{"id":2928,"date":"2012-03-13T21:02:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T02:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2928"},"modified":"2012-03-13T21:05:05","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T02:05:05","slug":"david-sloan-wilson-richard-dawkins-and-group-selection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2012\/03\/13\/human-nature\/david-sloan-wilson-richard-dawkins-and-group-selection\/","title":{"rendered":"David Sloan Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Group Selection"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting skirmish has been going on recently between noted proponent of the theory of group selection David Sloan Wilson and Jerry Coyne, b\u00eate noir<\/em> of the Intelligent Designers.\u00a0 It started when Wilson posted an article on his website entitled When Richard Dawkins is not an Evolutionist<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 It appears that, in Wilson’s opinion, Dawkins wanders from the straight and narrow path of a true evolutionist 1) In his discussion of religion in The God Delusion, and 2) In his opinion of the role of selfish genes in relation to group theory.<\/p>\n

Jerry Coyne immediately fired back with a\u00a0somewhat overwrought\u00a0rebuttal <\/a>on his blog.\u00a0 I won’t go into the details of the controversy here, and, for the record, I agree with Coyne in most of his reply, except for his tendency to “soften” Dawkins’ comments about group selection in The Selfish Gene<\/em>.\u00a0 Here’s what Coyne wrote:<\/p>\n

Yes, genes are<\/em> replicators, but no, Dawkins never claimed that their status as selfish replicators somehow rules out group selection. What he claimed, in The Selfish Gene<\/em> and The Extended Phenotype<\/em>, was that successful replicators must share the same vehicle if they are to be successful in the future. Usually that vehicle is the body of an individual organism, which is used by the replicators to propagate themselves. Dawkins\u2019s argument against the efficacy of group selection was that this form of selection is usually unsuccessful because groups are vulnerable to subversion from within by those selfish replicators.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Evidently Coyne didn’t read The Selfish Gene<\/em> very closely, or he’s been unduly influenced by Dawkins’ recent rowback in the matter of group selection.\u00a0 Here, Wilson is right.\u00a0 In fact, Dawkins rejected group selection root and branch.\u00a0 For example, quoting from the book in the context of a discussion of the importance of selfishness and altruism,<\/p>\n

“These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz’s “On Aggression,” Ardrey’s “The Social Contract,” and Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s “Love and Hate.”\u00a0 The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong.\u00a0 They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works.\u00a0 They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene).”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that the\u00a0bald statement that the theory of group selection is “totally and utterly wrong” is somehow compatible with\u00a0forthright acceptance of group selection, albeit in limited circumstances.\u00a0 If that’s what Dawkins meant to say, he certainly had a roundabout way of doing it.\u00a0 This particular quote has an interesting history, by the way.\u00a0 It was used by Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate<\/em>, to dismiss the entire intellectual legacy of Robert Ardrey root and branch, in a single sentence, even though group selection was never more than a sidelight in his work.\u00a0 In other words, Pinker was capable of writing a thick tome purporting to be about the Blank Slate while managing to ignore the role of the most significant opponent of Blank Slate orthodoxy in its heyday in all but a single sentence.\u00a0 Certainly a virtuoso performance.<\/p>\n

And how do I know that Ardrey was the Blank Slate’s most significant opponent?\u00a0 As readers of my earlier posts are aware, you certainly don’t have to take my word for it.\u00a0 It’s all nicely documented in an invaluable little book published in 1968 by the Blank Slaters themselves, entitled Man and Aggression<\/em>, edited by Ashley Montagu, and still available at Amazon for about a buck.\u00a0 For example, from an essay in the book by Geoffrey Gorer,<\/p>\n

Almost without question, Robert Ardrey is today the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature, and the most skilled populariser or the findings of paleo-anthropologists, ethologists, and biological experimenters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, today Ardrey, is an unperson, thanks in part, as noted above, to Dawkins’ hard over position on group selection.\u00a0 After all, Ardrey was a mere playwright, and to admit the crucial role he played would be to offend the academic gravitas of any number of worthy professors emeritus who really had been “totally and utterly wrong” about human nature when Ardrey was right.<\/p>\n

But I digress.\u00a0 Allow me to quote a couple of other passages from “The Selfish Gene” to clear up any remaining doubt about Dawkins’ unequivocal rejection of group selection in that book:<\/p>\n

To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first.\u00a0 Therefore the world becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals.\u00a0 This is the theory of ‘group selection’, long assumed to be true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory, brought out into the open in a famous book by V. C. Wynne-Edwards, and popularized by Robert Ardrey in the Social Contract.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not much wiggle room there, either, is there, unless Dawkins meant to inform his readers that he is not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory?\u00a0 Here’s another remarkable example:<\/p>\n

Robert Ardrey, in ‘The Social Contract,’ used the group-selection theory to account for the whole of social order in general.\u00a0 He clearly sees man as a species that has strayed from the path of animal righteousness.\u00a0 Ardrey at least did his homework.\u00a0 His decision to disagree with orthodox theory was a conscious one, and for this he deserves credit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here I really don’t know what on earth Dawkins was talking about.\u00a0 He was either deliberately lying, or he never actually read “The Social Contract.”\u00a0 The idea that Ardrey used that book, “to account for the whole of social order in general” is the purest fantasy.<\/p>\n

In a word, anyone who takes the trouble to read The Selfish Gene<\/em> can see that Coyne is on very thin ice in his attempts to dumb down Dawkins’ position on group selection when he wrote the book.\u00a0\u00a0By all means, check all the references to group selection in the index if you\u00a0like, but you’ll find\u00a0it’s not really\u00a0necessary to read past the first chapter to see that Wilson is\u00a0entirely justified in claiming that, “A major objective of The Selfish Gene was to argue against a theory known as group selection.”<\/p>\n

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An interesting skirmish has been going on recently between noted proponent of the theory of group selection David Sloan Wilson and Jerry Coyne, b\u00eate noir of the Intelligent Designers.\u00a0 It started when Wilson posted an article on his website entitled When Richard Dawkins is not an Evolutionist.\u00a0 It appears that, in Wilson’s opinion, Dawkins wanders … Continue reading “David Sloan Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Group Selection”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[48,105,109,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-group-selection","category-human-nature"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Le","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2928"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2931,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions\/2931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}