

"The descent of Edward Wilson" (by Richard Dawkins) - tokenadult
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/edward-wilson-social-conquest-earth-evolutionary-errors-origin-species/

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fchollet
If the original thesis managed to get published in Science, then it is indeed
scientifically acceptable (which is quite different from "accepted by the
scientific community"), and worthy of debate. The fact that it is receiving
strong criticism does not mean it should be discarded right away. It simply
means that it goes again the mainstream conceptions.

When you have studied evolution the computational way --like I did-- you have
an idea of how many hidden dynamics and synergies are going on. Evolution is
one incredibly complex phenomenon. Truth is we don't understand that well what
drives it --yet some of us seem supremely confident in the current mainstream
theory (which seems a little too simple to me to account for all I've been
witnessing).

In the case of Dawkins I suppose that confidence is not entirely unrelated to
the fact that he considerably helped to propel that theory to its current
acceptance level. Scientists should not cherish their own ideas _that_ much,
it's not healthy for scientific progress.

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themgt
Dawkins' decades-long reductionist insistence on the supremacy of genes is
incoherent. Organisms do not exist in a vacuum, they interact with other
organisms in their environment in myriad cooperative and competitive ways, and
that affects which organisms survive and reproduce and which do not

Beyond that, it's becoming increasingly clear the genes aren't some recipe for
making an organism, they're much more like a complicated self-referential
computer program for manipulating reality. This genetic reductionism is like
refusing to think or talk about computer software as anything but 1s and 0s

Wilson says "Riak is succeeding because of its straightforward scalability"
and Dawkins responds "show me which 1s and 0s make it scalable! I see no
scalable 1s or 0s. you're wrong"

~~~
zootar
> Organisms do not exist in a vacuum, they interact with other organisms in
> their environment in myriad cooperative and competitive ways, and that
> affects which organisms survive and reproduce and which do not

What's your point? In what way would Dawkins disagree with this statement?

> they're much more like a complicated self-referential computer program for
> manipulating reality

What does "manipulating reality" mean? What reality is being manipulated, if
not an organism's cells?

~~~
majmun
I think Dawkins believes that genes are being manipulated not cells. But
Dawkins disagrees that this genes (that cascadly manipulate reality) contain
information about reality beyond cells, like for example different groups
dynamics. While this other guy thinks the opposite. (Thats what i get from his
squirels example.

Dawkins has hypothesis that evolution is "blind" process, so if this is true
than it would probably collapse.

~~~
zootar
Is it your understanding that Dawkins and Wilson (or any other reputable
scientist) disagree about the information content of genes? If so, can you
provide a source for that?

~~~
majmun
1\. yes 2\. this article quote: "That’s differential group survival. But you’d
never say of any part of a squirrel that it evolved to promote the welfare of
the grey squirrel over the red. Wilson wouldn’t say anything so silly about
squirrel"

~~~
zootar
Are you claiming that Wilson _would_ in fact say something like that about
squirrels? If so, why? If not, then what scientist agrees with you if neither
Dawkins nor his rival Wilson?

More to the point, that quote doesn't refer to the information content of
genes at all. You'll certainly agree that it doesn't do so explicitly. Can you
find a quote that explicitly says that someone disagrees with Dawkins about
the information content of genes? Maybe in the Wikipedia articles for gene
selection and kin selection?

~~~
majmun
no i don't have explicit quote. but this is what it boils down to. What else
could it mean?

~~~
zootar
No, it doesn't boil down to that. They agree on what information can be
encoded genetically. They disagree on a detail of the mechanism of evolution:
To what extent does selection occur at various "levels" (gene, individual,
kin-group, species, etc)?

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madhadron
It is intriguing that not one comment (here or on the site itself) actually
addresses the technical content of the article. It's all foaming at the mouth
about Dawkins.

The name 'Nowak' rang a bell, so I dug through my citation manager. His papers
that I had stocked away are primarily evolutionary game theory in various
mathematical settings (static graphs, lattices, or simply aggregate,
unstructured populations). He dresses it up in various cute ways, but they're
still textbook exercises in game theory with no biological relevance.

The argument from Dawkins is really simple: there are heritable traits (call
them genes; forget DNA). We need a word besides just "trait" because of
transmission of recessive characteristics. Naively, you might say that if an
organism has more offspring on average than other organisms in the same
population, then there will be more copies of the gene.

That's true, but it's not an adequate accounting. The genes of a rabbit that
has fifty times as many babies, but they're all runts and die, the genes of
that rabbit are not going to show up in the population in the longterm. So you
have to talk about the expected long term frequency of the rabbit's genes in
the population. And once you realize that, you start looking for all the
copies of the gene. It doesn't matter whether the gene in a particular
organism is identical by descent or identical by allele. Thus your bookkeeping
has to include other paths of descent.

However, genes aren't traits (the whole recessive transmission thing). Thus
any genetically encoded strategy can't depend on the genes of any other
individuals, only on proxies. But proxies can be faked. Among proxies,
relatedness is 1) hard to fake and 2) universal among sexually reproducing
organisms. Thus it's a really important piece of bookkeeping to do when
calculating out expected frequencies of genes. And that's kin selection. Not
that it's the only proxy. It's just a really, really common one.

As for group vs kin selection, ideas of superorganisms, or such things, it's
all a red herring. In the end, what I actually need is a theory describing
masses of individual creatures out being born, eating, mating, and dying.
Doesn't matter what abstraction you want to couch the case in question in
initially, you eventually need to get back to that.

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lmm
>both phenomena are more parsimoniously treated as emergent manifestations of
individual phenotypes, and it is individual phenotypes that are directly
influenced by genes. You may choose to treat a dominance hierarchy as a group
phenotype if you insist, but it is better seen as emerging from each hen, say,
being genetically programmed to learn which other hens she can beat in a fight
and which normally beat her.

This sounds like an argument that applies equally well to the phenotypes of
organisms - you can treat them as entities in their own right, but they're
more truly seen as the result of particular gene expressions. Indeed, the end
of the article seems to be acknowledging that families have phenotypes;
there's no reason this shouldn't apply to groups.

~~~
sharkbot
You have skipped over the most important word in the quoted phrase:
'parsimoniously'.

Yes, there is no reason this shouldn't apply to groups, but is that the
simplest explanation that fits the facts? The more parsimonious explanation is
that genes (being the primary mechanism of propagating traits between
generations) are the unit of replication, and closely-related kin have much
higher gene similarity than arbitrarily-sized groups (due to the
mutation/genetic drift that occurs all the time). Natural selection can only
operate on replicators, and genetic replicators only create kin. These
replicators may influence group formation and their subsequent natural
selection, but is there any evidence for that hypothesis that isn't suitably
explained by kin selection?

~~~
lmm
>Natural selection can only operate on replicators, and genetic replicators
only create kin. These replicators may influence group formation and their
subsequent natural selection, but is there any evidence for that hypothesis
that isn't suitably explained by kin selection?

Territoriality and dominance hierarchies can't be explained in terms of kin
selection (except insofar as they can be explained in terms of individual
selection; my point is they have very little to do with kinship). Nevertheless
they are evidently selected for, and therefore it makes sense to regard them
as phenotypes.

~~~
sharkbot
> ...the end of the article seems to be acknowledging that families have
> phenotypes; there's no reason this shouldn't apply to groups.

You state that "there's no reason this shouldn't apply to groups", but that's
the critical question under investigation! Namely, do the behaviours (that
you're classifying as a part of the phenotype) provide evidence for group
selection, or are they adequately explained by kin/individual selection? It's
a given that group selection could occur, but where is the evidence that it
does occur?

~~~
lmm
It's not a question of "adequately explained by". All evolution is explained
by selection on genes, because that's what actually happens. There is no
evidence that individual selection occurs, no gene propagation that can't be
explained by gene selection and means we have to look to individual selection
for an explanation. The notion of an individual phenotype is useful because it
simplifies understanding why certain genes are more successful at replicating
themselves, and this statement is also true for the group behaviours we're
talking about.

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ngvrnd
Love how he spends a couple paragraphs arguing from authority, then says
"scientists don't like arguing from authority"

~~~
zootar
If anyone is reading this comment without having read the article, note that
he didn't do this inadvertently: "If it was authority that got the paper
published, there is poetic justice in deploying authority in reply."

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mattmanser
Funny how the comments rapidly descend into nonsense about memes. I wonder if
he sometimes regrets introducing that concept.

Interestingly the commentators seem to be some sort of anti-Dawkins cabal
which includes this rather charming fellow:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:NBeale>

[http://starcourse.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Richard%20Dawk...](http://starcourse.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Richard%20Dawkins)

Who obviously first started hating Dawkins because of his religious views. The
cynic in me wonders if it was a co-ordinated attack, especially the silly tit-
for-tat between him and the Munro guy. Given the frequency that he attacks him
on the blog you'd think that would be the first book on his night-time reading
list.

~~~
sageikosa
Dawkins doesn't have religious views. He has views on religions.

------
snowwrestler
I think Dawkins' narrow concept of "the gene" is outdated, and he does not
realize it because he is an old biologist, not an information scientist.

A "gene" was never a physical object, it is an information object--a mental
placeholder for the smallest chunk of genetic information that determines a
physical trait. But as our understanding of the nature of information has
advanced, it seem like the gene is ultimately an _obscuring_ concept, not a
revealing concept.

A "gene" is not a specific, standardized DNA sequence. As a concept it is not
physically specific enough to tie into the stack of rigorous scientific
knowledge that starts with quantum mechanics and ascends through physics, past
chemistry, to biology. As a result it cannot be treated wholly mathematically,
which leaves open the risk of storytelling vs. actual rigorous hypothesizing
and testing. The last few chapters of "The Selfish Gene" are filled with
fuzzy, untestable storytelling for instance.

On the other hand, as a unit of information it is far too specific and
limited, because of course a gene is not the only way that information can be
passed from one generation to the next. Information is also passed through
society and culture--and yes, that can lead directly to physical traits. For
instance my wife has pierced ears, and so does my mother-in-law. This hole in
the ear is a physically measurable trait of both those humans, and it was
caused by the direct passage of information from one generation to the next.
That chunk of information just does not happen to meet Dawkins' conception of
a "gene". But why does he get to define which information "really matters",
and which doesn't, when it comes to physical traits and survival of the
fittest?

When I read this book review I see Dawkins attempting to defend an early,
fuzzy conception of an information theory. Evolution is an _information_
process, and information is information is information, regardless of whether
it is coded in DNA, in societal behavior, or in the printed word. I have not
read the book in question, but Wilson might be better equipped to break down
old distinctions because of his focus on social behavior--which carries
information.

Ironically Dawkins started down this road with his idea of the "meme" but has
not been able to make the mental leap to a fully realized information-centric
vision of life and evolution.

Biologists are in for a hard time in the next few decades. A lot of fuzzy
concepts that they take for granted--like "gene"--are going to be broken down
and reformulated rigorously by mathematicians and computer scientists. It is
already well on its way--a friend who started his Ph.D. in evolutionary
biology in the lab now spends the vast majority of his time at his laptop,
coding hypotheses and tests against a deep data set of sequenced genomes.

Warning: the preceding has been the ravings of an interested amateur and
should not be considered Real Authoritative Science.

edit: fixes

~~~
madhadron
A gene was not conflated with a DNA locus until the 1960s. Classical genetics
treated 'gene' as any trait that could be stably isolated and transmitted in
breeding experiments.

I agree that a lot of the broken ideas are going to be revised, but in many
cases they're going to be revised back to the original meaning before someone
better at marketing than science forced a broken meaning on it.

