I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...) argue that the fine-grained causal relations that could constitute membership in a biological population are huge in number and many are manifested by degree, and thus we can construe population membership as being defined by massively multidimensional constructs, the differences between which are largely arbitrary. I end by showing that positions in two recent debates in theoretical biology depend on a view of biological populations at odds with the pluralism defended here. (shrink)

Do multi-level selection explanations of the evolution of social traits deepen the understanding provided by single-level explanations? Central to the former is a mathematical theorem, the multi-level Price decomposition. I build a framework through which to understand the explanatory role of such non-empirical decompositions in scientific practice. Applying this general framework to the present case places two tasks on the agenda. The first task is to distinguish the various ways of suppressing within-collective variation in fitness, and moreover to evaluate their (...) biological interest. I distinguish four such ways: increasing retaliatory capacity, homogenising assortment, and collapsing either fitness structure or character distribution to a mean value. The second task is to discover whether the third term of the Price decomposition measures the effect of any of these hypothetical interventions. On this basis I argue that the multi-level Price decomposition has explanatory value primarily when the sharing-out of collective resources is `subtractable'. Thus its value is more circumscribed than its champions Sober and Wilson (1998) suppose. (shrink)

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...) grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists must understand not just what the mind does, but how it does what it does. In this paper, I consider four aspects of cognitive architecture: how the mind develops, the extent to which it is or is not modular, the extent to which it is or is not optimal, and the extent to which it should or should not be considered a symbol‐manipulating device (as opposed to, say, an eliminative connectionist network). In each case, I argue that insights (...) from developmental and evolutionary biology can lead to substantive and important compromises in historically vexed debates. (shrink)

This paper addresses methodological and metatheoretical aspects of the ongoing debate over the adaptive significance of Tibetan polyandry. Methodological contributions include a means of estimating relatedness of fraternal co-husbands given multigenerational polyandry, and use of Hamilton’s rule and a member-joiner model to specify how inclusive fitness gains of co-husbands may vary according to seniority, opportunity costs, and group size. These methods are applied to various data sets, particularly that of Crook and Crook (1988). The metatheoretical discussion pivots on the critique (...) by evolutionary psychologists of adaptationist accounts of polyandry. Contrary to this critique, I argue that valid adaptationist explanations of such practices do not necessitate cognitive mechanisms evolved specifically to produce polyandry, nor that there must have been exact equivalents of Tibetan agricultural estates and social institutions in human evolutionary history. Specific issues raised when one posits either kin selection or cultural evolution to explain the adaptive features of Tibetan polyandry are also discussed. (shrink)

Niche construction theory (NCT) is distinctive for being explicit in recognizing environmental modification by organisms—niche construction—and its legacy—ecological inheritance—to be evolutionary processes in their own right. Humans are widely regarded as champion niche constructors, largely as a direct result of our capacity for the cultural transmission of knowledge and its expression in human behavior, engineering, and technology. This raises the question of how human ecological inheritance relates to human cultural inheritance. If NCT is to provide a conceptual framework for the (...) human sciences, then it is important that the relationship between these two legacies is clear. We suggest that cultural processes and cultural inheritance can be viewed as the primary means by which humans engage in the universal process of niche construction. (shrink)

In an incendiary 2010 Nature article, M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson present a savage critique of the best-known and most widely used framework for the study of social evolution, W. D. Hamilton’s theory of kin selection. More than a hundred biologists have since rallied to the theory’s defence, but Nowak et al. maintain that their arguments ‘stand unrefuted’. Here I consider the most contentious claim Nowak et al. defend: that Hamilton’s rule, the core explanatory principle (...) of kin selection theory, ‘almost never holds’. I first distinguish two versions of Hamilton’s rule in contemporary theory: a special version (HRS) that requires restrictive assumptions, and a general version (HRG) that does not. I then show that Nowak et al. are most charitably construed as arguing that HRS almost never holds, while HRG buys its generality at the expense of explanatory power. While their arguments against HRS are fairly uncontroversial, their arguments against HRG are more contentious, yet these have been largely overlooked in the ensuing furore. I consider the arguments for and against the explanatory value of HRG, with a view to assessing what exactly is at stake in the debate. I suggest that the debate hinges on issues concerning the causal interpretability of regression coefficients, and concerning the explanatory function Hamilton’s rule is intended to serve. (shrink)

Recent theoretical work has identified a tightly-constrained sense in which genes carry representational content. Representational properties of the genome are founded in the transmission of DNA over phylogenetic time and its role in natural selection. However, genetic representation is not just relevant to questions of selection and evolution. This paper goes beyond existing treatments and argues for the heterodox view that information generated by a process of selection over phylogenetic time can be read in ontogenetic time, in the course of (...) individual development. Recent results in evolutionary biology, drawn both from modelling work, and from experimental and observational data, support a role for genetic representation in explaining individual ontogeny: both genetic representations and environmental information are read by the mechanisms of development, in an individual, so as to lead to adaptive phenotypes. Furthermore, in some cases there appears to have been selection between individuals that rely to different degrees on the two sources of information. Thus, the theory of representation in inheritance systems like the genome is much more than just a coherent reconstruction of information talk in biology. Genetic representation is a property with considerable explanatory utility. (shrink)

The dissertation criticizes two analogical applications of Darwinism to the spheres of mind and culture: the Darwinian approach to creativity and memetics. These theories rely on three basic analogies: the ontological analogy states that the basic ontological units of culture are so-called memes, which are replicators like genes; the origination analogy states that novelty in human creativity emerges in a "blind" Darwinian manner; and the explanatory units of selection analogy states that memes are "egoistic" and that they can spread independently (...) of our mind. The detailed philosophical analysis offered in the dissertation shows that these three analogies rely on either wrong or trivial statements: they provide either wrong or no new descriptions or explanations of the phenomena at hand. In Chapter One, I introduce the diverse ways, in which contemporary Darwinism is used today outside of evolutionary biology. Chapter Two explains what it means to claim that something evolves in a Darwinian manner. Chapter Three to Five address each of the three analogies separately. Darwinism applied to culture and mind, at least in the way discussed in this study, is not a dangerous idea. It leads either to wrong claims or to a re-telling in Darwinian terms of what we have already known. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that sensory exploitation, a model from sexual selection theory, deserves more attention in evolutionary thinking about art than it has up until now. We base our argument on the observation that in the past sensory exploitation may have been underestimated in sexual selection theory but that it is now winning field. Likewise, we expect sensory exploitation can play a more substantial role in modeling the evolution of art behavior. Darwin's theory of sexual selection provides a (...) mechanistic basis to explain the evolution of male display traits. This mechanistic approach has proven useful to developing hypotheses about the evolution of human art. Both Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Miller (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001) have applied an indirect-benefit model from sexual selection to the evolution of art behavior. We argue that the mechanistic possibilities sensory exploitation has to offer as a model have remained underexplored so far, so we propose a concept based upon it. From the sensory exploitation perspective it follows that exaptive exploitation of psychosensory biases is a primary force in the evolution of art production (notice that the use of a model from sexual selection does not imply art evolved as a sexual display - we only use it for its mechanism) and that the indirect-benefit model only provides secondary forces. Thus, sensory exploitation may operate alone under some conditions but usually secondary processes as a result of indirect benefits are expected to kick in. The concept of sensory exploitation will need to play a central role in articulating all of the existing hypotheses about art. (shrink)

There is a tendency in both scientific and humanistic disciplines to think of biological evolution in humans as significantly impeded if not completely overwhelmed by the robust cultural and technological capabilities of the species. The aim of this article is to make sense of and evaluate this claim. In Section 2 , I flesh out the argument that humans are ‘insulated’ from ordinary evolutionary mechanisms in terms of our contemporary biological understandings of phenotypic plasticity, niche construction, and cultural transmission. In (...) Section 3 , I consider two obvious objections to the above argument based on the growing literatures related to gene-culture coevolution and recent positive selection on the human genome, as well as a pair of less common objections relating to the connection between plasticity, population size and evolvability. In Section 4 , I argue that both the ‘human evolutionary stasis argument’ and its various detractor theories are premised on a fundamental conceptual flaw: they take evolutionary stasis for granted, since they fail to conceive of stabilizing selection as a type of evolution and drift as a universal tendency that dominates in the absence of selection. Without the continued operation of natural selection, the very properties that are purported to reduce the evolutionary response to selection in humans would themselves drift into non-functionality. I conclude that properly conceived, biological evolution is a permanent and ineradicable fixture of any species, including Homo sapiens. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and the replication and spread of memes. I further argue that both cultural group selection and the vertical flow of cultural information have been (...) important. More conjecturally, I identify a potential role for meme-based cultural evolution in the explanation of the ‘human revolution’ of the last 100 000 or so years, and defuse an important objection to that explanation. Introduction Cultural groups The cultural invention of adaptive complexes Niche construction models Dual inheritance Memes Memes or minds? Conclusion. (shrink)

Hierarchical expansions of the theory of natural selection exist in two distinct bodies of thought in evolutionary biology, the group selection and the species selection traditions. Both traditions share the point of view that the principles of natural selection apply at levels of biological organization above the level of the individual organism. This leads them both to considermultilevel selection situations, where selection is occurring simultaneously at more than one level. Impeding unification of the theoretical approaches of the multilevel selection traditions (...) are the different goals of investigators in the different subdisciplines and the different types of data potentially available for analysis. We identify two alternative approaches to multilevel situations, which we termmultilevel selection [1] andmultilevel selection [2]. Of interest in the former case are the effects of group membership onindividual fitnesses, and in the latter the tendencies for the groups themselves to go extinct or to found new groups (i.e., group fitnesses). We argue that: neither represents the entire multilevel selection process; both are aspects of any multilevel selection situation; and both are legitimate approaches, suitable for answering different questions. Using this formalism, we show that: multilevel selection [2] does not require emergent group properties in order to provide an explanatory mechanism of evolutionary change; multilevel selection [1] is usually more appropriate for neontological group selection studies; and species selection is most fruitfully considered from the point of view of multilevel selection [2]. Finally we argue that the effect hypothesis of macroevolution, requiring, in selection among species, both the absence of group effects on organismic fitness (multilevel selection [1]), and the direct determination of species fitnesses by those of organisms, is untestable with paleontological data. Furthermore, the conditions for the effect hypothesis to hold are extremely restrictive and unlikely to apply to the vast majority of situations encountered in nature. (shrink)

Memes are an idea whose time has come, again, and again, and again, but which has never really made it beyond metaphor. Anthropologist Robert Aunger’s book 'The Electric Meme' is a new attempt to take it to the next stage, setting up a research program with proper models and theoretical entities. He succeeds partially, with some contributions to the logic of replication, but in the end, his proposal for the substrate of memes is a non-solution to a central problem of (...) memetics. (shrink)

The three main naturalistic approaches to culture the Epidemiological account (Sperber 1996; Atran 1990, 2002; Sperber and Claidière 2006), Memetics (Dawkins 2006 [1976], Dennett 1996) and the Standard Evolutionary approach (Boyd and Richerson 1988 [1985], Mesoudi 2011) reduce it to a set of representational items that are shared by individuals in a population by non-genetic means. Thats why I see those three approaches as versions of what I call the Itemic View of Culture (IVC). I argue that, by that reduction, (...) the IVC is missing a key element in the subject matter of culture: an element that is best captured by the notion of constraints (Barwise and Perry 1983). I call my approach the Constraint-Based Approach (CBA), and I conceive it as an account that situates conventional constraints, and the simple attunement to those constraints by individuals, as the fundamental building blocks of culture. On their grounds, other kinds of attunements can be distinguished, and a natural account of explicit representational items and our cultural knowledge of them can be built. In this sense, the CBA is a necessary fundamental requirement for the IVC. (shrink)

Philosophical questions can often be answered using evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Of course, one needs a sound epistemology and philosophy os science to do so. Phenomenology and hermeneutics offer no escape route, however, because they are based on a wrong model of science. Evolutionary biology can explain teleology, the organization of nature, altruïsm, morality, and even our quest for meaning.

Various results show the ‘formal equivalence’ of kin and group selectionist methodologies, but this does not preclude there being a real and useful distinction between kin and group selection processes. I distinguish individual- and population-centred approaches to drawing such a distinction, and I proceed to develop the latter. On the account I advance, the differences between kin and group selection are differences of degree in the structural properties of populations. A spatial metaphor provides a useful framework for thinking about these (...) differences: kin and group selection may be conceptualized as large, overlapping regions of K - G space. I then consider some implications of the account, defend it from possible objections, and further argue that the structural features characteristic of both kin and group selection may recur at multiple levels of biological organization. (shrink)

This article argues that conscious attention exists not so much for selecting an immediate action as for using the current task to focus specialized learning for the action-selection mechanism and predictive models on tasks and environmental contingencies likely to affect the conscious agent. It is perfectly possible to build this sort of a system into machine intelligence, but it would not be strictly necessary unless the intelligence needs to learn and is resource-bounded with respect to the rate of learning versus (...) the rate of relevant environmental change. Support for this theory is drawn from scientific research and AI simulations. Consequences are discussed with respect to self-consciousness and ethical obligations to and for AI. (shrink)

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

This article on the epistemology of computational models stems from an analysis of the Gaia hypothesis (GH). It begins with James Kirchner’s criticisms of the central computational model of GH: Daisyworld. Among other things, the model has been criticized for being too abstract, describing fictional entities (fictive daisies on an imaginary planet) and trying to answer counterfactual (what-if) questions (how would a planet look like if life had no influence on it?). For these reasons the model has been considered not (...) testable and therefore not legitimate in science, and in any case not very interesting since it explores non actual issues. This criticism implicitly assumes that science should only be involved in the making of models that are ‘‘actual’’ (by opposition to what-if) and ‘‘specific’’ (by opposition to abstract). I challenge both of these criticisms in this article. First by showing that although the testability—understood as the comparison of model output with empirical data—is an important procedure for explanatory models, there are plenty of models that are not testable. The fact that these are not testable (in this restricted sense) has nothing to do with their being ‘‘abstract’’ or ‘‘what-if’’ but with their being predictive models. Secondly, I argue that ‘‘abstract’’ and ‘‘what-if’’ models aim at (respectable) epistemic purposes distinct from those pursued by ‘‘actual and specific models’’. Abstract models are used to propose how-possibly explanation or to pursue theorizing. What-if models are used to attribute causal or explanatory power to a variable of interest. The fact that they aim at different epistemic goals entails that it may not be accurate to consider the choice between different kinds of model as a ‘‘strategy‘‘. (shrink)

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance ofHomo sapiensas an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (...) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology's central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change. (shrink)

" The best way to predict the future is to invent it. —Alan Kay _1_ It is obvious that there are patterns of cultural change—evolution in the neutral sense—and any theory of cultural change worth more than a moment's consideration will have to be Darwinian in the minimal sense of being consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection of Homo sapiens. —Daniel Dennett _2_ The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. —William Gibson _3_ It is (...) the magician's wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases. —Charles Darwin commenting on the power of artificial selection _4_ " This article introduces an applied Theory of Evolution of Artificial Systems, called Directed Evolution. The theory is grounded in fifty years of research on Inventive Engineering known as TRIZ, which started in the former Soviet Union by G. Altshuller and continues today. The theory has generated a set of Patterns and Lines of Evolution that represent a compilation of trends that document strong, historically recurring tendencies in the development of manmade systems in general and technological systems in particular. Directed Evolution is the systematic applied-oriented process for “predicting” future generations of a system by inventing them along these evolutionary patterns. The current article introduces the theory, reflects on its basic underlying logic, and provides a broad historical context and intellectual justification for such an effort. It shows that the quest of DE theory and practice falls well within the boundaries of past pursuits to identify evolutionary patterns of complex systems and to use these patterns to control and manipulate possible futures of artificial systems. (shrink)

Enzyme directed genetic mechanisms causing random DNA sequence alterations are ubiquitous in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. A number of molecular geneticist have invoked adaptation through natural selection to account for this fact, however, alternative explanations have also flourished. The population geneticist G.C. Williams has dismissed the possibility of selection for mutator activity on a priori grounds. In this paper, I attempt a refutation of Williams' argument. In addition, I discuss some conceptual problems related to recent claims made by microbiologists on (...) the adaptiveness of molecular variety generators in the evolution of prokaryotes. A distinction is proposed between selection for mutations caused by a mutator activity and selection for the mutator activity proper. The latter requires a concept of fitness different from the one commonly used in microbiology. (shrink)

Altruistic behavior is often regarded as sociobiology''s most central theoretical problem, but is it? Altruism in biology, bioaltruism, has many meanings, which can be grouped into two categories. The first I will callcommon bioaltruism. It is primarily of ethological relevance. The second,evolutionary bioaltruism, is a special category in evolutionary respects in that it may indeed pose a problem for evolutionary theory. These categories are logically independent. Moreover, both of them are logically different from altruism in its everyday psychological or moral (...) sense. Sociobiological examples of bioaltruistic behavior concern bioaltruism in the first sense only, so the theoretical problem altruism is supposed to pose, is indeed nothing but a theoretical problem and the bioaltruism that actually occurs has no evolutionary relevance. Nevertheless, evolutionary theory is relevant to our understanding of the possibility of common bioaltruism, and that possibility — even though bioaltruism is conceptually different from ethical altruism — is relevant for ethicists: it sheds light on what we can ask people to do or not to do. (shrink)