Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Hili: Jerry, why are you eating Malgorzata’s jam and drinking from a mug with my picture on it? Jerry: I miss my friends in Dobrzyn. Hili: Well, come back and we can get lost in the forest together.
In Polish:
Hili: Jerry, dlaczego jesz dżem Małgorzaty i pijesz z kubka z moim zdjęciem?
Jerry: Bo tęsknię do moich przyjaciół z Dobrzynia.
Hili: To wracaj, będziemy się mogli razem zgubić w lesie.
Note: I sent this picture to Andrzej and Malgorzata yesterday with my own dialogue, just for fun and not expecting it to be used as a Genuine Hili Dialogue. When Malgorzata received it, she said she would submit it to both Andrzej and Hili for consideration as a dialogue, but that the “decision was theirs, not hers.” I then got an email from Malgorzata this morning:
Hili demanded change in the last line. She said that it would be fun to show you all her favourite haunts. Just be prepared to crawl on the ground, jump from tree branch to tree branch and sit without moving a muscle for a long time, waiting for a rodent.
Don’t bother saying that this issue comes up too often here. First, that’s a violation of the Roolz. Second, I can’t help myself: the genesis of this post was determined by the laws of physics.
And I want to ask one question, similar to one I asked before, but one that’s been reawakened by recent discussion.
Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?
a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of “free will” can be compatible with determinism?
or
b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?
Of course my answer is b).
I don’t really give a hoot about the varieties of compatibilism that have been offered by philosophers. They seem to me largely armchair exercises, and, in some cases, seem have been concocted to prevent society from the supposedly dire consequences of thinking that we don’t have libertarian free will. What has compatibilism done for us lately—or ever? Its only function seems to be to keep philosophers off the streets.
On the other hand, if we truly grasp determinism, then the consequences are profound—and largely good. We realize that nobody truly “chooses” to be good or bad, and that criminals who are judged simply as “bad people” have no more choice about their actions than those who are treated differently because they’re considered “insane” or “unable to know right from wrong.” That mandates big changes in our criminal justice system: a scientific approach about which punishments are best for deterrence, reform, and keeping criminals from relapsing into crime. It rules out retributive justice, which simply doesn’t make sense. It also makes us think hard about the notion of moral responsibility, which is connected with praise and punishment. In my view, determinism renders the notion of moral responsibility incoherent, but I suppose philosophers can rescue that one, too.
Now we can do both a) and b) if we want, but philosophers tend to concentrate on a) rather than b). Yet b) seems to me far more important. If the notion of determinism is so important, and compatibilism so trivial, why this disproportionality?
A new paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA by Alexander Stewart and Joshua Plotkin (link and citation below) has gotten some press (see, for instance, this summary in Archaeology News), for the results seems to show that evolutionary “game theory” will produce cooperative behavior. People love that because it shows that selfish genes can produce unselfish behavior. (The Templeton Foundation also loves it because it creates a kind of fusion between evolution and niceness.)
Well, we knew about the evolution of cooperation already, but “game theory” analysis, in which different game-like strategies (usually involving two players) compete against other to see which strategy “wins” in a population, has a particular fascination for people. Many of us know about the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game, and the “tit-for-tat” strategy that can also produce initially cooperative behavior in such a game.
Game-theoretic studies of cooperation continue to appear, as people want to see why and how cooperation could have evolved in our species when it seems easier to imagine that selfish genes produce selfish behavior. I won’t try to refute the latter misconception here: Dawkins has done it many times before, and you should already know about reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and other situations in which genes producing cooperation have higher fitness. And I’m dubious about such studies anyway, because they rarely have a genetic model behind them. If you want to show whether a complex behavior can theoretically evolve, you really need to have some genetic assumptions behind it. Is a switch between two complex strategies due to a single gene? If not, how can you go from one complex behavior to another (which is how these models work) if many genes are involved, and the hybrid form may have an intermediate strategy.
But what I want to highlight here instead is the funding of the Stewart and Plotkin work. I won’t go into the gory details of their results, but will merely give the “layperson’s summary” of the paper:
Significance
Cooperative behavior seems at odds with the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest, yet cooperation is abundant in nature. Scientists have used the Prisoner Dilemma game, in which players must choose to cooperate or defect, to study the emergence and stability of cooperation. Recent work has uncovered a remarkable class of extortion strategies that provide one player a disproportionate payoff when facing an unwitting opponent. Extortion strategies perform very well in head-to-head competitions, but they fare poorly in large, evolving populations. Rather we identify a closely related set of generous strategies, which cooperate with others and forgive defection, that replace extortionists and dominate in large populations. Our results help to explain the evolution of cooperation.
One of the authors gives a pretty strong statement about the significance of the work in the Archaeology News piece:
“Ever since Darwin,” Plotkin said, “biologists have been puzzled about why there is so much apparent cooperation, and even flat-out generosity and altruism, in nature. The literature on game theory has worked to explain why generosity arises. Our paper provides such an explanation for why we see so much generosity in front of us.”
And a blurb for the piece even appears on the Dawkins Foundation website. But in truth I doubt whether this is a viable explanation for human generosity, which can have many sources besides a particular game-theoretic model.
What interests me more is who funded this work, and how the funding was mentioned.
If you go to the acknowledgments section of the paper, you will see a nod to funding from “The “Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology Fund”:
What fund is that? I hadn’t heard of it before. But if you Google it, you’ll be taken to a link on Harvard University’s server describing not a fund but a grant, and there you will discover that the bankroll for that grant comes from the deep pockets of—yes, you guessed it—The John Templeton Foundation. And if you click further, you’ll find that that grant is to the tune of $10,500,000, and the project leader is Martin Nowak, a religious evolutionist whom I’ve discussed before.
Now I’m not suggesting at all that the study’s results are tainted by Templeton’s funding. But what I am suggesting is two things. First, that Templeton gives out an inordinate amount of money for this kind of work, and that they know what kind of results they want. And if you produce those results, Templeton gives you more dosh, and you keep your seat on the gravy train. 10.5 million dollars is much more than an average National Science Foundation grant, and Templeton’s penchant for the numinous, and for the fusion of science and faith, deeply corrupts the research efforts of evolutionary biology by allowing researchers access to a huge pot of money with an agenda behind it.
Second, why did the authors not thank the Templeton Foundation directly? Could they be embarrassed or ashamed by the association? (I know I would be!) And had I been money-hungry enough to have taken that money to fund my work, I would have cited the funds honestly, as “A grant on the Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology from the John Templeton Foundation.” For there really isn’t a “Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology Fund.” There is a grant funded by Templeton. Templeton’s name doesn’t appear.
I don’t know if the investigators are ashamed of their funding, but I do wonder why they chose to disguise its source.
The observation at issue is that in several species in four genera of small marsupials from Australia and New Guinea, males mate only once, or with several females over a very short period. They copulate frenetically and for long periods (mean 9.4 hours but up to 14 hours per bout!) and then drop dead immediately thereafter, their immune systems shot to hell. (Females live longer.) More than 90% of the males die almost immediately after mating, so that the population loses nearly all its males in synchrony. The reproductive system of mating only once in a lifetime is called “semelparity,” while animals that have several reproductive episodes over their lifetime are said to be “iteroparous.”
The males show a number of features for this one-shot, suicidal reproduction. They irrevocably shut down the production of sperm about a month before the short breeding system, and begin losing sperm through their urine, so they must inseminate a female soon lest they become permanently infertile and die without issue. The breeding season is short (about a month), occurring right around the peak of insect abundance in the marsupials’ habitat.
Here’s one of the marsupials that does this: the “phascogale” from Australia (there are two species in the genus Phascogale, also called “wambengers”):
Image credit: Janelle Lugge/Shutterstock
Why do the males kill themselves over sex? The authors list several previous suggestions for this well-known phenomenon, including unknown “developmental constraints” that make the behavior nonadaptive, as well as “altruism” (“males sacrifice themselves to avoid competing with the next generation for limited food”). The latter explanation seems unlikely, as it depends on group selection—a process not known to account for any adaptations in nature.
The authors suggest that suicidal reproduction is adaptive in an environment where the breeding season is short and predictable. First the seasonal predictability of insect prey should be higher in these mammals’ habitat (high latitude forests and grasslands) than at lower latitudes where the suicidal species don’t live, and those peaks would coincide with the time females produce offspring. Further, females would have shorter breeding seasons in species having suicidal males, and that the breeding season of species with suicidal males would be shorter than those having males that reproduce more iterparously. Such findings would support the idea that female reproduction is constrained by the environment, and that males have only one real chance to mate before females can produce their (and the males’) offspring.
These predictions were all confirmed. Note that while these findings support the theory, they don’t constitute what I see as extremely strong evidence.
Here’s one figure showing that the length of the breeding season is correlated not only with the predictability of insect abundance (greater predictability, shorter breeding season) as well as with the “suicidality” of males. Each number indicates one species of insect-eating marsupial, with “1” being those in which more than 90% of the males die after mating, ranging through “5”, fully iteroparous species, with intermediate numbers indicating intermediate levels of male die-off. As you see, the shorter the breeding season, the greater the synchronous die-off of males, as predicted:
The authors conclusions are below, noting the analogy to suicidal reproduction in male spiders. Males in some spider species appear to “voluntarily” catapult themselves into the female’s mouth after mating, giving her a meal that enables her to produce more baby spiders (that behavior has been shown by experiments to be adaptive in males, since those males making the fatal legspring produce more offspring):
An adaptive hypothesis to explain why insectivorous marsupials are prone to evolve lethal male competition is strongly supported by our comparative data. . . Strong sexual divergence in reproductive lifespan also occurs in some spiders, in which sexual selection has led to adaptive suicidal reproduction in males of at least one species because cannibalized males manipulate female behavior to increase paternity. We propose that in semelparous marsupials, females manipulate male behavior to increase their own reproductive success. Males in seasonally predictable habitats increase mating effort at the expense of survival, not because adult male or female survival is low for environmental reasons in these habitats (which are relatively benign and predictable) or because males are altruistic, but ultimately because females profit from sperm competition. Environmental seasonality sets the scene for females to impose severe sexual selection pressure on males by shortening the breeding period and mating with extreme promiscuity.
Now I’m not sure if there are data from these species showing that females who mate repeatedly have more offspring. If that wasn’t the case, then it’s not kosher to say that females are “manipulating male behavior.” Even if females mated only once, and the mating season were short because of a spike in insect availability, males might still compete frenetically with other males to mate, and might die in the attempt—but it would be controlled more by the environment than by “female manipulation —although access to females is still crucial. And we still don’t know why these males don’t live longer than a year, getting a chance to produce offspring the next season. Perhaps their small size and high metabolism gives them a short life span.
But I suspect that the authors are right here. To make their conclusions firmer, we need to know whether females in the “suicidal” species mate more than once, and whether those who do have more offspring. We also need data showing that males who mate with already-mated females have offspring, rather than just wasting their sperm. That’s certainly true in the Drosophila I work on, in which males who mate with previously-mated females actually “displace” the previous males’ sperm, producing the lion’s share of offspring. That gives an evolutionary impetus to mate frenetically and repeatedly—which they do.
After all this, what can you say about those males but “what a way to go”? Sadly, you can’t even say that the males who mate themselves to death die happy, as happiness is probably a concept foreign to these small marsupials. What you can say is that they’ve done well by their genes.
In yesterday’s Hili Dialogue, reader Lianne Byram announced that she was adopting a cat from the local shelter. There was, of course, an immediate outcry for photos, not least from me. Lianne has obliged and sent a few words and a photo of her new cat, Chloe, on its first day in what is called on the Cat Interwebz its “forever home.” (I kind of like that term, actually.)
Apparently Chloe has gotten over her initial fright at her new digs, when she hid under the bed.
I adopted little Chloe from the local Cat Shelter today. With 99 cats to choose from, it was no easy task. In the end I couldn’t resist her pretty face and beautiful, friendly purr! She is settling in beautifully. It turns out we both love playing with the computer (Chloe likes to rub her face against it), and lounging around. Purrfect roommate! 🙂
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A while back, reader Charlie Jones sent me two pictures of his moggies, Grover (top) and Neville (bottom) slumbering, as well as a note:
Our cats are VERY relaxed when sleeping. These are the first cats I’ve owned that don’t start awake when you touch them. Grover (pink chair) generally just starts purring, whereas Neville remains as limp as a fresh corpse. If only I could emulate their stress-free existence!
Who’s running this railroad? According to CBS News, the Vatican has discovered, belatedly, that it misspelled the name “Jesus” on a medal struck to commemorate the ascendancy to infallibility of Pope Francis:
According to the Vatican Information Service, more than 6,000 of the medals were produced by the Italian State Mint to commemorate the beginning of Francis’ papacy.
The medal features a portrait of Francis on one side and on the other, a Latin phrase that the future pontiff says inspired him as a teenager to pursue the priesthood: “Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum et quia miserando antque eligendo vidit, ait illi sequere me.” (Translation: “Jesus, therefore, saw the publican, and because he saw by having mercy and by choosing, He said to him, ‘Follow me'”).
However, the letter “J” in Jesus was mistakenly replaced with the letter “L.”
The Telegraph reports that the medals – 200 in gold, 3,000 in silver and 3,000 in bronze – were withdrawn after being put on sale at the Vatican Publishing House in St Peter’s Square.
At least four of them are in private hands already, though, and those will be worth a pile to the lucky collectors. Praise Lesus (or is it Cieling Cat)?
