timtyler comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong
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Kin selection and reciprocity are "just so stories"? Hmm. Have fun with that step back into the scientific dark ages. Scientists know a lot about why humans cooperate and behave in a moral manner.
Right - but the "aliens did it" explanation is a lot like the "god did it" one. Tremendously unlikely - but not completely disprovable. Most scientists don't require such a high degree of certainty.
Obviously, kin selection can be a genuine phenomenon in the right circumstances. So can group selection, although it's obviously much rarer. (I'm afraid I don't know as much about reciprocity, but I assume the same is true for that.) But while just-so stories like "populations that help each other will last longer" or "you are more likely to encounter relatives, so helping everyone you meet is a net win" may sound reasonable, to humans, but evolution is not swayed by such arguments.
Source?
If we already knew and understood reasons why morality would evolve, and we learned that it was actually aliens, then that would mean that we were mistaken about said reasons (unless the aliens just simulated our future evolution, if you're fighting the counterfactual.)
The modern scientific consensus is that kin selection and group selection are equivalent, explain the same set of phenomena and make the same predictions. For details of this see here. This has cleared up many of the issues relating to group selection - though there are still disagreements regarding what terminology and methodology it is best to use - and things like whether we really need two frameworks.
Well, this is from my reading of the literature. Darwinism and Human Affairs laid out the basics in 1979. Some things have changed since then, but not the basics. We know more about the role of culture and reputations these days. Whitfield's "reputations" book has a good summary of the literature there.
A nice summary article about modern views of cooperation is here. Human cooperation is similar, but with culture and reputations playing a larger role.
Of course there are still disagreements in the field. However, if you look at recent books on the topic, there is also considerable consensus:
I'm not clear about why the "aliens did it" hypothesis is worth continued discussion. Scientists don't think that aliens gave us our moral sense. The idea reminds me more of medieval theology than science. All manner of bizarre discoveries could refute modern scientific knowledge in a wide range of fields. But in most cases, the chances of that happening look very slender. In which case: so what?
This seems suspiciously similar to saying "kin selection exists and group selection basically doesn't" but with less convenient redefinition of "group selection".
They can't be equivalent if group selection doesn't exist - since kin selection is well established orthodoxy.
Both the kin selection and group selection concepts evolved after being invented. This is normal for scientific concepts: our ideas about gravity and light evolved in a similar manner.