Altruism is a deep and complex phenomenon that is analysed by scholars of various disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, biology, evolutionary anthropology and experimental economics. Much confusion arises in current literature because the term altruism covers variable concepts and processes across disciplines. Here we investigate the sense given to altruism when used in different fields and argumentative contexts. We argue that four distinct but related concepts need to be distinguished: (a) psychological altruism , the genuine motivation to improve others’ interests and (...) welfare; (b) reproductive altruism , which involves increasing others’ chances of survival and reproduction at the actor’s expense; (c) behavioural altruism , which involves bearing some cost in the interest of others; and (d) preference altruism , which is a preference for others’ interests. We show how this conceptual clarification permits the identification of overstated claims that stem from an imprecise use of terminology. Distinguishing these four types of altruism will help to solve rhetorical conflicts that currently undermine the interdisciplinary debate about human altruism. (shrink)

This is a review article of Paul Cillier's 1999 book _Complexity and Postmodernism_. The review article is generally encouraging and constructive, although isolates a number of areas in need of clarification or development in Cillier's work. The volume of the _South African Journal of Philosophy_ in which the review article appeared also printed a response by Cilliers.

Although the theory of memetics appeared highly promising at the beginning, it is no longer considered a scientific theory among contemporary evolutionary scholars. This study aims to compare the genealogy of memetics with the historically more successful gene-culture coevolution theory. This comparison is made in order to determine the constraints that emerged during the internal development of the memetics theory that could bias memeticists to work on the ontology of meme units as opposed to hypotheses testing, which was adopted by (...) the gene-culture scholars. I trace this problem back to the diachronic development of memetics to its origin in the gene-centered anti-group-selectionist argument of George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins. The strict adoption of this argument predisposed memeticists with the a priori idea that there is no evolution without discrete units of selection, which in turn, made them dependent on the principal separation of biological and memetic fitness. This separation thus prevented memeticists from accepting an adaptationist view of culture which, on the contrary, allowed gene-culture theorists to attract more scientists to test the hypotheses, creating the historical success of the gene-culture coevolution theory. (shrink)

Science’s theory of evolution purports to explain life and its historical dynamics in a physics/material-only fashion. But this entails a broad reliance on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) for inheritance (and thus blueprints), which appears to be implausible for a number of unusual innate behaviors. The immediate unfolding challenge, though, is that the inheritance role is conveniently testable via searches for the DNA origins of a number of human behavioral and health tendencies, and despite enormous efforts those searches have thus far largely (...) failed (i.e., the “absolutely beyond belief” missing heritability problem). This existing case for DNA’s inadequacies will be briefly reviewed herein. The subsequent main analysis considers some big challenges facing DNA associated with some evolutionary dynamics—the acquisition of color vision in primates; instinctive behaviors including the egg-laying practices of emerald jewel wasps; kin selection; and our natural religious beliefs. Together these challenges strongly suggest that the acceptance of DNA as the (complete) language of life was premature. The haphazard and ambiguous nature of DNA/genetic specifications is very unlikely to have provided a vehicle for the exacting blueprints required for the many instinctive behaviors or capacities. Life appears to be more complex than biologists believe. Two possible alternative explanations are briefly considered in the wake of these discussions. Finally, does anyone—beginning with academics—care about this unfolding foundational failure? (shrink)

The case of the Arabian babblers is a controversial and significant one in ethology that troubles standard sociobiological theories of the evolution of behaviour. In this chapter from her book Naissance d'une théorie éthologique, Vinciane Despret examines the divergent models and methods of the scientists studying the babblers, their different epistemologies and ontologies that are only truly visible and understandable if one takes into account their particular ways of comporting themselves with the birds, and the babblers’ active role in writing (...) their own scripts. In so far as it resembles the immersive participation and individual biographing of anthropological and primatological methods, and pays skilful attention to the reasons for their actions, Zahavi's way of relating to and questioning the babblers gives them the opportunity to respond. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change (...) are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics. (shrink)

The field of information technology is broadened up to the domain of ‘learning’ systems and cybernetics. In covering this extension of the field due recourse is made to the epistemological basis of theory construction. When so comprehended, information technology becomes a philosophical inquiry on a variety of social, scientific and technological issues. A new idea that we refer to as neuro-cybernetics is born. The term neuro-cybernetics is used to delineate the epistemological field of system and cybernetic study. The above-mentioned phenomenological (...) or the epistemic model of a cybernetic and system type is applied to flood control problem in Bangladesh. This example presents an application of the cybernetic model to a physico-human problem. This is the nature of socio-scientific system. In it, organically unifying relations occur between the environment and the human world, with the objective of controlling the perennial problem of floods by using interactive factors. (shrink)

Starting from Denis Noble’s criticism on the modern synthesis, this article argues that the author’s presentation of the modern synthesis focusses too one-sidedly on the phenomenal characteristics of the living, whereby it is made easily suitable to his criticisms, but risks to remain trapped in a territory-struggle; this criticism lacks an explicit focus on logical matters, and more in particular on the synthetic principles required to situate the relevancy or irrelevancy of phenomenal characteristics beyond territory-struggles. A brief sketch of how (...) the principle of teleology calls for reflexivity allows us to reveal the tension in Noble’s account between, on the one hand, the way in which he stresses the importance of metaphors and language, and, on the other hand, the way in which he invokes empirical arguments to assess the illusory character of certain metaphors. (shrink)

Rational analysis (Anderson 1990, 1991a) is an empiricalprogram of attempting to explain why the cognitive system isadaptive, with respect to its goals and the structure of itsenvironment. We argue that rational analysis has two importantimplications for philosophical debate concerning rationality. First,rational analysis provides a model for the relationship betweenformal principles of rationality (such as probability or decisiontheory) and everyday rationality, in the sense of successfulthought and action in daily life. Second, applying the program ofrational analysis to research on human reasoning (...) leads to a radicalreinterpretation of empirical results which are typically viewed asdemonstrating human irrationality. (shrink)

References in Darwin’s Origin of Species to competition between units of selection at and above the level of individual organisms are enumerated. In many cases these references clearly speak of natural selection and do not support the view that Darwin thought selection only occurred at the level of the individual organism. Darwin did see organismal selection as the main process by which varieties were created but he also espoused what is here termed community and varietal selection. He saw no essential (...) difference between varieties and species and the references show that he also believed that selection could operate at the species level. (shrink)

Current empirical studies of moral behavior of healthcare professionals are almost entirely focused on self-reports, usually collected under the assumption that an ethical disposition characterizes individuals across various contexts. It is well known, however, that individuals adjust their behavior to what they see being done by those in their peer group. That presents a methodological challenge to traditional research within a community of peers because the behavior of each individual is both the result of norms and a contributor to the (...) norms of others. Computer simulations can be used to address this methodological challenge. A Markov replicator model that runs on an Excel spreadsheet was used to investigate a community with four agent types in the dental community: devious practitioners, ethical practitioners who avoid involvement in the poor ethics of others, ethical practitioners who accept it as part of their professional responsibility to challenge colleagues who act unprofessionally, and those who enforce ethical standards. A panel of leaders in the profession independently estimated parameters for the model and criteria for a possible distribution of agent types in the community. The simulation converged on distributions of the agent types that were very similar to the expectations of the panel. The simulation suggests the following characteristics of such moral communities: The structure of such communities is robust across a wide distribution. It appears that reduction in unethical behavior is more sensitive to the way ethical practitioners interact with each other than to sanctions the enforcement community imposes on unethical practitioners, and that large external interventions will be short lived. (shrink)

Here is a tribute to humanity. When under dictatorial rule, with free speech much constrained, a young intellectual mimed; he mimed in a public square. He mimed a protest speech, a speech without words. People drew round to watch and listen; to watch the expressive gestures, the flicker of tongue, the mouthing lips; to listen to – silence. The authorities also watched and listened, but did nothing.

Many now accept the thesis that norms are somehow constitutively involved in people's contentful intentional states. I distinguish three versions of this normative thesis that disagree about the type of norms constitutively involved. Are they objective norms of correctness, subjective norms of rationality, or intersubjective norms of social practices? I show the advantages of the third version, arguing that it improves upon the other two versions, as well as incorporating their principal insights. I then defend it against two serious challenges: (...) (1) If content is constituted by others' normative judgments, how can content be causally efficacious? (2) This account appears to make having contentful thoughts a matter of people having contentful thoughts about your thoughts. That appears to be viciously circular and so can't be naturalistic. (shrink)

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins (1976) proposed the existence of a unit of cultural inheritance that he called the meme. Some examples of memes are clothing fashions, tool designs, and architectural designs. Like genes, memes must share three properties: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. Longevity refers to the lifespan of a meme, fecundity to the rate of spread of a meme, and copying-fidelity to how accurately a meme is replicated. In other work (Hardisty and Cassill, in preparation), we hypothesized that successful (...) memes should share a fourth property with successful genes: memes should affect an organism’s lifetime fitness by improving survival or reproduction. Sterelny (2006) argued that high-fitness memes include tools or artifacts that are physically enduring, made from easy to find materials, and easy to reverse-engineer. Here, we argue that another way to link memes to individual fitness is to think of tools as part of an organism’s ecological niche. Each tool or artifact an organism makes that extends its evolutionary lifespan or increases its reproductive output is thus a meme that is directly contributing to that organism’s fitness. (shrink)

The question "what is (are) the unit(s) of selection" can be interpreted in three different ways. These interpretations are discussed and it is shown that they prompt different answers; such units are shown to be individuals in the context of the given interpretation. One of these interpretations is argued, by examples, not always to have an unambiguously correct answer. An alternative approach to this question is sketched.

The nature of moral values has occupied philosophers and educationalists for centuries and a variety of claims have been made about their origin and status. One tradition suggests they may be thoughts in the mind of God; another that they are eternal truths to be reached by rational reflection (much like the truths of mathematics) or alternatively through intuition; another that they are social conventions; and another (from the logical positivists) that they are not verifiable facts but simply the expression (...) of emotional likes and dislikes. Standard introductory texts (e.g., Bowie 2004; Vardy and Grosch 1999) on the subject of ethics rarely mention Darwin or Darwinism (Mepham 2005 is a useful exception) possibly mindful of the fact that the relationship of evolutionary biology to moral questions has had a troublesome history. The effect of this has been that whole generations of moral philosophers have given the biological sciences a wide berth and consequently often remain poorly informed about recent advances in evolutionary thought and the neurosciences. On the other hand, scientists have developed interesting models of the evolution of the moral sentiments and are using new imaging techniques to explore the centres of the brain associated with emotion and motivation, but many have been fearful of committing the naturalistic fallacy and so have steered clear of extrapolating their findings to ethical questions. No one after all wants to be seen to be committing an elementary logical blunder. But in the last 20 years, evolutionary biologists have regained the confidence to explore the implications of evolution for the study of ethics (de Waal 1996; Wilson 1998; Wright 1994; Greene 2003). This paper is designed to encourage those entrusted with the teaching of ethics to be open to the potential of Darwinism as a source of ideas on the origins and status of ethical thought and behaviour. It is also hoped that it will illustrate for science educators the enormous explanatory power inherent in Darwinian thought. (shrink)

During the last two decades, a new understanding of life emerged at the forefront of science.The development of complexity theory, technically known as nonlinear dynamics, has allowed scientists and mathematicians to model the complexities of living systems in new ways that have yielded many important discoveries. In this article, the author reviews the basic concepts, current achievements and status of complexity theory from the perspective of the new understanding of biological life. Models and theories discussed include the theory of dissipative (...) structures for nonlinear chemical systems, the application of bifurcation theory to genetic networks and cell differentiation, the study of the origin of biological form, a new approach to the understanding of developmental stability in embryology, and a model of the ‘origin of life’ and prebiotic evolution in tiny, membrane-bounded vesicles in the primeval oceans. (shrink)

Memes have been proposed to explain wide swathes of human culture and language use. I argue that what is really doing the explanatory work in many of these cases is a basic mechanism of information...

Two studies examined the link between social dominance and male waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). Groups of four men interacted in a leaderless group discussion. In both studies, men with higher WHRs (associated with current and long-term health status) were rated by other group members as behaving more leader-like when an observer was present, and rated themselves as being more assertive. In Study 2, men with higher WHRs were rated by independent observers as behaving more dominantly, but only when the evaluator was (...) present. These results are discussed in terms of evolutionary models of health, attraction, and intrasexual competition. (shrink)

Cultural evolution, producing group‐level adaptations, is more problematic than the cultural evolution of individually confirmable skills, but it probably has occurred. The “conformist transmission,” described by Boyd and Richerson (1985), leads local social units to become homogeneous in anadaptive, as well as adaptive, beliefs. The resulting intragroup homogeneity and inter‐group heterogeneity makes possible a cultural selection of adaptive group ideologies.All archaic urban, division‐of‐labor social organizations had to overcome aspects of human nature produced by biological evolution, due to the predicament of (...) genetic competition among the cooperators. The universal norms found in archaic moral systems are seen as curbs to this human nature, reinforced by beliefs in invisible sanction systems and rewarding and punishing afterlives (as in heaven or reincarnation). Perhaps the ubiquity of lavishly wasteful royal funerals is to be explained as contributing to this function. (shrink)

The conceptual foundations of Aldo Leopold's seminal land ethic are traceable through Darwin to the sentiment?based ethics of Hume. According to Hume, the moral sentiments are universal; and, according to Darwin, they were naturally selected in the intensely social matrix of human evolution. Hence they may provide a ?consensus of feeling?, functionally equivalent to the normative force of reason overriding inclination. But then ethics, allege K. S. Shrader?Frechette and W. Fox, is reduced to a description of human nature, and the (...) question remains open whether one really ought or ought not value, approve, or do this or that. The moral sentiments, however, are informed by culture. Specific ethical injunctions, even so, are not culturally relative, because cultural beliefs are amenable to cognitive criticism. New experience and new discoveries of science may bring to light hitherto unrecognized ?proper objects? of our moral sentiments. (shrink)

Pursuing a precise, focused train of thought requires cognitive effort. Even more effort is necessary when more alternatives need to be considered or when the imagined situation becomes more complex. Cognitive resources available to us limit the cognitive effort we can spend. In line with previous work, an information-theoretic, Bayesian brain approach to cognitive effort is pursued: to solve tasks in our environment, our brain needs to invest information, that is, negative entropy, to impose structure, or focus, away from a (...) uniform structure or other task-incompatible, latent structures. To get a more complete formalization of cognitive effort, a resourceful event-predictive inference model is introduced, which offers computational and algorithmic explanations about the latent structure of our generative models, the active inference dynamics that unfold within, and the cognitive effort required to steer the dynamics—to, for example, purposefully process sensory signals, decide on responses, and invoke their execution. REPI suggests that we invest cognitive resources to infer preparatory priors, activate responses, and anticipate action consequences. Due to our limited resources, though, the inference dynamics are prone to task-irrelevant distractions. For example, the task-irrelevant side of the imperative stimulus causes the Simon effect and, due to similar reasons, we fail to optimally switch between tasks. An actual model implementation simulates such task interactions and offers first estimates of the involved cognitive effort. The approach may be further studied and promises to offer deeper explanations about why we get quickly exhausted from multitasking, how we are influenced by irrelevant stimulus modalities, why we exhibit magnitude interference, and, during social interactions, why we often fail to take the perspective of others into account. (shrink)

In the past 150 years there have been many attempts to draw parallels between cultural and biological evolution. Most of these attempts were flawed due to lack of knowledge and false ideas about evolution. In recent decades these shortcomings have been cleared away, thus triggering a renewed interest in the subject. This paper offers a critical survey of the main issues and arguments in that discussion. The paper starts with an explication of the Darwinian algorithm of evolution. It is argued (...) that this ‘formula’ is substrate-neutral, which means that biological evolution might not be the only Darwinian process. Other dynamic systems could evolve as well provided that certain conditions are met. In the case of human culture this seems to be the case. The paper then focuses on the notion of niche construction. It is argued that niche construction plays a crucial role in human evolution because it has altered the sources of natural selection and thus the path of evolution. Next two approaches to cultural evolution are discussed: sociobiology and memetics. I will argue that both approaches have flaws because they either underestimate the influence of culture or they stretch analogies too far. Finally two common objections against the idea of cultural evolution are addressed: Lamarckian inheritance and the issue of guided variation. I will argue that although cultural evolution differs from biological evolution in several respects, these discrepancies do not jeopardize the claim that cultural evolution is essentially Darwinian. (shrink)