Comment by nemo1618 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo1618 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone summarize the linked paper? What result does it propose w.r.t altruism, and why are Dawkins/Pinker/others challenging it?

EDIT: after some digging, I found this article: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the..., which summarizes the disagreement like so:

  For lay spectators, the row is a symptom of the long and controversial
  evolution of the very idea of evolution.  At root it is a dispute about
  whether natural selection, the theory of "the survival of the fittest" first
  put forward by Charles Darwin in 1859, occurs only to preserve the single
  gene. Wilson is an advocate of "multi-level selection theory", a development
  of the idea of "kin selection", which holds that other biological, social and
  even environmental priorities may be behind the process.
  
  But Dawkins is far from convinced: "Wilson now rejects 'kin selection' and
  replaces it with a revival of 'group selection' – the poorly defined and
  incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of
  whole groups of organisms."

"How can genetically prescribed selfless behavior arise by natural selection, which is seemingly its antithesis?"

"This problem has vexed biologists since Darwin, who in The Origin of Species declared the paradox — in particular displayed by ants — to be the most important challenge to his theory."

"Eusociality is not a marginal phenomenon in the living world. The biomass of ants alone composes more than half that of all insects and exceeds that of all terrestrial nonhuman vertebrates combined. Humans, which can be loosely characterized as eusocial, are dominant among the land vertebrates."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/

Dawkins [EDIT: remove adjective] believes in kin selection, based on results of inclusive fitness theory, which makes predictions about fitness when interacting organisms are related. (e.g. ant workers share 3/4 of their genes, and ants are remarkably social.) Wilson et al. contend that inclusive fitness theory is a bit of a distraction, since it only applies in rare cases, and in those cases it's just a specialization of direct fitness, which can be calculated without respect to relatedness. Later in the supplement they build a model which has the features discussed by kin selection without relying on relatedness.

Are there accessible lay-person "popular science" type books that contradict Dawkins and are highly regarded? My very limited understanding of evolutionary biology mostly comes from reading Dawkins books, which were highly enjoyable. And the concepts seem pretty solid and playing around with my own toy throwaway simulations, don't seem implausible. I also understood that other math had backed up the general points of Dawkins.

If this isn't the case, what's the recommended pop-sci reading to help make me less wrong on all this?

I took a general biology course given by Wilson, plus an ecology course for which it was a prerequisite, but that is the extent of my knowledge in this field. Both of those were a long time ago. I don't know enough to make such a recommendation.

However, if you don't mind a general comment, this whole "controversy" has an element of "angels dancing on the head of a pin" to it. It is still the case that evolutionary biology falls somewhat short of many other sciences with respect to empirical rigor. Many of the concepts that the field presents (e.g. "ring species", "punctuated equilibrium", etc.) are primarily narrative or even ad hoc. Sociobiology particularly suffers this condition, and evolutionary psychology was basically written by Rudyard Kipling. My impression is that Wilson has made some progress past that (I'm thinking of his island experiments), but evolutionary biology is stuck in the Age of Philosophy. The field hasn't really had its Copernicus yet, let alone its Newton. I say that not to denigrate the entire effort, but to put this particular argument into context.

As any grad student will tell you, however, we must value parsimony, and on its face this paper seems to have that over kin selection.

The paper itself is pretty readable and interesting even for a layperson.

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