Richard Dawkins interviews Steven Pinker
youtube.com
youtube.com
The other problem is that I really get the idea that Dawkins aren't really having a discussion as such, they're just talking back and forth about things they both know perfectly well.
I'm starting to appreciate the traditional style of interview, where the interviewer is ignorant, and thus a better stand-in for the audience.
This still doesn't explain why the camera transitions mid-sentence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lfTPTFN94o#t=37m10s
Also I would recommend checking out Craig Venter's interview, was probably the best out of the bunch.
I find it creates this weird perception of almost being in the same room, like you're part of the conversation. It's distracting, but also engaging.
I'd rather watch two experts in a field conversing. That's thought provocative, and it gives me good pointers on subjects that I should follow up on.
I've always enjoyed contemplating the inverse of this theory; what if we gained appreciation for music and other collective rituals because by acting out these rituals (as individuals), our collective tribe benefited. These rituals cause us individuals to 'tune' ourselves as a collective and as a result, the tribe has increased chances of survival.
If this were the case, it would be more appropriate to say that our collective tribes evolved music and rituals for the tribe's sake - it doesn't directly help an individual survive and the individual might not even understand their compulsion to participate. For example, a drum beat might compel a soldier into battle. A religious ritual might compel an individual to supersede their allegiance in order to serve a king. If you look at other species like bees and ants that function as a collective, you see that their 'dance' is not an individual's language but one that evolved because it enabled the collective to survive. Again, the individuals might not understand their dance - they just wanna dance!
So actually, I like the idea that maybe speech, language, and what we call intelligence are all byproducts of adaptations like music and rhythm that appear worthless to individual survival, but in fact are crucial to the survival of the collective. What do you all think?
This is called group selection. It's ironic that you mention it in response to this interview; Dawkins became famous by explaining the fact that group selection doesn't exist, and why theories like the one you've just suggested violate very fundamental principles of evolution. More: http://amzn.com/0199291152
I'll go and read The selfish Gene before I write more, but one more pesky comment about the experiment in the lesswrong.com article: I am suspicious of their conclusion that their case study disproves group selection. This does not seem to respect the vast scope of evolutionary time scale. Maybe group selection is like quantum tunneling - with large clusters of individuals, the chances of it happening are infinitesimal - you won't see it in the laboratory. But on an evolutionary time scale, infinitesimal chances do happen occasionally - and if they yield advantageous results, they will shape life's future. Maybe our love for music came about from freak genetic mutations that in fact didn't serve much purpose for individual survival, but this collective activity caused individuals to synchronize their behavior. Maybe this synchronization helps low-advantage/individual traits 'tunnel' probabilistically and exist long afterward because the same traits are high-advantage/collective traits. (?)
But group selection is certainly not impossible. If you view a human as a population of cells, then cancer cells will tend to be group selected out.
Organism selection isn't a counterexample to the non-existence of group selection, because organism selection doesn't exist either. Selection pressure doesn't operate on species, populations, organisms, or even cells. It operates on genes. What appears to be organism selection is actually gene selection operating in the special circumstance that all of your cells were created by the same genome. This is also why bees, which will gladly commit suicide to sting you and protect the hive, aren't an example of group selection. The bees that sting you are sterile. The reproductive potential of their genes lies entirely outside of their bodies, so they're disposable. Their gonads are quite literally somewhere else.
So, I'll add the caveat that music could be adaptive in the sense originally described, conditional on a demonstration that people who enjoy similar music are sterile identical clones produced in bulk by the same mother.
> If you view a human as a population of cells, then GENES THAT ARE LIKELY TO RESULT IN cancer cells will tend to be group selected out.
And as I said it is also entirely possible that being good at music/rituals improves an individual's chances of survival, as well as the chances of survival of the tribe. In this case the arguments against group selection don't apply.
Group selection is definitely an effect, but is a small effect compared to individual selection. So if traits that are good for the group are at odds with traits that are good for the individual then the traits that are good for the individual are likely to "win".
I'm not arguing that music isn't adaptive. It's plausible that its adaptive value is to display to potential mates how well one's brain processes rhythm, which is useful for any number of physical activities as Pinker points out in the interview. But that's different than being selected for because it makes the group more cohesive. It may even, in fact, make the group more cohesive, but this will have nothing to do with why it was selected. This would have to be a happenstance byproduct, and thus not a plausible explanation for the existence of a complex adaptation like music. It would no more explain music than having your flowers watered would explain why it's raining.
I agree that within a group, group selection doesn't matter (duh). However, if you look at the aggregate of groups, after some time the groups with the group benefiting genes still exist while the other groups have died out. The groups that still exist will spawn new groups, etc, the standard evolution tale.
Consider this extreme case:
We have several groups. At every time step the group has a chance of being annihilated. An individual in a group can either have gene A or gene B. If an individual of a group has gene A then the chance that the group as a whole is annihilated is decreased. If it has gene B then this chance stays the same. Each individual in the group has a chance of reproducing. Once the group is above a certain size, it splits into two groups.
Now I'm sure you agree that gene A will be selected for relative to gene B, even though gene A gives no benefit to the individual relative to the other individuals in its group.
In the aggregate of groups, a gene with a huge benefit to the group and a slight disadvantage to the individual can, in the aggregate of groups, outperform a gene with a slight benefit to the individual but no benefit to the group. Sure, the conditions have to be just right for this to happen, but it does happen (e.g. cancer cells). So you can't say just because "group selection is impossible" that group selection doesn't happen in populations of animals. You need to analyze the particular situation to determine this.
It is possible, in principle, that rituals are another example of this.
There's a lot of backstabbing and competition that goes on within individual hives of the social insects.
Pinker establishes two things within the first ten minutes that make his perspective a lot more reasonable and considered: any adaptationist account of a behavior MUST begin with an a priori appraisal of that behavior on its own merits. As an 'engineering problem', he puts it. So it's not enough to look at some human behavior and then explain that it occurs because it is a natural function of some basic need, if there would be no half-way reasonable way for that function to emerge as useful without already existing.
The second thing is that if you do establish or argue for some feature as an adaptation, you have only provided a possible account of its origin as an evolved behavior, and said nothing at all about its worth or appropriateness in the world.
I think that questions of behavior as adaptive would encounter less immediate resistance—and explanations of behavior as adaptive would lose much of their unsavory panacean appeal—if these factors were better understood.
This isn't new. Go back and check what Pinker/Dawkins et al have been writing for a long time.
>>I think that questions of behavior as adaptive would encounter less immediate resistance—and explanations of behavior as adaptive would lose much of their unsavory panacean appeal—if these factors were better understood.
You shouldn't just trust other people's description of the position they argue against, if they argue from political/religious standpoints.
(I don't know why the extreme left have problems with some behaviors being strongly influenced genetically. Frankly, I have better things to do than care what some idealists "know" are true.)
That said, you will find bad research in all areas.
Edit: I might add this reference from an old Gould discussion, to show that side of the coin...
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html
Or this fun review of a "classic" book:
http://dba.fc.ul.pt/evo/textos/dawkins_review_not_in_our_gen...