A misguided attack on kin selection

August 30, 2010 • 11:43 am

I don’t know what’s gotten into E. O. Wilson.  He’s certainly the world’s most famous evolutionary biologist, and has gone from strength to strength over the years, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, writing great general books on not only ants but conservation and social behavior.  And he’s kept his hands in the ant work, producing any number of technical papers and monographs. He’s even written a novel!  Frankly, I don’t know how he does it.  I haven’t always agreed with what he says—I think he overreached with the sociobiology stuff, for instance—but you have to admire the guy’s knowledge, breadth, dedication to conservation, and sheer workaholism.

But now Wilson, along with some collaborators like David Sloan Wilson and Martin Nowak, is definitely heading off on the wrong track.  They’re attacking kin selection, maintaining not only that it has nothing to do with the evolution of social insects, but that’s it’s also a bad way to look at evolution in general.   And they’re wrong—dead wrong.

Their latest attack on kin selection is a big paper in the new Nature by Wilson, Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, all from Harvard.  They begin by arguing that the classical argument for insect eusociality (cooperatively breeding societies in which “castes” of individuals, like the workers in bees, are sterile and help the queen produce offspring)—an argument based on asymmetrical relatedness—is wrong.  This failure to explain eusociality, they claim, is a severe blow to kin-selection theory.

They’re right about the biology. The “textbook” explanation, based on a higher relatedness of workers to their sisters than to their own potential offspring, no longer seems feasible.  It posits that queens mate only once, but in reality they often mate many times, which destroys the asymmetry of relatedness that supposedly selects for cooperative breeding. Further, other species, like aphids, termites and mole rats, are eusocial but don’t show asymmetrical relatedness.  Finally, lots of haplodiploid species (those in which males come from unfertilized eggs, females from fertilized ones) have asymmetrical relatedness but aren’t eusocial.

But we’ve known all this for years!  Check out the papers by Gardner & West and Strassmann & Queller cited below—they point out the same problems that Nowak et al. present as novel, but as far back as 1998.  There’s nothing new here.

The main problem with the Nowak et al. paper is this: they see the failure of asymmetrical relatedness to explain social insects as a general failure of kin selection to help us explain those groups—or anything at all.  That’s just wrong.  There are alternative explanations for how relatedness explains the evolution of social insects (see the two papers by Strassman and Queller), including the phenomenon of sterile castes.  And, although Nowak et al. claim that “the production of inclusive fitness theory must be considered meagre,” there are many aspects of eusociality that have been profitably investigated, and explained, by inclusive fitness theory.  Here are just a few:  why worker bees commit suicide when they sting; why, when a honeybee colony divides, the remaining queen goes around stinging to death all the other future queens in their cells; why workers prefer to raise rear queens in colonies where their mothers have mated only once, but rear males in colonies where their mothers have mated multiply; and why workers in singly-mated colonies kill male larvae. And there are many others.

Sex ratio theory, in which mothers produce different proportions of males and females, has been a particularly fruitful area for applying inclusive fitness theory.  So has “altruism”—suicidal honeybees are just one example.  And so are parental care and aspects thereof, especially parent-offspring conflict, a field brought to life by Bob Trivers using inclusive fitness theory.  How else can you explain weaning conflict except by a conflict between the mother’s genetic welfare and that of her offspring?

I’m baffled not only by Nowak et al.’s apparent and willful ignorance of the literature, but by statements that are just wrong.  They flatly assert, for instance, that “inclusive fitness theory” is something different from “standard natural selection theory.”  But it’s not: it’s simply a natural extension of population genetics to the situation in which one’s behavior affects related individuals.  I could go on, but a little bird has told me that the big guns in the field will, soon and en masse, answer Nowak et al.’s arguments about both theory and data.

I can’t fathom any motive, either psychological or scientific, for Wilson and Company to repeatedly denigrate the importance of inclusive-fitness theory.  It’s just a shame that, this late in his career, Wilson has chosen to fight the wrong battle. In the meantime, contrast his attacks on the value of kin selection with the summary paragraphs of Strassman and Queller (2007), who, after reviewing the bearing of inclusive-fitness theory on understanding social insects, conclude:

Any scientific theory purporting to account for biological complexity ought to account for this special nature of social insects. Why do their colonies show a degree of apparent purpose lacking in other aggregations, herds, and flocks? The kin selection extension of natural selection theory does explain this; cooperation results from the opportunity to give sufficiently large benefits to kin.

More importantly, kin selection theory has successfully predicted new findings. Although social insect colonies have clocklike design in many respects, kin selection theory predicts who is throwing sand into the clockworks, as well as which gears might be slipped and which springs sprung. Many of the predicted findings, such as sex ratio conflict and policing, were otherwise completely unexpected. The success of this approach shows that the Darwinian paradigm is capable of explaining not just the adaptations of organisms but also how new kinds of organismal entities come into being.

Finally, a big raspberry to the folks at Nature who decided to publish such a strange paper in the interest of stirring up controversy.  If they’d gotten decent reviewers, and followed their advice, it never would have seen print.

UPDATE:  Over at his website, Richard Dawkins has added his own notes on the Nowak et al. paper.  He doesn’t like it either, and for many of the same reasons.

_______

Nowak, M. A., C. E. Tarnita and E. O. Wilson.  2010.  The evolution of eusociality.  Nature 466: 1057-1062.

Queller, D. C., and J. E. Strassmann. 1998. Kin selection and social insects. Bioscience 48:165-175.

Strassmann, J. E., and D. C. Queller. 2007. Insect societies as divided organisms: The complexities of purpose and cross-purpose. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 104:8619-8626.

West, S. A. and A. Gardner.  2010.  Altruism, spite, and greenbeards.  Science 327:1341-1344.

I swear I was Egyptian!

August 30, 2010 • 5:42 am

According to Sunday’s New York Times, belief in reincarnation is not only widespread in America—a Pew survey says that nearly one in four of us thinks we lived before—but is becoming part of mainstream psychotherapy.  A bunch of quacks now practice “past-life regressions,” in which they help their patients remember who they were in previous incarnations.  I don’t know why these “doctors,” many of whom are psychiatrists and thus have a medical degree, aren’t thrown out of the field.

Some, like Brian Weiss, have been censured, but continue to rake in the bucks through popular books and lectures. A few, like Dr. Paul DeBell, claim that they too have had past lives:

He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.

They’re always the good Germans, aren’t they? Why aren’t the concentration camp guards coming back? Where is Himmer’s valet?

Others, aware of sanctions, carefully hedge their claims, but they’re not fooling anyone.

“I have done several thousand individual past-life regressions,” said Ms. [Janet] Cunningham, of the International Board for Regression Therapy. “And I will also say that I don’t know where these memories come from. So when we say ‘reincarnation,’ it may be our singular soul that reincarnates again and again and again. It may be an aspect of soul energy. It may be a collective unconscious. I think some people might go into fantasy. It may be an allegory or metaphor from the mind.” No matter what these visions are, Ms. Cunningham said, uncovering them can be therapeutic.

The amusing thing is how little evidence it takes to convince these credulous loon-shrinks that someone might have had a past life:

Dr. [Brian] Weiss stresses that he is a medical doctor who was not expecting to encounter past lives in a conventional therapeutic setting. (His favorite title, he says, is not “guru” but “professor.”) Under hypnosis, Catherine, the patient in his book, had memories of times and places, and in such extraordinary and historically accurate detail, he said, that she could never have invented them. (In one life she is an Egyptian servant in charge of embalming corpses. “I see eyes,” she told Dr. Weiss under hypnosis. “I see a woman, a goddess, with some type of a headpiece on … Osiris … Sirus … something like that.”) . . .

I’d be more convinced if the woman suddenly became fluent in Middle Egyptian.

. . . Dr. [Jim] Tucker studies American children and in one case found a young boy who started to say, around the age of 18 months, that he was his own (deceased) grandfather. “He eventually told details of his grandfather’s life that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal means,” Dr. Tucker wrote in Explore, which calls itself a journal of science and healing, “such as the fact that his grandfather’s sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end of his life.”  Dr. Tucker won’t say such cases add up to proof of reincarnation, but he likes to keep an open mind.

On this they base a therapy?  “Oh look, I was one of the good Nazis who tried to assassinate Hitler!  Ich bin ein Berliner! . . . Wait—I see a sausage . . . schlockwurst, knockwurst . . . something like that.”

Un bel di

August 29, 2010 • 10:49 am

What could be better than seeing a bunny on your way to work and then having someone bring you a pake—all on the same day?

In the past couple of years there has been a small explosion of eastern cottontail rabbits, Sylvilagus floridanus—otherwise known as “Nature’s buffet”—in Hyde Park.  About one day in three, if I come to work early enough, I’ll see one or more grazing on the quad.  They are of course very timid: this is the closest I could get.

And I am the recipient of a pake!  A pake (“pie + cake”) is a recently-invented dessert that incorporates a whole pie baked inside a cake, usually covered with cream-cheese frosting.  It may sound dire, but it’s actually scrumptious.  Here’s mine: it features an entire blueberry pie baked inside a spice cake, topped with an entire peach pie baked inside a yellow cake, all generously slathered with cream cheese frosting:

Yes, I know it’s a bit crude-looking, but don’t scoff: it was someone’s first attempt, and it was delicious.  And I know it’s an artery-buster, so don’t bother reminding me; those comments are gratuitous and will be deleted!  I estimate the weight of this pake at about 8 pounds (no kidding), and a 15-degree slice is a generous serving.

Here’s a more professionally baked pake, the famous cherpumple: cherry, apple, and pumpkin pies in three layers of cake (white, yellow, and spice respectively):

This is no from-scratch treat: it involves baking store-bought pies inside batter from a cake mix. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can get the recipe here or here.

Michael, we hardly knew ye

August 29, 2010 • 6:59 am

The Templeton Foundation has two major goals, promoting capitalism and blurring the line between science and faith. So it’s hardly surprising that their Big Questions online magazine would publish an article claiming that capitalism is an important source of human morality.  And it’s not that surprising that they’d also claim an evolutionary basis for this wonderfully fortuitous and Gekko-ish conjunction of greed and ethics.

What is surprising is that the argument is made by Michael Shermer.

Shermer is a well known—and well respected (including by me)—skeptic, author of several good books (Why Darwin Matters, Why People Believe Weird Things), columnist for Scientific American, and publisher of Skeptic magazine.  So it’s really, really sad to see him pushing the Templeton Thesis on the Templeton website.  Templeton is, after all, devoted to effacing the demarcation between science and woo, a demarcation that Shermer has vigorously defended for years.  And it’s disturbing to see him once again in the pay of the Templeton machine, making an argument that, while supporting their mission, seems pretty thin.

Here’s his thesis:

Given the economic roller-coaster ride of the past two years,  the idea that capitalism promotes morality might seem like an oxymoron. The imperfections of the market system, the wild swings of the boom-and-bust cycle, and the “animal spirits” of irrational investors have revealed the gulf between economic theory and financial reality — and have put the advocates of capitalism on the defensive.

But let’s not get carried away. As every economist knows, the market system, based on the free exchange of goods, is the greatest prosperity-generating machine ever invented. Nor are markets just a necessary evil that we must regretfully tolerate. To the contrary, trade itself leads directly and measurably to greater virtue — to higher levels of generosity, fairness, and trust. But don’t take my word for it. There is plenty of experimental evidence to back me up, and it points to the deep evolutionary foundations of the market’s moral effects.

Shermer then goes on to describe experiments with apes and monkeys showing that they seem to have an elementary sense of fairness.  A monkey trained to exchange a pebble for a cucumber slice, for instance, will suddenly go on strike if it sees another monkey getting a much tastier grape.  Humans, too, will turn down free money in a “split” with another person if that other person claims too much of the pie.  From this Shermer concludes (agreeing with the psychologist who did that study) that “we are naturally inclined to be fair and generous with our kin and kind because of genetic relatedness and reciprocal connectedness.”

I don’t have a problem with the idea that some part of human morality evolved in small bands of our ancestors as a way to enforce social harmony and hence reproductive output.  But I do have a problem with Shermer’s idea that fairness and virtue in general are not just promoted by the modern institution of free-market capitalism, but are inherent in them.

Shermer sees capitalism as simply the interactions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors writ large:

In short, important as it may be to figure out the causes of the current economic downturn, we should not lose sight of the big picture: trade makes people more trusting and trustworthy, which makes them more inclined to trade, which increases trust — and round and round it goes in a positive feedback loop that generates not just unprecedented prosperity but civilized virtue as well.

After all, don’t you have to trust people to do business?  Isn’t a good businessman one who earns his customers’ trust by behaving fairly?  Maybe, but is that really morality?  Isn’t morality something that you intuitively feel is the right thing to do, not just a way of behaving that helps you make money? Is it something you do—like driving below the speed limit—simply because you know you’ll be sanctioned if you don’t? Is Apple moral? Is General Motors moral? The questions make no sense.  These corporations may act morally by donating money to good causes and so on, but it’s ludicrous to claim that selling cars or computers promotes morality.

Capitalism is not in fact a simple scaling up of the interactions of our ancestors.  It makes sense to at least act ethically when you interact with someone every day and would be caught out if you cheated.  But many of those sanctions vanish in a free market where that kind of close interaction is diminished.  I need hardly point out that businesses and other bulwarks of capitalism often cheat, or fail to behave in ways we’d consider virtuous, when they think they can get away with it.  Tainted milk, tainted meat, salmonella-infected eggs, other kinds of cost-cutting that endangers consumers, putting antifreeze in wine, selling illegal knockoff handbags—these too are the fruits of capitalism.  So too is the exploitation of third-world countries for the profit of others. And let us not forget Bernie Madoff and his thieving, cheating ilk—the very efflorescence of capitalism. Yes, businesses usually have to treat their customers fairly to survive, but this is simply a necessity if they’re to prosper, not something that, by acting as a beacon of virtue, increases the sum total of morality in this world.  There’s a reason why the poster child for duplicity is the used car salesman.  And if the free market is so virtuous, why do we need federal inspections, the FDA, and consumer protection agencies?

I don’t see capitalism as innately conducive to morality. It is, at best, orthogonal to it. It may make us more prosperous, but it doesn’t make us better people.

I haven’t read Shermer’s latest book, The Mind of the Market, which appears to include this thesis, but I’m not convinced by his Templeton essay.  I note that the book was endorsed by Dinesh D’Souza.  Much as conservatives dislike evolution, they may accept it if they see it justifying capitalism and promoting virtue.  But that’s just another form of social Darwinism.

Hitch and Harris on moderate Islam

August 28, 2010 • 7:14 am

The debate about the “ground zero” mosque is continuing. I’ve said my piece, and will just point out debate elsewhere.   About two weeks ago Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens gave their views on the New York Islamic cultural center, and they’ve weighed in again this week.

Hitchens, ill as he is, has barely broken stride. In his latest column at Slate, he continues to point out that the Imam behind the Cultural Center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, may not be as moderate as everyone thinks.  Besides holding the U.S. partially responsible for the World Trade Center attacks, says Hitchens, the Imam asked Obama to endorse the theocracy of Iran. And he worries about how moderate “moderate Islam” really is:

Emboldened by the crass nature of the opposition to the [cultural] center, its defenders have started to talk as if it represented no problem at all and as if the question were solely one of religious tolerance. It would be nice if this were true. But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

. . So, before he is used by our State Department on any more goodwill missions overseas, I would like to see Imam Rauf asked a few searching questions about his support for clerical dictatorship in, just for now, Iran. Let us by all means make the “Ground Zero” debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well.

In “Silence is not moderation,” his latest piece at the Washington Post’s “On Faith” site, Harris comes up with nearly identical sentiments:

The true scandal here is that Muslim moderates have been so abysmally lacking in candor about the nature of their faith and so slow to disavow its genuine (and growing) pathologies—leading perfectly sane and tolerant people to worry whether Muslim moderation even exists.

Despite his past equivocations on this issue, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf could dispel these fears in a single paragraph:

“Like all decent people, I am horrified by much that goes on in the name of ‘Islam,’ and I consider it a duty of all moderate Muslims to recognize that many of the doctrines espoused in the Qur’an and hadith present some unique liabilities at this moment in history. Our traditional ideas about martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, and the status of women must be abandoned, as they are proving disastrous in the 21st century. Many of Islam’s critics have fully justified concerns about the state of discourse in parts of the Muslim world–where it is a tissue of conspiracy theories, genocidal ravings regarding the Jews, and the most abject, triumphalist fantasies about conquering the world for the glory of Allah. While the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity also contain terrible passages, it has been many centuries since they truly informed the mainstream faith. Hence, we do not tend to see vast numbers of Jews and Christians calling for the murder of apostates today. This is not true of Islam, and there is simply no honest way of denying this shocking disparity. We are members of a faith community that appears more concerned about harmless cartoons than about the daily atrocities committed in its name–and no one suffers from this stupidity and barbarism more than our fellow Muslims. Islam must grow up. And Muslim moderates like ourselves must be the first to defend the rights of novelists, cartoonists, and public intellectuals to criticize all religious faiths, including our own.”

These are the sorts of sentiments that should be the litmus test for Muslim moderation. Find an imam who will speak this way, and gather followers who think this way, and I’ll volunteer to cut the ribbon on his mosque in lower Manhattan.

I know exactly how many commenters are going to respond:  a.  It’s not our place to tell the Imam what to say, and b. There really are tons of moderate Muslims who have decried the extremes of terrorism and repression practiced by some Muslims in the name of their faith.  And yes, maybe I’ve missed some of these.  (I haven’t, however, missed the many Catholics who vociferously oppose much of the repressive dogma of their church.)  But it does seem to me that many moderate Muslims—this excludes ex-Muslims like Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali—are strikingly silent on many of these excesses.  Yes, they may decry beheadings and suicide bombings, but I haven’t heard much about the pervasive repression of women and homosexuals in Muslim states, about freedom of expression, or about the lunacy of fatwas for publishing “offensive” books, drawing pictures of Mohamed, and naming teddy bears after the Prophet.  The Qur’an doesn’t seem to have been subject to nearly as much liberal or metaphorical interpretation as the Bible.

Caturday felid: spines!

August 28, 2010 • 5:10 am

Today we have three videos about spiny things, but only one is related to kittehs.  First, if you have a male cat, you may have noticed that his penis has spines on it (these seem to disappear after castration). As this National Geographic video shows, the spines are essential for successful mating.  (Although the video suggests that the female’s postcopulatory rolling may help sperm get to the eggs, I’m not convinced.)

Here’s the penis of a male cat, showing the spines:

Although the spiny anteater, or echidna, eats ants, it isn’t really an anteater in the classical sense (those tube-nosed South American mammals of the order Pilosa).  It is, instead, a monotreme: one of the two primitive mammals that, along with the platypus, lays eggs.   And males have a bizarre generative organ, a penis with four heads.  It looks for all the world like the creature from Alien bursting from the groin:

The function of the echidna’s clumped sperm that swim as a unit is unclear, but recent work suggests that, in species where females mate multiply, it’s an adaptation for a male’s sperm to win the race to the egg.  By joining with another sperm from the same ejaculate, your swimming speed increases, upping your chance of being the first to fertilize.  Clearly, two tails are better than one.  (Note that this behavior is facilitated if the sperm are related.  Because only one sperm can fertilize an egg, if two join together and penetrate the egg, only one of them will pass on its genes.  But if you’re related to other sperm, a form of kin selection can promote the evolution of clumping.)

It’s been shown in deer mice (whose females mate multiply) that when you mix sperm from ejaculates of different males, the sperm that clump together tend to be those from the same male.   There may be some “recognition molecule” on the sperm’s surface that helps it discriminate between “brother” sperm and unrelated sperm. In contrast, when sperm from males of a monogamous mouse species are mixed together, there is no tendency for related sperm to clump.  Presumably this is because in those species the ejaculates of different males never co-occur in a wild female.

Finally, just for lolz, here’s a hedgehog in the bath. Be sure to watch until he inverts. (Warning: baby talk!)

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.964700&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Journal: Hauser fabricated data

August 27, 2010 • 12:07 pm

The Boston Globe reports today that, according to the editor of the journal Cognition, Professor Marc Hauser of Harvard fabricated data.

Gerry Altmann, the editor of the journal Cognition, which is retracting a 2002 article in which Hauser is the lead author, said that he had been given access to information from an internal Harvard investigation related to that paper. That investigation found that the paper reported data that was not present in the videotape record that researchers make of the experiment.

“The paper reports data … but there was no such data existing on the videotape. These data are depicted in the paper in a graph,” Altmann said. “The graph is effectively a fiction and the statistic that is supplied in the main text is effectively a fiction.”

. . . “If it’s the case the data have in fact been fabricated, which is what I as the editor infer, that is as serious as it gets,” Altmann said.

It’s absolutely unbelievable that, as a sanction for this kind of crime against science, Hauser was given just a year’s suspension without pay. (There may also have been sanctions about his future ability to mentor graduate students and postdocs.)  Although funding agencies like the NIH and NSF may impose further sanctions, he’ll nevertheless get to keep his job—forever.  I’m deeply ashamed of my alma mater.

A new kind of cloud

August 27, 2010 • 10:53 am

You probably didn’t know that there’s a Cloud Appreciation Society that recognizes new types of clouds.  A new one has recently been named, the first since 1951.  It’s the asperatus cloud (or, formally, Undulatus asperatus—clouds seemed to be named like organisms!), a strange, undulating formation that’s been described as looking like the surface of a rolling sea.  They’re apparently rare, and their formation mysterious.  But they’re gorgeous.  Has anybody seen these?


Check out the Cloud Appreciation Society’s gallery, with about 6500 photos of clouds, classified by type. There’s also a nice section on “clouds that look like things.”