The false allure of group selection Flashcards
What does Stewart Brand say has “pummeled Darwinian selection-by-mutation”?
“Simplistic Darwinian selection-by-mutation got pummeled by sexual recombination, chromosome doubling and tripling, kin selection, extended phenotype, endo-symbiosis (Margulis), regulatory genes, mitochondrial genomes, transgenic gene flow, and doubtless more to come.”
Why till research in microbial ecology and evolution “change everything in how we think about genes and evolution”, according to Stewart Brand?
“My prediction is that new research in microbial ecology and evolution will change everything in how we think about genes and evolution. Because of the prevalence of “horizontal” gene transfer (by six different ways) in micro-organisms, they don’t have Darwinian species, and their evolution looks Lamarckian—traits are acquired on the fly and passed on to offspring.”
Describe “what Karl Popper and other philosophers of science have criticized as “essentialism” (as quoted by Daniel Everett)
“An inconsequential concern that a term can only be correctly used if all of the attributes that one writer associates with the term are found in all uses of the term. If not, the word has been used incorrectly.”
Why is a genetic base for language proof of group selection, according to Daniel Everett?
“Languages are group traits. If there are genes for language, then this would support group selection—the language genes are there to ensure the survival of groups (even if only the original band of humans).”
One what grounds goes Daniel Everett reject the notion of an innate grammar or a “language instinct”?
“One reason for rejecting language as part of the human genotype, for example, is that if this were the case, then we would expect to find populations of humans whose linguistic genotype differs from other populations’, due to cultural selection, just as we find other culturally selected genetic traits in human populations, such as lactase persistence and oxygen processing at high altitudes. This would predict that some populations would not be able to learn the languages of other populations, which is false.”
What is dual-inheritance theory?
The selection of genetic mutations by cultural pressures.
“I have already mentioned two potential examples in which dual-inheritance produces results that benefit an entire group, the ability to digest milk beyond infancy and the oxygen-processing ability of some Tibetan populations. Daniel Dediu and Robert Ladd published a paper a few years back arguing for a similar culturally selected genetic change in some populations that facilitates tone perception, useful for populations of tone-language speakers.”
How does David Queller differentiate between inclusive fitness selection and group selection?
“They simply divide up fitness in slightly different ways – inclusive fitness into effects on self versus others, and multilevel selection into between-group and within-group parts – and a simple partition of fitness should not alter predictions.”
What is David Quellers assessment of the support for inclusive fitness selection versus group selection?
“Inclusive fitness became popular, despite the head start enjoyed by multilevel selection thinking, because it successfully weighted the relative importance of its two fitness components, using genetic relatedness. Without a similar set of weights, group selection advantages could not be accurately judged, and their strength and importance was often overemphasized. However, modern multilevel selection theory does have such weights, the between-group and within-group genetic variances, whose ratio happens to be relatedness of the actor to its groupmates (including itself). Once the proper weights are accounted for, the two approaches give essentially identical results.”
