was we're talking is what seems to be very rampant in human psychology which that we tend to conform to others very very quickly and unconsciously this is what some social psychologists John Barr just talked about is the chameleon effect that was a nice article about him in your times a while ago where people bump into an experiment or unbeknownst to them in a hallway and in one case they're holding a hot cup of coffee in the case they're holding a cold cup of coffee and the expander simply says could you hold my coffee and then later on they're asked what they think about that person well if they were holding the hot cup of coffee I think the person is warmer and kinder and nicer nervous the cold cup of coffee their colder and not so nice so we readily kind of turn our colors like the individual rely can this create this kind of in-group bias ease and of course doctor advises so what's interesting to me about the ant human comparison is that ants of solve this problem without having to evolve all the psychological machinery it seems to have been necessary in the evolution of human large-scale cooperation where Ali because you have primates that are not doing anything near what we're doing at the level of cooperation then you have the ants who are doing it so you've got two different solutions there's only some kind of convergent evolution but with completely different mechanisms so mage is a lot last comment do you think there is some chance that because you've writing about consilium thinking about human cooperation of scale where we begin to integrate across these different level group selection different kinds of selection will actually help predict where to begin looking at some of us like a logically this was wire where I think biologists and like me anthropologist and like you will now begin to have a much more fruitful discussion and I as a preliminary answer I would put the reason for that difference is that ants are too stupid to do it any other way and that humans are the only species that ever managed it without having genuinely altruistic non reproducers we have found I think we that even those who are institutionally supposed to be non reproducers or often not and so I see this as a very fruitful way of proceeding forward I'm hoping that after this book is you know out I mean even before then I can start rethinking myself human behavior and I may be around two to talk to you thank you so let's take a few questions yeah 110 yeah now that's an interesting question not genetically but I it seems to me that what we need badly in our international political discourse is the recognition that hostility toward other groups you know this hair trigger response we all have the over react go to war destroy the infidel whatever it's what we tend to do is regard this as a kind of pathology in other words we're just not being human enough but but unfortunately we're being all to you so if we can find a way of coming to understand that and then this is where biology and anthropology need to work hard to try to present a more solid and convincing explanation of what humanity is and where it came from and why we behave and we're in a strange such a strange way we're a bizarre species then this information might be at least a moderating influence on religious extremism and political aggressiveness that would be my hope we always say that as Abba Eban once said that men at the time of the 1967 war that men will turn to reason when all else fails well we if we keep trying that other thing we're going to kill you kill ourselves so we have to turn to reason and it seems to me that what we're talking about tonight may or may not be quite correct we're in the early stages of developing some of these ideas and I wouldn't care I wouldn't want to come you know tell people to look at the ants because answer the most warlike genus idle species on earth ah but we're a little bit better self understanding might help us moderate our behavior that could be a start thank you for asking the question here in well hello Dan I don't know what are the kids but if there are under those what you're trying is hook those conditions the conditions where there are opportunities for the evolution developers are primarily ecological opportunities they all have to be in place and as you say there also has to be that's partly what I'm saying I'm also saying that the idea of for the social insects anyway and I think microorganisms is that the idea of collateral kins election which is a phenomenon that seemed to be the key as you will remember that idea is dead and that changes an awful lot what it says now is that we really need to focus on the other two countervailing selection pressures and that that analysis both in theory and also field and experimental work focused on them and the countervailing power of them is the best way to advance though co-pi ology true you can get from inclusive fitness and gene centered you know this is dynamics to an equivalence with the group selection and countervailing two forms of selection explanation focused on group selection ah but that's as the old southern him used to put it that's up the rough side of the mountain in other words that's an unproductive way to approach the whole problem and all that it's given us is an awful lot of confusing mathematics and changing of the definition of or making extremely abstract the definition of the rfactor you know and Hamilton equality and so on and it's been a terrible struggle for the mathematical theorists to continue down that route without just making it so abstract and remote that it has little heuristic so you're right yes in a sense I could say well now we have to turn to ecology but we must turn also to closer studies of exactly what is happening of a potentially selective genetically selective nature in the contest between group and individual level selection and what are the emergent traits in the group and so on all these few of these questions have been asked now that's the where we want to go thank you for the Irena suggestion and I probably the way we'll end up but gradually I what I want to see is the mathematicians who've been trying struggling with traditional gene centered selection models and those models are getting harder and harder to read and more and more boring I want to see them rather quietly leave their workstations and come over and start working on theory that is clearly more heuristic because we've got a wonderful world out there waiting the study in which now empirical information that we get from the field of what's going on can in the best tradition of the physical sciences be addressed by the kind of theory that will actually help the empirical part along let's take one more question in the middle there yeah phenomenon of algorithm well you know you're you're you're very right and I don't I don't think we've begun to address the question why couldn't the Neanderthals get it right they had you know they had they had plenty of time they had what a couple hundred thousand years and why did it take homo sapiens almost forever to get it right was there a genetic change that occurred what kind was it was it that some sort of rare cultural event that started it going these are hugely important questions I wouldn't even begin to guess but i'm pretty sure that will be addressing them more and more in the future well thank you so I think we'll end tonight will help but you'll come back and visit us next here and talk about humans okay

2021-01-12 01:03

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