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Unit of Selection

I know text is an asynchronous medium and we wanna get away from “cult of the new” and give some older posts some love but even so, me replying to a post from the 1980s might be pushing it. 💁🏻‍♀️

It’s Stephen Jay Gould’s “Caring Groups and Selfish Genes”! 🥁

Group selection

The world of objects can be ordered into a hierarchy of ascending levels, box within box. [...] Life, too, operates at many levels, and each has its role in the evolutionary process. Consider three major levels: genes, organisms, and species.

That’s indeed a useful model, but in the end it’s just a model, one that, in this particular question might lead us far astray from the truth, as I’ll try to argue.

Mutation is the ultimate source of variation, and genes are the unit of variation. Individual organisms are the units of selection. But individuals do not evolve—they can only grow, reproduce, and die. Evolutionary change occurs in groups of interacting organisms; species are the unit of evolution. In short, as philosopher David Hull writes, genes mutate, individuals are selected, and species evolve.

So the question I wanna look at here is what the unit of selection is, if it’s only on the individual organism level or if something else is going on.

The identification of individuals as the unit of selection is a central theme in Darwin’s thought. Darwin contended that the exquisite balance of nature had no “higher” cause. Evolution does not recognize the “good of the ecosystem” or even the “good of the species.” Any harmony or stability is only an indirect result of individuals relentlessly pursuing their own self-interest—in modern parlance, getting more of their genes into future generations by greater reproductive success.

Yes, it’s good to maintain awareness of a lack of teleological “intention” around a lot of stuff that the creepy crawlies on this blue li’l marble are up to. It’s an emergent system. I just wanna go one step farther and note that unlike Conway's "Game of Life" model, the rules of our system can themselves change. We don't have to live in a Galt's Gulch of cruelty and robbery.

Individuals are the unit of selection; the “struggle for existence” is a matter among individuals.

Huh?! Three seconds ago we were saying it’s not teleological. A bee isn’t gonna start belting out “I will survive!”

You correctly pointed out that evolution does not recognize the “good of the ecosystem” or even the “good of the species”, but it doesn’t consider the “good of the individual” either.

Instead, evolutionary processes effect pressures on all kinds of units. People, animals, herds, hives, cities, corporations, clubs, tribes, bands, families, nations... There are also evolutionary processes on memes! Religions, editors, operating systems, game rule sets, political platforms, resource distribution protocols...

Evolution, probably better known as throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what’s best at sticking around and then recursing on that, isn’t limited to just “each animal for themselves”. Evolutionary processes are everywhere in complex iterative systems, not limited to just one level.

Nations, cities, clubs, corporations are all examples of evolutionary processes on a group level. Successful group concepts will not only thrive, they’ll be copied. If we aren’t aware of these emergent consequences of our protocols, we will get wrecked.

This is why we must overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that ruling that gave corporations some of the rights of people with none of the responsibilities. Corporations don’t have consciousnesses nor do they have the same repercussions as we do. They can be useful but we need to regulate them.

Scottish biologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards raised orthodox hackles fifteen years ago by arguing that groups, not individuals, are units of selection, at least for the evolution of social behavior.

Yes, it’s correct to observe that evolutionary processes effect changes on groups.

Some of the specific mechanics proposed by Wynne-Edwards (like epideictic displays to manage group density) ended up not being proven.

But remember, it’s not teleological. Just like most bees or algae don’t go “Hmm, what shall I do to survive today?”, neither do most hives. They don’t summon everyone for a big speech going “Listen up gang! We’re getting a li’l too dense over here, so fewer babies next spring”. That’s a straw reading of group selection pressures.

Siblings, on average, share half their genes. If you die to save three sibs, you pass on 150 percent of yourself through their reproduction. Again, you have acted for your own evolutionary benefit, if not for your corporeal continuity. Kin selection is a form of Darwinian individual selection. [...] Most evolutionists would now admit that group selection can occur in certain special situations (species made of many very discrete, socially cohesive groups in direct competition with each other). But they regard such situations as uncommon if only because discrete groups are often kin groups, leading to a preference for kin selection as an explanation for altruism within the group.

While that would explain racism, it’s wrong because it, again, overly ascribes intent to these li’l dandelions and fishes. Instead, reframing the evolutionary process as a mutually recursive eval/apply loop of iteration-via-survival, survival-via-iteration of pressures it becomes clearer to see that it works on all kinds of groups whose behaviors can evolve. That would explain not only racism but also sexism, nationalism, classism, ageism, all kind of dumb bullying.

Group selection is a real thing. It’s also why gay. Gay behavior has emerged in many species even though it’d make an orthodox darwinist panic; it would seem incomprehensible on an individual-survival-level. But a queer eye can be a vital thing for a society. Through a group selection perspective, it makes total sense. A diverse group has complementary strengths.

Now, as Gould himself points out in a previous essay (called Shades of Lamarck), we humans can hack this. There’s also memetic evolution. Our books, our ideologies, our git repos, our games and our laws—in short, our protocols.

If we wanna fix things and end racism and nationalism and corrupt corporate overreach, step one is to stay aware of how this stuff works.

This is also why climate change is such an incredible mindbomb to try to address. We’re set up to make most of our decisions on some sorta Dunbar tribe scale, but now we’ve got to work together since planets are the units of selection here. Planets that can get its shit together and not burn themselves will survive longer than those who do. (That's maybe not an evolutionary process in the strictest sense since there's no iterative copying of planetary setups, at least not yet. We're not living in a rimward Orion Arm galactic empire or a Bostrom sim multiverse, as at least as far as we know. So it's not a full eval/apply loop, just a survivability eval part, but... Uh, let's not mess this planet up, please!)

For some reason we managed to do it in the seventies and eighties with the energy crisis and freons, but since this affects every consumer, corporation, and politician, not just OPEC or a small handful of corporations in the refrigerator and hairspray business, there’s a lot more squabble. We’ve got to rise above, sooner rather than later.

My selfish gene it fills my spleen

The second half of Gould’s essay is better, arguing against Dawkin’s expression of Maynard Smith’s horrible “selfish gene” idea. Let me use language as an analogy to show how wack that idea is:

One of the things that make human language so cool compared to the language of many other animals like monkeys or fish is that it’s multilevel.

There are monkeys where one type of scream means “danger, snake!” and another means “danger, eagle!”

We humans go one step further since we have put our screams (our “phonemes”) together into words, whether the combinations and their order matters. “Eek” means something different than “key”, “wish” something different than “shiv”, “canal” something different than “Lacan”. “Forty-six” something different than “Sixty-four”.

Dogs can understand that level of human speech just fine. They are much better at it than most human kids are. They can understand “go in the other room and get the blue ball” way better than most human li’l rugrats can.

However, we’ve cranked it up a notch since we’ve then put our words together in combinations where their order matters.

“Before you get the red ball, get the blue ball” mean something different than “get the red ball before you get the blue ball” even though it has the same words, just in a different order. Even though the phrases “red ball” and “blue ball” are in the same order, things like the placement of “before” flips the meaning entirely.

(Yeah, yeah, Latin and Finnish and other case-heavy languages work a li’l differently than that but that’s a story for another day.)

Most dogs can’t understand that at all while most human kids understand it just fine. This is called “syntax”—the order of words mattering. Once you take syntax into account, that’s where humans are a li’l special.

And then of course that can be recursed upon further. Watching Memento in the chronological cut is a different experience than watching it the way it was originally released.

(It’s not proven whether humans are the only animals with this kind of multilevel language. There’s still plenty to learn about ant scent trails or whale songs or even our favorites: the li’l chirping birds♥︎.)

There’s evolutionary pressures on ideas, on slogans, on books, on political platforms. The evolutionary pressure on individual letters is way lower by comparison. Yeah, yeah, I might slightly favor words with my favorite letters like “s” and get a li’l turned off by the guttural IPA [χ] sound of Loch and Bach, but not to the extent that I’m throwing out an entire idea because of that. But, then again, “why not both?” Evolutionary pressures happen on all kinds of levels. To the extent that selfish gene idea tries to reduce it to only or even primarily genes, that’s wack.

I get the idea was to promote kin selection, to be like “OK here’s why we help each other; it’s because our genes recognize themselves in other people, not literally because genes don’t have eyes, but various processes have emerged that rewards and affords such help”, but on the surface level it still feels like an artifact of the hyper-individualist era. Forget Galt’s Gulch, it’s not even enough with “every man is an island”, now my left arm is trying to stage a coup against my right foot!

Conway’s Game of Life - Wikipedia

When they tried to say that egoism was good

Dangerous Protocols Web - Summer of Protocols

Dunbar’s number - Wikipedia