Again- okay. But I don’t think I mentioned self domestication theory, Brian Hare or autism. Shouldn’t you be directing that to someone who did? I don’t see how it follows our interaction.
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If only Herbert Spencer was around to take your advice.
Also see: the numerous transphobic " scientific theories" that fail to stand up to scrutiny and peer review. It’s almost as if there are people who don’t want to be criticised. Imagine if they all started shouting “cancel culture! I’m being silenced!” whenever their ideas were shown to be false.
Oh, wait. That isn’t my imagination, it’s reality.
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Herbert Spencer the pacifist, or Herbert Spencer the jingoist?
Meh.
- The survival of the fittest.
=The survival of those best suited to survive.
=The standing of those left standing.
=Say what?
Sorry but I never really thought this statement particularly profound.
A good rundown of darwinian fitness can be found in this letter.
Hamiltonian inclusive fitness: a fitter fitness concept
n 1963–1964 W. D. Hamilton introduced the concept of inclusive fitness, the only significant elaboration of Darwinian fitness since the nineteenth century. I discuss the origin of the modern fitness concept, providing context for Hamilton’s discovery of inclusive fitness in relation to the puzzle of altruism. While fitness conceptually originates with Darwin, the term itself stems from Spencer and crystallized quantitatively in the early twentieth century. Hamiltonian inclusive fitness, with Price’s reformulation, provided the solution to Darwin’s ‘special difficulty’—the evolution of caste polymorphism and sterility in social insects. Hamilton further explored the roles of inclusive fitness and reciprocation to tackle Darwin’s other difficulty, the evolution of human altruism. The heuristically powerful inclusive fitness concept ramified over the past 50 years: the number and diversity of ‘offspring ideas’ that it has engendered render it a fitter fitness concept, one that Darwin would have appreciated.
Though some will argue that inclusive fitness is a needless complication that doesn’t have much explanatory power.
Eusociality, in which some individuals reduce their own lifetime reproductive potential to raise the offspring of others, underlies the most advanced forms of social organization and the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. For the past four decades kin selection theory, based on the concept of inclusive fitness, has been the major theoretical attempt to explain the evolution of eusociality. Here we show the limitations of this approach. We argue that standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach, allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations.
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Gould, SJ. Kropotkin was no crackpot, Natural History Magazine 1988;97:12–21
Still Peter Kropotkin is mentioned in just three pages of Structure of Evolutionary Theory (out of almost 1400)
p136
As with the next topic of creativity for natural selection (pp. 137-159), the issue of levels in selection has resounded through the entire history of evolutionary theory, and continues to set a major part of the agenda for modern debate—as it must, for the subject lies (with only a few others) at the very heart of Darwinian logic. Wallace never comprehended the question of levels at all, as he searched for adaptation wherever he could find it, oblivious to any problems raised by the locus of its action; Kropotkin, in asserting mutual aid, never grasped the problem either; Weismann shared Darwin’s insight about the problem’s fundamental nature, but also came to understand, after a long and explicit intellectual struggle with his own strong reluctance, that exclusivity must yield to hierarchy (pp. 197-224).
p(471)
The rule of biotic competition
Prince Peter Kropotkin, the charming Russian anarchist who spent 30 years in English exile, has generally been viewed as idiosyncratic and politically motivated in his famous attack on Darwinian competition, and his advocacy of cooperation as the norm of nature—Mutual Aid (1902). In fact, Kropotkin, who was well trained in biology, spoke for a Russian consensus in arguing that density-independent regulation by occasional, but severe, environmental stress will tend to encourage intraspecific cooperation as a mode of natural selection (Todes, 1988; Gould, 1991b). The harsh environments of the vast Russian steppes and tundras often elicited such a generalized belief; Kropotkin and colleagues had observed well in a local context, but had erred in overgeneralization. But Darwin and Wallace, schooled in the more stable and diversely populated tropics, may have made an equally parochial error in advocating such a dominant role for biotic struggle over limited resources in crowded space (Todes, 1988).
p705-706
- A standard mode of construing competition among organisms has beguiled us into thinking that interaction requires sympatry. As argued in Chapter 6 (pp. 470-477), Darwin strongly asserted the predominance of biotic over abiotic competition as the only promising path for a defense of progress in evolution. This preference has passed through the Victorian fascination with overt battle as a defining mode of competition, right into our present times, with continuing Tennysonian metaphors about “nature red in tooth and claw” (see Gould, 1992a), and newspaper stories about firms engaged in Darwinian struggles to the death as they vie directly for the allegiance of a limited population of consumers. (As I revised this chapter in the summer of 2000, a new magazine for “business evolving in the information age” made its debut under the name Darwin—also available on line at www.darwin-mag.com.)
706 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
But this focus on the biotic mode has always been indefensible as a claim for exclusivity, or even dominant relative frequency. In Darwin’s own time, Huxley ridiculed this notion as “the gladiatorial theory of existence,” while Kropotkin (1902) and others constructed alternatives based on cooperation in sympatry and the prevalence of abiotic competition in most environments (see Todes, 1988; Gould, 1991b). Darwin himself clearly favored an expansive concept of interaction with environments in natural selection—as when he insisted, in a famous passage (1859, p. 62), that “a plant on the edge of a desert” struggles for existence against the drought and other features of the physical environment just as surely as “two canine animals in a time of dearth” struggle more overtly for a limited supply of meat.
Right, and other things like (at a basic level) healthcare and nutrition that influence survival. This is the subject of This view of life, which introduces multilevel selection theory. The idea being that any imperfect intergenerational transfer of information is subject to evolutionary forces, which act at the level of the information transfer. It seems pretty self evident to me but upsets many biologists because they think it smells a bit too much like group selection (despite being entirely independent of genetic evolution).
So I bought and read the book. Some parts were interesting-- domestication of dogs was pretty strong, though I don’t know if it repeats material from their previous work. Some parts I wish there were more technical details. The politics section is not especially radical-- it condemns antifa for not being moderate. It advocates integration as the best strategy for fighting prejudice.
Williams syndrome is mentioned once in the book, and autism is mentioned in the title of a cited article.
The critique of Darwinian notions of fitness is somewhat limited-- though something called the “Ascent of Man” scale (a technique for measuring fascism) is frequently mentioned.
Interesting links – these topics are always fascinating.
I was being a little facetious before (decades of encountering common misconceptions in evolutionary theory has left me jaded and cynical) but my point about the phrase remains.
Reducing complex biology theories into pithy slogans that are accurate and useful is hard!
So much generalization, assumption, false dichotomy, and personification in attempts so far and a lot of authors seem to have expressed they would have approached book titles and biological nomenclature differently had they had known better.
I wonder if this is common in all sciences?
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Maybe we shouldn’t do that then? The fact is somethings are complicated, and they can’t be reduced…
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My sentiments exactly.
True that.
Reductionism and representation can be fun and useful at times (see science) but there’s dangers and limitations to that game too.
A couple of fav quotes from One Straw Revolution by scientist turned philosopher turned farmer Masobu Fukuoka:
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things -
We murder to dissect-Wordsworth
Nature as grasped by scientific knowledge, is a nature which has been destroyed, it is a ghost possessing a skeleton but no soul.
Nature as grasped by philosophical knowledge is a theory created out of human speculation, a ghost with a soul but no structure.
The face of nature is unknowable. Trying to capture the unknowable in theories and formalised doctrines is like trying to catch the wind in a butterfly net.
-Masanobu Fukuoka (translated from Japanese)
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