Judging by the number of readers who have emailed me about Steve Pinker’s essay on the Edge website, “The false allure of group selection,” I gather that a lot of you have read his erudite and elegant discussion (and critique) of that topic. I’m not going to prolong the back-and-forth on this website, but wanted to point out that I’ve added an 800-word piece to the discussion called “The problem with group selection” (it’s in the comments section below Steve’s essay, along with other comments by Dan Dennett, Herbert Ginnis, David Queller, and others).
I expect more comments will appear in the next week, so keep an eye out if you’re following this debate.
Meanwhile, RIP Group Selection. Oh, and I haz a poster, too!
Nice poster.
You should discuss group selection with Scott Atran on Bloggingheads.tv
Did you read Herbert Gintis’ comment. It’s hilarious! He understands biology like Deepak Chopra understands physics.
i regret that comment. It was low and inaccurate. But the man’s take on Dawkins and The Selfish Gene is wrongheaded and disingenous.
+1 on that!
I found the blather by Daniel Everett even more hilarious: and it has the benefit of positing an immense amount of wrong in very little space.
I love your poster! Might it possibly have a top, though? It says religious ideas are never said to be “true,” they just become a metaphor. Did you mean, “untrue” there?
Oops, not “top” -see corrected post below. (Sorry for unintentional double post, I thought I’d stopped the first one before it transmitted.)
I love your poster! Might it possibly have a typo, though? It says religious ideas are never said to be “true” — they just become a metaphor. Did you mean, “untrue” there?
“true” is right. After the religious claim is falsified, apologists claim it was never said to be true (literally) in the first place, and that it was meant to be a metaphor with some other meaning.
Just a comment to your post to say that I like your poster 🙂
+ 1
I believe Williams wrote ‘Adaptation and Natural Selection’ in the 60s, partly as a critique on Group Selection. The book it seems has maintained its relevance, thanks to the absurdities, unfortunately, of some eminent biologists.
Unless there is some inherent property of a molecule that can assess the value of a resource, group selection is not a viable alternative to gene selection.
This is why I love The Edge. Having experts get in afterwards and discuss the topic at hand is a wonderful learning resource.
Not sure this is so wonderful to see so many “experts” thinking so fuzzily so publicly. If experts think like this, my god, we’re doomed.
I don’t mean Jerry, Daniel Dennett, or Steven, are the ones thinking fuzzily, just to be clear.
i find it amazing that the Queller comment was ignored. one specific point i’d make is that while ‘group selection has not created any major research agenda with empirical tests, unlike kin selection’, i’d say that is because people are ‘looking for their key under the lampost under the assumption that in the dark there can be nothing that matters’.
traditional population geneticists aren’t going to try to quantify non-kin effects.
one just deals with the fruit flies or bats you know—and are group selected with to receive scientific funding.
if you speak english, then there is no reason to study russian speakers’ views because they don’t make any sense. and this may be a good strategy too, if the sapir-whorf view is true, along with language/religion/paradigm being innate (eg chomsky). Eventually you’ll be proven right (or if competetive exclusion fails then the two groups will evolve independently as if on other planets. One could then see if group and kin selected individuals could be cross bred.)
d s wilson’s ending paragraph and the boyd and richerson comments i glanced at are also on-point.
“…if the sapir-whorf view is true…”
I didn’t think there were many people anymore who take that hypothesis seriously.
various weak and some stronger versions exist—check wikipedia. sortuh like group selection, or whether the speed of light is a constant.