Richard Dawkins in furious row with EO Wilson over theory of evolution

[alp227]

A disagreement between the twin giants of genetic theory, Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, is now being fought out by rival academic camps in an effort to understand how species evolve.

The learned spat was prompted by the publication of a searingly critical review of Wilson's new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in Prospect magazine this month. The review, written by Dawkins, author of the popular and influential books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, has prompted more letters and on-line comment than any other article in the recent history of the magazine and attacks Wilson's theory "as implausible and as unsupported by evidence".

"I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson's latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory," Dawkins writes.

The Oxford evolutionary biologist, 71, has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve. Wilson, in a short piece penned promptly in response to Dawkins's negative review, was also clearly annoyed by this attempt to outflank him.

full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the-professors

[laconicsax]

1. This article seems to mischaracterize the nature of the debate.

I'm sorry..."furious row"

[longship]

4. Stupid headline writers

Apparently scientists are a hopeless lot to them. Scientists are always "baffled" or some other such description. Then you read the article which shows no such befuddlement on the part of the scientists.

This kind of thing pisses me off. No wonder the public is so ignorant of science.

[TlalocW]

2. I'm reminded of Bloom County

Where Milo and Binkley were discussing the activities of their friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who was competing against Steven Hawkings to come up with the great unification theory of the universe. They wondered what two such people do when at odds with each other, "Send each other nasty notes in algebra?" The last panel showed Oliver and his mom at the door, a large device on the porch with a note, "Good luck! From Steve!" and Oliver was saying, "Put the cat out, mother. It's a thermonuclear bomb."

TlalocW

[Jim__]

3. Here's a link to the review in Prospect and a very short reply by Wilson.

Here

[HereSince1628]

5. This is a long running theme

Last edited Sun Jun 24, 2012, 07:54 AM - Edit history (1)

and it was used to invigorate many of the graduate seminars in population biology I attended in the late 70's and early 80's--What is the unit of selection? The comments of this disturbance in the force do seem to originate over 30 years ago.

I say to current graduate students and their advisers...enjoy the debate (and the beer that sustains it)!

Regarding Dawkin's list of experts who he claims agree with him, I note that he is missing the names of some truly great thinkers who participated in this long running debate (i.e. S.J. Gould), and that's probably no accident.

[Jim__]

6. Dawkins does mention Gould in his review, but in a somewhat insulting way.

The argument from authority, then, cuts both ways, so let me now set it aside and talk about evolution itself. At stake is the level at which Darwinian selection acts: “survival of the fittest” but, to quote Wilson’s fellow entomologist-turned-anthropologist RD Alexander, the fittest what? The fittest gene, individual, group, species, ecosystem? Just as a child may enjoy addressing an envelope: Oxford, England, Europe, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Universe, so biologists with non-analytical minds warm to multi-level selection: a bland, unfocussed ecumenicalism of the sort promoted by (the association may not delight Wilson) the late Stephen Jay Gould. Let a thousand flowers bloom and let Darwinian selection choose among all levels in the hierarchy of life. But it doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Darwinian selection is a very particular process, which demands rigorous understanding.

[HereSince1628]

7. My point was Dawkins doesn't and can't name Gould among his list of supporters

And relative to argument, consensus not withstanding, there is something to be said for the quality of support rather than quantity of supporters.

Dawkins' list is, by necessity, selective. Everyone in the business realizes that Gould and Dawkins disagreed on this aspect of evolution.

Rhetorically Dawkins is making a twofold statement:

In part it disparages Gould's consideration of multi-level evolution which was in conflict with Dawkins gene-centric position. Gould spent a fair amount of time thinking about macro-evolution above the species level. And Gould wasn't overly fond of the hegemony of natural selection in evolutionary explanations.

Specifically, Gould saw genes as packaged within individuals. In that container, better genes and worse genes might occur together, and even the 'best gene' could be unfortunate to have less fit pairing or be extinguished without replication by various natural processes. For Gould the individual was an important unit that survived and reproduced. If you look at the list of supporters Dawkins gives, Gould certainly wouldn't have been counted in the same company. Gould had few good things to say about the thinking of evolutionary psychologists.


It is also is an allusion to the bad interpersonal dynamics between Wilson and Gould: Wilson has objected to Gould's habit of reframing old ideas as Gould's own--an example being the notion of 'tempo and mode'/'punctuated evolution--which was actually introduced in The Origin of Species.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. But mainly, it's because Gould is dead

and thus it would be extremely difficult to list him among people who criticised Wilson's 2010 paper.

[HereSince1628]

11. No, not Wilson's paper but, the debate about what is 'the' unit of selection. That's decades old

And Dawkins really hasn't change his position much since the mid-1970's. Similarly, the notion of inclusive-fitness from which Wilson's new work emerges is actually an older idea.

Gould DID write about what he thought were units of selection and Gould, being very interested in macroevolution of larger units than species actually wrote about the possibility of species as units of selection. He includes lengthy discussion about the general question in middle of his magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, asI remember it that was around chapter 7 or 8.

[Odin2005]

8. This yelling match is over 30 years old.

In the 70s Stephen J. Gould, going by fossil evidence, hypothesized that evolutionary change happens by fits and starts (the Punctuated Equilibrium (P-E) hypothesis. This lead to the "Orthodox Neo-Darwinists", ignorantly thinking P-E was a revival of the pseudo-scientific "Saltationism" (think all the bad sci-fi movies about "mutants&quot of 100 years ago, to viciously attack Gould. Gould rebutted by arguing that P-E was the result of stabilizing selection mixed in short periods of intense directional and divergent selection. Then Ernst Mayr shot back dismissively at Gould, telling him something like "We knew THAT back in the 40s, this is nothing new".

Then the Gouldians and Dawkinsians started arguing over pre-adptations and spandrels and just-so-stories.

Gould was also a huge critic of the notion of gene-level selection Dawkins popularized, saying that selection can only act on whole organisms, not on individual genes, because, except in odd circumstances, genes are only the "bookkeepers" of selection. Mayr sided with Gould in this flap.

Essentially, this is a very old 3-way spat between paleontologists (Gould) naturalists (Mayr, Wilson) and geneticists (Dawkins)

I generally side with the Paleontologists and the Naturalists. I think Gene-Selectionism is simply nonsense, an example of only having a hammer and seeing everything as a nail. Dawkins is a geneticist so he has a bias towards gene-level explanations.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Steven Pinker: The False Allure of Group Selection

(Dawkins said Pinker was among those who protested about Wilson's Nature paper, and Wilson replied that he hadn't. Whether he had or not when the review was written, it's clear from this he does think group selection fails as a theory).

I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not. After all, group selection sounds like a reasonable extension of evolutionary theory and a plausible explanation of the social nature of humans. Also, the group selectionists tend to declare victory, and write as if their theory has already superseded a narrow, reductionist dogma that selection acts only at the level of genes. In this essay, I'll explain why I think that this reasonableness is an illusion. The more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it fits the facts of human psychology and history.

Why does this matter? I'll try to show that it has everything to do with our best scientific understanding of the evolution of life and the evolution of human nature. And though I won't take up the various moral and political colorings of the debate here (I have discussed them elsewhere), it ultimately matters for understanding how best to deal with the collective action problems facing our species.
...
The idea of Group Selection has a superficial appeal because humans are indisputably adapted to group living and because some groups are indisputably larger, longer-lived, and more influential than others. This makes it easy to conclude that properties of human groups, or properties of the human mind, have been shaped by a process that is akin to natural selection acting on genes. Despite this allure, I have argued that the concept of Group Selection has no useful role to play in psychology or social science. It refers to too many things, most of which are not alternatives to the theory of gene-level selection but loose allusions to the importance of groups in human evolution. And when the concept is made more precise, it is torn by a dilemma. If it is meant to explain the cultural traits of successful groups, it adds nothing to conventional history and makes no precise use of the actual mechanism of natural selection. But if it is meant to explain the psychology of individuals, particularly an inclination for unconditional self-sacrifice to benefit a group of nonrelatives, it is dubious both in theory (since it is hard to see how it could evolve given the built-in advantage of protecting the self and one's kin) and in practice (since there is no evidence that humans have such a trait).

None of this prevents us from seeking to understand the evolution of social and moral intuitions, nor the dynamics of populations and networks which turn individual psychology into large-scale societal and historical phenomena. It's just that the notion of "group selection" is far more likely to confuse than to enlighten—especially as we try to understand the ideas and institutions that human cognition has devised to make up for the shortcomings of our evolved adaptations to group living.

http://edge.org/conversation/the-false-allure-of-group-selection