Epistemic Status: confused & unlikely

Author's note: the central claim of this article I now believe is confused, and mostly inaccurate. More precisely (in response to a comment by ChristianKl)

>Whose idea of reductionism are you criticising? I think your post could get more useful by being more clear about the idea you want to challenge.

I think this is closest I get to having a "Definiton 3.4.1" in my post

"...the other reductionism I mentioned, the 'big thing = small thing + small thing' one..."

Essentially, the claim is that to accurately explain reality, non-reductionist explanations aren't always *wrong*. 

The confusion, however, that I realized elsewhere in the thread, is that I conflate 'historical explanation' with 'predictive explanation'. Good predictive explanation will almost always be reductionist, because, as it says on the tin, big are made of smaller things. Good historical explanations, though, will be contra-reductionist, they'll explain phenomena in terms of its relation to the environment. Consider evolution; the genes seem to be explained non-reductionistically because their presence or absence is determined by its effect on the environment i.e. whether its fit, so the explanation for how it got there necessarily includes complex things because they cause it.

>Apart from that I don't know what you mean with theory in "Reductionism is a philosophy, not a theory." As a result on using a bunch of terms where I don't know exactly what you mean it's hard to follow your argument.

Artifact of confusion;  if contra-reductionism is a valid platform for explanation, then the value of reductionism isn't constative -- that is, it isn't about whether it's true or false, but something at the meta-level, rather than the object level. The antecedent is no longer believed, so now I do not believe the consequent.

The conceit I had by calling it a philosophy, or more accurately, a perspective, is essentially that you have a dataset, then you can apply a 'reductionist' filter on it to get reductionist explanations and a 'contra-reductionist' filter to get contra explanations. This was a confusion; and only seemed reasonable because I I was treating the two type of explanation -- historical and predictive -- as somehow equivalent, which I now know to be mistaken.

Reductionism is usually thought of as the assertion that the sum of the parts equal the whole. Or, a bit more polemically, that reductionist explanations more meaningful, proper, or [insert descriptor laced with postive affect]. It's certainly appealing, you could even say it seems reality prefers these types of explanation. The facts of biology can be attributed to the effects of chemistry, the reactions of chemistry can be attributed to the interplay of atoms, and so on.

But this is conflating what is seen with the perspective itself; I see a jelly donut therefore I am a jelly donut is not a valid inference. Reductionism is a way of thinking about facts, but it is not the facts themselves. Reductionism is a philosophy, not a theory. The closest thing to an testable prediction it makes it what could be termed an anti-prediction.

Another confusion concerns the alternatives to reductionism. The salient instance of anti-reduction tends to be some holist quantum spirituality woo, but I contend this is more of a weak man than anything. To alleviate any confusion, I'll just refer to my proposed notion as 'contra-reductionism'.

Earlier, I mentioned reductionism makes no meaningful predictions. To clarify this, I'll distinguish from a kind a diminutive motte of reductionism which may or may not actually exist outside my own mind, (and which truly is just a species of causality, broadly construed). In broad strokes, this reductionism 'reduces' a phenomena to the sum of it's causes, as opposed to its parts. This is the kind of reductionist explanation that treats evolution as a reductionist explanation, indeed it treats almost any model which isn't strictly random as 'reductionist'. The other referent would be reductionism as the belief that "big things are made of a smaller things, and complex things are made of simpler things". 

It's is the former kind of reductionism that makes what I labeled an anti-prediction, the core of this argument is simply that reductionist is about causality; specifically, it qualifies what types of causes should even be considered meaningful or well-founded or simply, worth thinking about. If you broaden the net sufficiently, causality is a concept which even makes sense to apply to mathematical abstraction completely unrooted in any kind of time. That is the interventionist account of causality essentially boils it down to 'what levers could we have pulled to make something not happen', which perfectly translates to maths, see, for instance, reductio ad absurdum arguments.

But I digress. This diminutive reductionism here is simply the belief that things can be reduced to their causes, which is on par with defining transhumanism as 'simplified humanism' in the category of useless philosophical mottes. In short, this is quite literally an assertion of no substance, and isn't even worth giving a name.

Now that I've finished attacking straw men, the other reductionism I mentioned, the 'big thing = small thing + small thing' one, is also flawed, albeit useful nonetheless.

This can be illustrated by the example of evolution I mentioned: An evolutionary explanation is actually anti-reductionist; it explains the placement of nucleotides in terms of mathematics like inclusive genetic fitness and complexities like population ecology. Put bluntly, the there is little object-level difference between explaining genes sequences with evolution and explaining weather with pantheons of gods (there is meta-level difference; i.e. one is accurate). Put less controversially, this is explicitly non-reductionistic; relatively simple things (the genetic sequence of a creature) are explained in the language of things far more complex (population and environment dynamics over the course of billions of years). If this is your reductionism, all it does is encapsulate the ontology of universe-space, or more evocatively, it's a logic that doesn't -- couldn't -- tell you where you live, because doesn't change wherever you may go.

Another situation where reductionism  and contra-reductionism give different answers is an example cribbed from David Deutsch. It's possible to set up dominos so that they compute an algorithm which decides the primality of 631. How would you explain a a positive result?

The reductionist explanation is approximately: "the domino remains standing because the one behind it didn't fall over", and so on with variation such as "that domino didn't fall over because the one behind it was knockovered sideways". The contra-reductionist explanation is "that domino didn't fall over "because 631 is prime". Each one is 'useful' depending on whether you are concerned with the mechanics of the domino computer or the theory.

You might detect something in these passages -- that while I slough off any pretense of reductionism, glorious (philosophical) materialism remains a kind of true north in my analysis. This is my thesis. My contra-reductionism isn't non-materialistic, it's merely a perspective inversion of the sort highlighted by a figure/ground illusion. Reductionism defines -- reduces -- objects by pointing to their constituents. A mechanism functions because its components function. A big thing of small things. Quasi-reductionism  does the opposite, it defined objects by their impact on other objects, "[A] tree is only a tree in the shade it gives to the ground below, to the relationship of wind to branch and air to leaf." I don't mean this in a spiritual way, naturally (no pun intended). I am merely defining objects externally rather than internally. At the core, the rose is still a rose, the sum is still normality.

If I had to give a short, pithy summation of this post, the core is simply that, like all systematized notions of truth or meaningfulness, reductionism collapses in degenerate cases where it fails to be useful or give the right answer. Contra-reductionism isn't a improvement or a replacement, but a alternative formulation in a conceptual monoculture, which happens to give right answer sometimes.

I'll make this short and sweet.

I've been reading Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, and it's been really helpful filling in some of the gaps I have in my understanding of how evolution actually works.

The last biology class I took was in high school, and I don't think the mechanics of evolution is covered particularly well in American high schools.

I'm looking for recommendations - has anyone read any books that accurately describe the process of evolution for someone without specialized knowledge of biology?  I've already checked LessWrong's recommended textbooks, and while it recommends some books on evolutionary psychology and on animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective, it doesn't appear to have anything that describes evolution itself in sufficient detail to model it.

I'm toying with the idea of trying to program an evolution simulator, and so I need a fairly detailed, accessible account.

Thanks for the help!

Epistemic status: speculating about things I'm not familiar with; hoping to be educated in the comments. This post is a question, not an answer.

ETA: this comment thread seems to be leading towards the best answer so far.

There's a question I've seen many times, most recently in Scott Alexander's recent links thread. This latest variant goes like this:

Old question “why does evolution allow homosexuality to exist when it decreases reproduction?” seems to have been solved, at least in fruit flies: the female relatives of gayer fruit flies have more children. Same thing appears to be true in humans. Unclear if lesbianism has a similar aetiology.

Obligate male homosexuality greatly harms reproductive fitness. And so, the argument goes, there must be some other selection pressure, one great enough to overcome the drastic effect of not having any children. The comments on that post list several other proposed answers, all of them suggesting a tradeoff vs. a benefit elsewhere: for instance, that it pays to have some proportion of gay men who invest their resources in their nieces and nephews instead of their own children.

But how do we know if this is a valid question - if the situation really needs to be explained at all?

I sure think it is!  But I could be wrong...

This is my first article/post? here and to be honest, I have this website open in another tab and I keep refreshing it to see if I still have enough points to post.  I wish I would have taken a screenshot every time my karma changed.  First it was 0, then it was -1, then it was back to 0, then I think it jumped up to 5.  I thought I was safe but then this morning it was down to 0.  So if this post seems "linky" then it might be because I'm trying to share as much information as I can while my window of opportunity is still open.  

Pragmatarianism (tax choice) is the belief that taxpayers should be able to choose where their taxes go.  Tax choice is the broad concept while pragmatarianism is my own personal spin on it... but sometimes I use "tax choice" when I mean pragmatarianism.  Eh, at this point I don't think it's a big deal.  Really the only thing nice about the word "pragmatarianism" is that it functions as a unique ID... which is extremely helpful when it comes to searches.  Don't have to worry about wading through irrelevant results. 

Here are some links from my blog which should help you decide whether pragmatarianism is more or less wrong...

Pragmatarianism FAQ - a good place to start.  It's pretty short.  

Key concepts - a work in progress.  Some of the concepts are linked to entries which have PDF files with a bunch of relevant quotes and passages.  If you like any of them then please share them in this thread... Quotes Repository.  I shared a few but they didn't fare so well... so I'm guessing that most people here aren't fans of economics... or they aren't fans of my economics. 

Progress as a Function of Freedom - hedging bets, the impossibility of hostile aliens, the problem with "rights".  

What Do Coywolves, Mr. Nobody, Plants And Fungi All Have In Common? - the universal drive to choose the most valuable option, the carrying model as an explanation for our intelligence, a bit on rationality.

Builderism - where better options come from, globalization, debunking Piketty, eliminating poverty. 

My Robin Hanson trilogy...

Is Robin Hanson's Path To Efficient Voting Pragmatic Or Brilliant Or Both? - maybe we should have a civic currency?

Rescuing Robin Hanson From Unmet Demand - how many other people are in the same boat?

Futarchy vs Pragmatarianism - is it logically inconsistent to support one but not the other?  

/trilogy.

AI Box Experiment vs Xero's Rule - my first brainstorm attempt to wrap my mind around the idea of an AI box.

Is A Procreation License Consistent With Libertarianism? - would a procreation license be less wrong?

Why I Love Your Freedom - my critique of the best critique of libertarianism.  A bit on rationality.

So what do you think?  Am I in the right place?  

What else?  Of course I'm an atheist!  And I love sci-fi... and for sure I want to live forever.  The major obstacle is that too many people fail to grasp that progress depends on difference.  I do my best to try and eliminate this obstacle.  Unfortunately I suck at writing and my drawings are even worse.  Oh well.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Summary of main point: I argue that there is a significant probability that creating de novo AGI is an intractable problem. Evolution only solved this problem because of anthropic reasons. Conclusions are drawn regarding priorities in AI risk research.

Sketch of main argument: There are suggestive relations between AGI and NP-completeness. These relations lead me to hypothesize that AGI programs posses large Levin-Kolmogorov complexity which implies that producing them is a computationally intractable problem. The timing of events in the evolution of human intelligence seems to be consistent with the assumption evolution's success is anthropic, if we postulate human intelligence as arising from a combination of two modules: an "easy" (low complexity) module and a "hard" (high complexity) module. Therefore, creating superhuman intelligence will require reverse engineering the human brain and be limited to improving the "easy" module (since creating a better "hard" module is again computationally intractable).

AGI and P vs. NP

There are several arguments the AGI problem is of a similar "flavor" to problems that are NP-complete.

The first argument is rather vague but IMO still compelling. Many class separations in complexity theory (P vs. NP, L vs. P, R vs. RE) hinge on the existence of a complete language. This means there is a single problem solving which under the stronger resource constraints would lead to solving all problems in the larger class. Similarly, Goedel incompleteness means there is no single algorithm (a program which terminates on all inputs) for proving all provable theorems. It feels like there is a principle of mathematics which rules out algorithms that are "too good to be true": a single "magic wand" to solve all problems. In a similar way, AGI is a "magic wand": it solves "all" problems because you can simply delegate them to the AGI.

Another argument has to do with Solomonoff induction. Solomonoff induction is incomputable but it becomes computable if we set a limit T on the run-time of the "hypotheses" (programs) we consider. However, the resulting computable induction carries an
O(T 2^T) slow-down penalty (the time it takes to run all possible hypotheses). On the other hand, the problem is easy modulo P^# and tractable given an NP-complete oracle given certain assumptions on the required probability accuracy.

Yet another argument goes through logical uncertainty. The latter is widely suspected to be an important component of AGI and there is a compelling relation between it and P vs. NP.

What does all of it mean? We certainly don't need an NP-oracle to construct an AGI since humans are "A"GIs and (presumably) there are no NP-oracles in our brain. To shed light on this, it is useful to take the quantitative point of view on AGI. Namely, there is a metric which rates programs according to how "intelligent" they are. From this point-of-view, an AGI is just a program which ranks high on this metric. The first such metric was suggested by Legg and Hutter and I improved on their construction by combining it with UDT.

This way the AGI design problem becomes an optimization problem: find a program with an intelligence metric as high as possible. The NP-connection now suggests the following conjecture: the AGI optimization program is of exponential complexity in program length. Of course we don't necessarily need the best program of a given length but the impression remains that AGI design is hard in some rigorous complexity theoretic sense. In particular, I'm guessing there should be a relation between the intelligence (in the precise quantitative sense) of a program and its Levin-Kolmogorov complexity.

The anthropic scenario

If we buy into the conjecture above, a glaring problem appears: if AGI design is so hard, how come evolution succeeded in it? After all, evolution is also a process with bounded computing resources. The only explanation that seems to remain is the anthropic one: evolution's a priori probability of success was insanely low but in an infinite universe it still succeeds infinitely many times and we observe one of these times for the obvious reason.

This explanation produces probabilistic predictions regarding the timing of events. For example, if there was no cosmological upper bound on when intelligence can appear we would expect it would appear extremely late. This is not the case in our universe (on a cosmological time scale). However, this is not difficult to explain since there is a relatively short time window in the lifetime of the universe in which suitable planets revolving suitable stars exist. In particular, on Earth in 0.6 billion years there won't be trees any more and in 1.1 billion years there won't oceans.

As well known, in scenarios with hard steps that are overcome anthropically, the hard steps are expected to be distributed on the timeline approximately uniformly. This seems to conflict with the most intuitive location of the intelligence hard step: somewhere between chimp and human. However, the apparent discrepancy goes away if we consider a model with two coupled "intelligence modules": an "easy" module E which is susceptible to non-anthropic evolutionary optimization and a "hard" module H which contains most of the Levin-Kolmogorov complexity and whose appearance is the hard step in question.

Before the hard step, an early version E1 of E co-evolves with a module h which performs a similar function to H but does it much worse (imagine a rough heuristic which works for many of the cases in a relatively narrow domain). During the hard step, H appears "out of the blue" due to sheer anthropic luck after which the E1-h "wire" is replaced by an E1-H wire. After the hard step, natural selection proceeds to transform E1 into its final version E2. This picture seems to be consistent with hard step happening to our chimp-like ancestor after which natural selection rapidly transformed the result into homo sapiens sapiens.

This scenario would be undermined if there was an "E-like" property of our ancestors which evolved shortly before the presumed hard step. What can this property be? The best candidate I can think of is the evolution of hands. Apparently, hands evolved 100 millions years ago. The ratio between this number and the remaining 600 million years doesn't seem to be small enough to rule out the anthropic scenario. The argument is made stronger if we take into account that there is an extinction event every 100 million years or so which means we can't reasonably expect a much larger time difference.

Consequences for future of mankind

If AGI is a computationally intractable problem, we won't be able to solve it "fairly" in the near future. However, we can use the existing solution: homo sapiens sapiens. This means reverse engineering the brain and either modifying it (improving module E) or extracting (emulating) H and writing E from scratch. It is not clear how much intelligence improvement to expect: on the one hand we're stuck with the current H on the other hand E might still have lots of room for improvement (which is intuitively likely). It is not clear whether the monopole (singleton) or multipole scenario is more likely. It feels to me that a singleton will require rewriting E and it will be easier to start tweaking it therefore multipole superhuman intelligence will be first.

Reverse engineering and modifying the brain is a project which is likely to require considerable resources and encounter enormous legal barriers. As opposed to de novo AGI, it is difficult to imagine it accomplished by a small group or any private organization. The most likely scenario seems to be a major government project in the spirit of Manhattan, Apollo or LHC. The currently prevailing culture / system of beliefs makes it extremely unlikely for the government of a liberal country to undertake such a project if the technology was available. If this circumstance doesn't change, the first government to try will be an authoritarian one like China. Such a government will ensure the resulting superhumans will have extreme built-in loyalty*, resulting in a world-wide superdictatorship. Therefore, the highest priority seems to be changing culture in a way that will ensure a supportive public opinion for a future friendly superintelligence project. Another high priority is continuing to develop the abstract mathematical theory to better understand the likelihood of this and other scenarios.

* I am assuming (or hoping) that no government will be stupid enough to try it before brain reverse engineering identifies the "utility function module"

EDIT: The treatment of anthropics in this post is unforgivably oversimplified. I'm hoping to a write a UDT-based analysis later. Also, thanks to Mark Friedenbach for point out the extremely relevant paper by Shulman and Bostrom.

EDIT: Incorporated suggestions from comments: Moved off-topic parts into comments, improved formatting, corrected links.

Definition

The LW post Value Deathism differntiates between the illusory nature of death and the 'desirability' of death called deathism proper. This post is about the latter. Where desirability is meant in a general sense and not (only) in the sense of desirable for an individual.

I propose a different more neutral term for deathism: Senexism - from the latin adjective senex - old.  I propose this because death is only the end of an aging process and by focussing on the ultimate and emotionally disturbing result one loads the topic with negative connotations. Senescence on the other hand - though unwanted - has also positive connotations of experience and humility. This also nicely splits off (or reduces applicability of) death by accident. 

Outline

My defense is twofold. First I address the (emotional) pain and loss death causes and point out adaptive affects of the coping mechanisms humans have. Second I address the actual benefits senescence and death has - not for the individual but for the group. Thus the latter is an utilitarian argument for death actually.

I will provide current research results for these points. At the end I will conclude with an opinion piece on what this means for rationalists and an outlook how this applies in light of the singularity. 

This is a small section on a paper I'm writing on moral enhancement. I'm trying to briefly summarize some of the points which were already made concerning local optima in evolutionary process and safety regarding taking humanity out of those local optima. You might find the text helpful in that it summarizes a very important concept. I don't think there's nothing new here, but I hope the way I tried to more properly phrase the utility-design trajectory space topology at the end can be fruitful. I would appreciate any insights you might have about that formulation in the end, how to better develop it more rigorously and some consequences. I do have some ideas, but I would want to hear what you have to say first.  Any other kind of general feedback on the text is also welcomed. But keep in mind this is just a section of a larger paper and I'm mainly interested in how to develop and what are the consequences of the framework at the end, rather than in properly developing any points in the middle.

Local optima are points where every nearby reachable positions are worse off, but there is at least one far away position which is vastly better. A strong case has been made that evolution often gets stuck on such local optima. In evolutionary processes, fitness is a monotonic function, i.e., it will necessarily increase or be maintained, any decrease in fitness will always be selected against. If there are vastly better solutions (for, e.g., solving cooperation problems) but in order to achieve those solutions organisms would have to pass through a lesser fit step, evolution will never reach that vastly better configuration. Evolutionary processes are limited by the topology of the fitness-design trajectory space, it can only go from design x to design y if there is at least one trajectory from x to y which is flat or ascendant, any trajectory momentarily descendent cannot be taken by the evolutionary processes. Say one is on the cyan ring ridge of the colored graphic. Although there is a vastly better configuration on the red peak, one would have to travel through the blue moat in order to get there. Unless one is a process who could pass through a sharp decrease in fitness, there would be no way of improving towards the red peak. Evolution is particularly prone to local optima due to fitness monotonicity. Enhancing human beings with the use of technology does not fall prey to the fitness monotonicity or any sort of utility monotonicity in general, we could initially make changes which would be harmful in order to latter achieve a vastly better configuration. Therefore, it seems plausible there would be a technological path out of evolution’s local optimum whereby we could rescue our species from these evolutionary imprisonments. Moreover, it is considered evolutionary local optima can be easily identifiable provided a careful, evolutionary and technical informed analysis is made. Hence these would be low-hanging fruits in the task for improving evolutionary products such as humans, easily accessible and able to produce great advances to humanity with little effort.

Nevertheless, it should be noted getting out of evolutionary local optima might not always be easy or even possible. Fitness does have a relatively strong correlation with overall human utility. And although human intelligence is not so dull as evolutionary process and does accept a decrease in utility in order to achieve a better design in the end, if the downward moat is deep enough, the risk of catastrophe - or much worse, extinction -, might not be worth taking. At least by being monotonic on a dimension correlated with utility, evolution was able to rightly avoid extreme losses. Perform widespread willy-nilly human enhancement, and we might fall on the moat guarding utility-design space garden’s delicious low-hanging fruits and not come back up. Particularly so in the case of moral enhancement, there is a self-reinforcing aspect of changing morality, motivations, values and desires. It might be the case tampering with deep and fundamental human morality is irreversible, because once we fundamentally value something else, we would not have any compelling reason for wanting to come back to our old values, desires or aspirations. Thus, it seems there are indeed cases where a small step past the edge of the moat will lead us to an irreversible path. To correctly map how each technology shapes utility-design trajectory space topology is a task deeply needed in order to carefully avoid falling on moats while attempting to reach local optima low-hanging fruits, or on even more dangerous existential holes. We ought to better get stuck at local optima than absolute minima. 

Utility-design trajectory space could be more properly defined as a space on R^n+u , a point there would use n-coordinates to locate all physically possible designs in all relevant dimensions n, it is defined by the laws of physics and by an utility function on u. A point will correspond to a design a iff all its neighbouring points x correspond to designs one physical step away from design a. Emergent designer processes such as evolution, human enhancement and AIs draw shapes on R^n+u by connecting points that are linked by one possible step under that process. Evolution’s hand is monotonic on dimension f, fitness, which makes for a pretty clumsy drawing. Biochemical human enhancement can more freely vary on f, but might contain other constraints elsewhere, that, e.g., uploaded minds would not. Extinctions correspond to singularities on u, once reached no other point is reachable, it designates lack of design. These points that can be reached but cannot reach need to be correctly mapped. It would also be relevant to investigate how each technology draws its specific shape on design space. Using u as some height analogue, some technologies might be inherently prone to shape moats with peaks on the middle, extinctions holes, effortless utility maximizing curves and so on. I believe moral enhancement draws a particularly bumpy hole-prone shape. FAI an ever utility-ascending shape, with all mishaps being existential holes.

Abstract: The study of cultural evolution has drawn much of its momentum from academic areas far removed from human and animal psychology, specially regarding the evolution of cooperation. Game theoretic results and parental investment theory come from economics, kin selection models from biology, and an ever growing amount of models describing the process of cultural evolution in general, and the evolution of altruism in particular come from mathematics. Even from Artificial Intelligence interest has been cast on how to create agents that can communicate, imitate and cooperate. In this article I begin to tackle the 'why?' question. By trying to retrospectively make sense of the convergence of all these fields, I contend that further refinements in these fields should be directed towards understanding how to create environmental incentives fostering cooperation.

We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us better than we tend to be. It seems to me that the greatest challenge we now face is to build them. - Sam Harris, 2013, The Power Of Bad Incentives

1) Introduction

2) Cultures evolve

Culture is perhaps the most remarkable outcome of the evolutionary algorithm (Dennett, 1996) so far. It is the cradle of most things we consider humane - that is, typically human and valuable - and it surrounds our lives to the point that we may be thought of as creatures made of culture even more than creatures of bone and flesh (Hofstadter, 2007; Dennett, 1992). The appearance of our cultural complexity has relied on many associated capacities, among them:

1) The ability to observe, be interested by, and go nearby an individual doing something interesting, an ability we share with norway rats, crows, and even lemurs (Galef & Laland, 2005).

2) Ability to learn from and scrounge the food of whoever knows how to get food, shared by capuchin monkeys (Ottoni et al, 2005).

3) Ability to tolerate learners, to accept learners, and to socially learn, probably shared by animals as diverse as fish, finches and Fins (Galef & Laland, 2005).

4) Understanding and emulating other minds - Theory of Mind- empathizing, relating, perhaps re-framing an experience as one's own, shared by chimpanzees, dogs, and at least some cetaceans (Rendella & Whitehead, 2001).

5) Learning the program level description of the action of others, for which the evidence among other animals is controversial (but see Cantor & Whitehead, 2013). And finally...

6) Sharing intentions. Intricate understanding of how two minds can collaborate with complementary tasks to achieve a mutually agreed goal (Tomasello et al, 2005).

Irrespective of definitional disputes around the true meaning of the word "culture" (which doesn't exist, see e.g. Pinker, 2007 pg115; Yudkowsky 2008A), each of these is more cognitively complex than its predecessor, and even (1) is sufficient for intra-specific non-environmental, non-genetic behavioral variation, which I will call "culture" here, whoever it may harm.

By transitivity, (2-6) allow the development of culture. It is interesting to notice that tool use, frequently but falsely cited as the hallmark of culture, is ubiquitously equiprobable in the animal kingdom. A graph showing, per biological family, which species shows tool use gives us a power law distribution, whose similarity with the universal prior will help in understanding that being from a family where a species uses tools tells us very little about a specie's own tool use (Michael Haslam, personal conversation).

Once some of those abilities are available, and given an amount of environmental facilities, need, and randomness, cultures begin to form. Occasionally, so do more developed traditions. Be it by imitation, program level imitation, goal emulation or intention sharing, information is transmitted between agents giving rise to elements sufficient to constitute a primeval Darwinian soup. That is, entities form such that they exhibit 1)Variation 2)Heredity or replication 3)Differential fitness (Dennett, 1996). In light of the article Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution (Henrich, Boyd & Richerson, 2008) we can improve Dennett's conditions for the evolutionary algorithm as 1)Discrete or continuous variation 2)Heredity, replication, or less faithful replication plus content attractors 3)Differential fitness. Once this set of conditions is met, an evolutionary algorithm, or many, begin to carve their optimizing paws into whatever surpassed the threshold for long enough. Cultures, therefore, evolve. 

The intricacies of cultural evolution and mathematical and computational models of how cultures evolve have been the subject of much interdisciplinary research, for an extensive account of human culture see Not By Genes Alone (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). For computational models of social evolution, there is work by Mesoudi, Novak, and others e.g. (Hauert et al, 2007). For mathematical models, the aptly named Mathematical models of social evolution: A guide for the perplexed by McElrath and Rob Boyd (2007) makes the textbook-style walk-through. For animal culture, see (Laland & Galef, 2009).

Cultural evolution satisfies David Deutsch's criterion for existence, it kicks back, it satisfies the evolutionary equivalent of the  condition posed by the Quine-Putnam Indispensability argument in mathematics, i.e. it is a sine qua non condition for understanding how the World works nomologically. It is falsifiable to Popperian content, and it inflates the Worlds ontology a little, by inserting a new kind of "replicator", the meme. Contrary to what happened on the internet, the name 'meme' has lost much of it's appeal within cultural evolution theorists, and "memetics" is considered by some to refer only to the study of memes as monolithic atomic high fidelity replicators, which would make the theory obsolete. This has created the following conundrum: the name 'meme' remains by far the most well known one to speak of "that which evolves culturally" within, and specially outside, the specialist arena. Further, the niche occupied by the word 'meme' is so conceptually necessary within the area to communicate and explain that it is frequently put under scare quotes, or some other informal excuse. In fact, as argued by Tim Tyler - who frequently posts here - in the very sharp Memetics (2010), there are nearly no reasons to try to abandon the 'meme' meme, and nearly all reasons (practicality, Qwerty reasons, mnemonics) to keep it. To avoid contradicting the evidence ever since Dawkins first coined the term, I suggest we must redefine Meme as an attractor in cultural evolution (dual-inheritance) whose development over time structurally mimics to a significant extent the discrete behavior of genes, frequently coinciding with the smallest unit of cultural replication. The definition is long, but the idea is simple: Memes are not the best analogues of genes because they are discrete units that replicate just like genes, but because they are continuous conceptual clusters being attracted to a point in conceptual space whose replication is just like that of genes. Even more simply, memes are the mathematically closest things to genes in cultural evolution. So the suggestion here is for researchers of dual-inheritance and cultural evolution to take off the scare quotes of our memes and keep business as usual.  

The evolutionary algorithm has created a new attractor-replicator, the meme, it didn't privilege with it any specific families in the biological trees and it ended up creating a process of cultural-genetic coevolution known as dual-inheritance. This process has been studied in ever more quantified ways by primatologists, behavioral ecologists, population biologists, anthropologists, ethologists, sociologists, neuroscientists and even philosophers. I've shown at least six distinct abilities which helped scaffold our astounding level of cultural intricacy, and some animals who share them with us. We will now take a look at the evolution of cooperation, collaboration, altruism, moral behavior, a sub-area of cultural evolution that saw an explosion of interest and research during the last decade, with publications (most from the last 4 years) such as The Origins of Morality, Supercooperators, Good and Real, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Non-Zero, The Moral Animal, Primates and Philosophers, The Age of Empathy, Origins of Altruism and Cooperation, The Altruism Equation, Altruism in Humans, Cooperation and Its Evolution, Moral Tribes, The Expanding Circle, The Moral Landscape.

3) Cooperation evolves

Shortly describe why and show some inequations under which cooperation is an equelibrium, or at least an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.

4) The complexity of cultural items doesn't undermine the validity of mathematical models.

 4.1) Cognitive attractors and biases substitute for memes discreteness

The math becomes equivalent.

 4.2) Despite the Unilateralist Curse and the Tragedy of the Commons, dyadic interaction models help us understand large scale cooperation

Once we know these two failure modes, dyadic iterated (or reputation-sensitive) interaction is close enough.

5) From Monkeys to Apes to Humans to Transhumans to AIs, the ranges of achievable altruistic skill.

Possible modes of being altruistic. Graph like Bostrom's. Second and third order punishment and cooperation. Newcomb-like signaling problems within AI.

6) Unfit for the Future: the need for greater altruism.

We fail and will remain failing in Tragedy of the Commons problems unless we change our nature.

7) From Science, through Philosophy, towards Engineering: the future of studies of altruism.

Philosophy: Existential Risk prevention through global coordination and cooperation prior to technical maturity. Engineering Humans: creating enhancements and changing incentives. Engineering AI's: making them better and realer.

8) A different kind of Moral Landscape

Like Sam Harris's one, except comparing not how much a society approaches The Good Life (Moral Landscape pg15), but how much it fosters altruistic behaviour.

9) Conclusions

I haven't written yet, so I don't have any!

Bibliography (_{Only of the part already written, obviously}):

Cantor, M., & Whitehead, H. (2013). The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 368(1618).

Dennett, D. C. (1996). Darwin's dangerous idea: Evolution and the meanings of life (No. 39). Simon & Schuster.

Dennett, D. C. (1992). The self as a center of narrative gravity. Self and consciousness: Multiple perspectives.

Galef Jr, B. G., & Laland, K. N. (2005). Social learning in animals: empirical studies and theoretical models. Bioscience, 55(6), 489-499.

Hauert, C., Traulsen, A., Brandt, H., Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (2007). Via freedom to coercion: the emergence of costly punishment. science, 316(5833), 1905-1907.

Henrich, J., Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2008). Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution. Human Nature, 19(2), 119-137.

Hofstadter, D. R. (2007). I am a Strange Loop. Basic Books

McElreath, R., & Boyd, R. (2007). Mathematical models of social evolution: A guide for the perplexed. University of Chicago Press.

Ottoni, E. B., de Resende, B. D., & Izar, P. (2005). Watching the best nutcrackers: what capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) know about others’ tool-using skills. Animal cognition, 8(4), 215-219.

Persson, I., & Savulescu, J. Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0199653645 (HB)£ 21.00. 160pp. On the brink of civil war, Abraham Lincoln stood on the steps of the US Capitol and appealed.

Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. Viking Adult.

Rendella, L., & Whitehead, H. (2001). Culture in whales and dolphins.Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 309-382.

Richardson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone. University of Chicago Press.

Tyler, T. (2011). Memetics: Memes and the Science of Cultural Evolution. Tim Tyler.

Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition.Behavioral and brain sciences, 28(5), 675-690.

Yudkowsky, E. (2008A). 37 ways words can be wrong. Available at http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/

Returned to original title, for the good reasons given here

There was a recent post in Discussion which at time of this writing held staggering 454 commentaries, which inclined me to write an evolutionary psychology and social endocrinology derived post on courtship, and Mating Intelligence, to share some readings on recent discussions and evidence coming from those areas. I've been meaning to do this for a while, and a much longer version could have been written, with more specific case studies and citations and an academic outlook, yet I find this abridged personal version more adequate for Lesswrong. In no area more disclaimers are desirable than when speaking about evolutionary drives for mating. It touches emotions, gender issues, morality, societal standards, and it speaks of topics that make people shy, embarrassed, angry and happy on a weekly basis, so I'll begin with a few paragraphs of disclaimers.

I'll try to avoid saying anything that I can remember having read in a Pick Up Artist book, and focus on using less known mating biases to help straight women and men find what they look for in different contexts. This post won't work well for same-gender seduction. If you object irrevocably to evolutionary psychology, just so stories, etc... I suggest you refrain from commenting, and also reading, why bother?

Words of caution on reading people (me included) talking about evolutionary psychology, specially when applied to current people: Suspicious about whether there is good evidence for it? Read this first, then if you want Eliezer on the evolutionary-cognitive difference, and this if your feminist taste buds activate negatively. If you never heard of Evolutionary Psychology (which includes 8 different bodies of data to draw from), check also an Introduction with Dawkins and Buss.

When I say "A guy does D when G happens" please read: "There are statistically significant, or theoretically significant reasons from social endocrinology, or social and evolutionary psychology to believe that under circumstances broadly similar to G, human males, on average, will be inclined towards behaving in manners broadly similar to the D way. Also, most tests are made with western human males, tests are less than 40 years old,  subject to publication bias, and sometimes done by people who don't understand math well enough to do their statistics homework, they have not been replicated several times, and they are less homogenous than physics, because psychology is more complex than physics."

If you couldn't care less for theory, and just want the advice, go to the Advice Session.

Misconceptions

Thusfar in Evolutionary Psychology it seems that our genes come equipped with two designs that become activated through environmental cues to think about mating.

Short-term mating

Long-term mating

Knowing this is becoming mainstream. The state of the art term is Mating Intelligence, and it has these two canonical modes that can be activated, depending on factors as diverse as being informed that X is leaving town in two days, and detecting X's level of testosterone, accounting for his height and status, and calculating whether his genes are worth more or less than his future company. If you choose to read the linked books, then you'll delve in this much deeper than I have, so stop reading this, and write a post of your own afterwards.

I'll list some main misconceptions, then suggest how to use either the misconceptions, or the theory mentioned while explaining them to optimize for whatever you want from the opposite gender individuals at a particular moment.

Misconception 1: Guys do Short-term, Girls do Long-term, unless they don't have this option.

This is false. Guys are very frequently pair bonded, most times even before women are, both have oxytocin levels going up after sex, and both have high levels of oxytocin during relationships. Girls only have less frequent causal intercourse because it is hard to find males worthy of the 2 year raising a baby period, or in the case in which they are pair-bonded already, because of the risk of the cuckolded "father" leaving, fighting her, or recognizing the baby ain't his. Obviously, no one's brain has managed to completely catch up with condoms and open relationships yet.

Misconception 2: Women go for the bad guys (if I remember my American Pie's correctly, also called jocks in US) and good guys, nerds, and conventionals are left last. 

'Bad guys' is a popular name for high testosterone, risk taking, little routine individuals. And indeed when a woman's short-term mating intelligence program is activated, which happens particularly when she is ovulating and young (even when she's close married/relationshiped) she does exhibit a preference for such types. When optimizing for long-term partners, the reverse is true.

Misconception 3: Guys just go for looks, Girls just go for status. 

Toned down reality: Guys in short-term mating mode go for looks, Girls in long-term mating mode care substantially for the difference between lower than average status and average status, then marginal utility decreases and more status is defeated by other desirable traits.

Women in short-term mode do not optimize for status, they'll take a bus-boy who shows through size, melanin, symmetry and chin that he survived local pathogens despite his high testoterone, she's after resistant genes, not resources. Men in long term mode still optimize for looks, but not that much, kindness and emotional stability take over when marginal returns for more beauty start subsiziding.

Misconception 4: When genders optimize for Status, Status=Money.

Unlike all known primate and cetacean species, Humans daily deal with being high, low, and medium status in different hierarchical situations. This should be as obvious as not to be worth mentioning, but sadly there are strong media incentives, and for some reason I don't understand well strong reasons within English and American culture to pretend that women go for status, status=money, therefore women go for money, and men should make more money. It may be a selection effect, the societies that financially took over the world believed that being financially powerful was the best way to get laid, or marry. It may just be that marketing these things together (using sexy women to sell cars) created a long-term pavlovian association. Fact is that it unfortunately happened, and people believe it, despite it being false. Women who begin believing it sometimes force themselves into doing it even more. 

Status has no universal measure. If you met someone in Basketball team, status will be how good that person is plus their game attitude. If in a class at university, maybe it will be how well spoken the person is in the relevant topic. Status can be how much food the person usually shares with groups, or how much they can ask for others without being very apologetic. It can be how many women sleep with a man, or how many he can afford to reject. It can be how many purses a woman has, or how she can show thrift and a sense of belonging to a community that identifies as anti-consumerist. Some minds assign status based on location of birth, race, hair color etc...   (In my city, Japanese women, all the 400.000, are commonly assumed to be high status). Finally, men do optimize for the trait people think as status, explained below, in long-term mates. 

Even in the case where status plays the largest role, women when activating long-term reasoning, status is only one factor out of four multiplicants that are important for the same reason, and detected, in a prospective male mate:  

Kindness*Dependability*(Ambition-Age)*Status = How many resources a man is expected to share with you and your hypothetical kids.

And this does not even begin to account for any physical trait, nor intelligence, humour, energy levels etc... If you take one thing out of this text, take this: Make your beliefs about what status is pay rent. Test if status is what people think it is, or something that only roughly correlates with that. Sophisticate your status modules, they may have been corrupted.

Misconception 5: Once you learn what your mind is doing when it selects mates, you should make it get better at that.

Let's begin by reaffirming the obvious: We live in a world that has nothing to do with savannahs where our minds spent a long time. We can access thousands, if not millions of people, during a lifetime. We have condoms and contraceptives. We live in an era of abundance compared to any other time in history, and in societies so large, that the moral norms constraining what "everyone will know" do not apply anymore.

So the last thing you want to do is to make your mind really sharp and accurate when judging a potential mate through its natural algorithms. What you want to do, to the extent that it is possible, is to override your algorithms with something that is better, and better is one of these two things:

1) Increasing your likelihood of mating with the individual (or class of individuals) you want to mate with in a matched time-horizon (long if you want long, for instance).

2) Enlarging the scope of individuals you want to mate with to include more people you actually do, will or can get to know. 

Advice

To give better advice, I'll first mention general advice anyone can use, and then specific advice for the four quadrants. For those who will say this is the Dark Arts, I say it would be if we lived in a Savannah without condoms, heating, medicine, houses or internets. Now it looks to me more like causing one-self, and one's beloved, to be more epistemically rational.

General Advice

Women, be confident: If you are a woman, be more confident, way more confident, when approaching a guy, don't be aggressive, just safe, you mind is tuned with who knows how many trigger devices that may make you afraid of a no, of being thought of as slutty, of losing face, and of the guy not raising your kids. Discount for all that, twice. Don't do it if everyone really will know, or if you actually want kids from that guy.

Use your best horizon features: If you have a trait that the other gender optimizes for more in short-term, lure them by acting short-term, even if later you'll attempt to raise their oxytocin to the long-term point. If you have goods and ills on both time horizons, switch back and forth until you grasp what they want. 

Discount for population size: There are two ways of doing that, one is to reason to yourself "I may not be as attractive as Natalie Portman or Brad Pitt, but our minds are tuned to trying to get the best few achievable mates out of a group of 100-1000, not of hundreds of millions, so I do stand a very good chance" The other is nearly opposite: "I may think that I should only marry a prince, or sleep with Iron Man, but in fact my world is much smaller than this, and my mind will be totally okay to mate with Adam, that cool guy."

Be hedonistic: For men and women alike, the main way evolution got us into intercourse was by making it fun. The reasons it got us out are related to unlikelihood of leaving great-grandchildren, energy waste, disease, and lowered status. Of those, only a subset of lowered status is still significant in a world full of condoms. Other than women when aiming at long-term only, everyone is completely under-calibrated for sex, since we substantially reduced the risks without reducing the hedonic benefits nearly as much.

Use fetishes and peculiarities: There are things each particular person is attracted to more than everyone else (for me that's freckles, red/orange/blue/purple hair, upper back, and short women). Use that in your favour, less competition, as simple as that.

Go places: There are better and worse places to find mates. Short-terming males (a temporary condition in which any male may find himself, not a kind of male) abound in dancing clubs, military facilities and sports areas, not to mention OkCupid. Long-terming females (same) abound on courses and classes of yoga, dancing, cooking, languages, etc...  Long-terming males usually have more of a routine, so are more frequent on saturdays and fridays than on a tuesday late evening, they'll be more frequent wherever no one naturally would go to find a one night stand, or in groups that are preselected for strong emotions (low thresholds for falling in love) Short-terming females may exist in dancing clubs, bars and other related areas, but are very high value due to comparative scarcity when in these areas, someone looking for them is better off in groups with a small majority of women, where social tension and hierarchies don't scale up in either gender.

Specific Advice

Note: The advice is about things you should do in addition to what you naturally tend to do in those situations, you already have the algorithms, and should just improve calibration, unless when explicited, the suggestion is not to substitute what you naturally tend to do, or this would be a book all by itself explaining 4 kinds of human courtship.

For Long-terming Men: Stop freaking out about financial status. Find a place where you are among the great ones in something, specially kindness, dependability, physical constitution, and symmetry which guys think of less frequently than Successful startups or Tennis worldchampions. If you are hot, use short-term, women are particularly more prone to switching from short to long-term. Get a dog, show you are able and willing to take care of something unspeakably cute and adorable. Be ambitious in your projects, show passion. While ambitious and passionate, also make sure she realizes (truly) that you notice things about her no one else does, find out her values, talk about shared ones, and be non aggressively curious about all of them.  Show her kindness in small gestures that need not cost a lot, such as time consuming hand-made presents. Test OkCupid and see if it works for you. Memorize details about her personality, assure her you can be loving specifically to her. Postpone sex a little bit. May sound hard, but is a reliable indicator that you won't change her for the next that quickly. Rationally override any emotion you may have regarding her sexual behavior, show you are not agressive and jealous, thus making her "(be) (a)lieve unconsciously" that you will not kill her in an assault of hatred when she sleeps with hypothetical another man whose child will never exist and get some years of schooling from you. If you think you can tell the wheat from the chaff, separate the PUA stuff that works for long-term, if not, read softer confidence/influence/seduction material. Use oxytocin inducing media (TV series and romantic movies). Rest assured, there are more women looking for long-term men than the opposite, aid the odds by going places. Show sympathy, kindness (to others as well) and dependability whenever you can.

For Long-terming Women: If you've been convinced by financial status gospel, stop freaking out about it. If you just account for the 4 factors in the equation above, you'll be way ahead of everyone within the gospel trance, then there are still all the other things you look for in a guy, which by themselves are very important. Sure, a classic indicator is how much other women in your social group like him, and, good as it is, it is defined in terms of competition, try to discount this one, after all, it is partially just made of a conformity bias, a bad bias to have when looking for a long-term mate. Be very nice and kind, and almost silly near the guy. The kinds of guys who are Long-terming most of the time are those who won't approach you that frequently. Also, older guys obviously have less chaos on in their minds and lives, so are more likely to want to settle down for a few years. Postpone sex in proportion to how much you suspect the guy is Short-terming. The importance of this cannot be overstated. By postponing sex (and sex alone) you make sure Short-termers still have a good reason to be around you until suddenly there is a hormonal overload and they fall in love with you (not that romantic, but mildly accurate), love's trigger is activated by many factors, when they sum above a threshold. The most malleable of these factors is time investment, give a guy mixed short long signals, and you'll increase likelihood of surpassing the threshold. Also, give known guys a second chance, many times your algorithms friendzoned (sorry for the term) them for reasons as silly as "he didn't touch me the first time we met, and I didn't feel his smell, because the table was wide" or "That day I was in Short-term mode and this other guy had more easily detectable attractive features, leaving John on the omega mental slot". Forget romantic comedies and princess tales where your role is passive. A man's love is actively conquered by a woman, you are the one who will fight dragons - frequently RPG dragons - for the guy in the beggining, not the opposite, the opposite comes later as a prize. 

For Short-terming Guys: Read Pick Up Artist books, actually do the exercises, as in don't find excuses for why you can't, do them. Don't do anything that disgusts you morally, which may be nearly all of it, but do all the rest. Other than that?... Some few things, very few indeed, were left out of those books. Optimize more than anything for your fetishes and specific desires to avoid competition. Use mildly tense situations which can be confounded with arousal (narrow bridges get you more dates than wide bridges). Woman's attractiveness peaks at approximately 1,73cm 5 feet 8 inches, shorter women are more likely to have had less home stability and developmental stability when young, which triggers more frequent short-terming, looking for testosterone indicators (square chin, prominent forehead, and specially having a ring-finger longer than index-finger) also helps, and it is fun because you can claim to read hands and actually make good predictions out of it.

For Short-terming Girls: I'll start with easy stuff, and escalate quickly to extremely high probability even in tough cases, such as he's not on the mood, tired, really shy, or (you think) not excited. Quite likely the main obstacle is inside your mind, not your clothes, either fear of rejection, or fear of reputational cost or something else. Be confident. Few guys will reject a subtle, feminine, discrete and firm sex "offer" (notice how language itself puts it). Look at him, smile, touch him while you speak, look intensely at his mouth while slowly approaching, make sure to try do this where he is unlikely to be paying some reputational cost (not on his aunt's marriage). If feeling clumsy, mention you do. When short-terming, men really do optimize for looks, so decrease light levels, and avoid available-female company, like asking him out to check a bookstore, or to see a movie. Sit near him while touching him, cut the conversation at some point, kiss him (remember to do that where neither of you may get embarrassed with anyone else). Before, talk about sexuality naturally and imagetically, say how it is important to you to be embraced, desired, enticed, penetrated, transformed inside, and arise re-energized the next day to go back to your life. If you are sure he is short-terming, make yourself scarce by mentioning time constraints. Carry condoms and pick them up while making up if he is still hesitant whether you want sex or not. But be cozy and reassure him "It's okay" if it feels like he nervous. If you are confortable with that, use the web, there are tons of Short-terming guys, and if you feel embarassed to meet a man who would reject you, you are safeguarded by being filtered beforehand through your pictures and description or by the bang with friends app. On the web, be upfront about your intentions, and assure them you are not a scam/bot/adv. When almost there, if he is not excited, it is not because you are not attractive to him, don't be passive, slowly touch and rub his genital, quite likely he's just nervous and you are disputing against his sympathetic system, when you and the parasympathetic win, he'll be excited and relaxed, and the party is on. If you live in a large urban area, go to swing places alone or with acquaintances, not friends - nowhere else there will be that many guys willing to have sex right there, right now, and the necessary infrastructure for it, in a safe environment with security guards, other high-class women etc... to make sure you are not getting into trouble - In short, guarantee situations in which neither him nor you pay reputational costs, be active yet reassuring, lower light levels, avoid competition and make sure there is infrastructure for the act.

The saying goes that you can't achieve happiness by trying to be happy (thought you can if you optimize for happiness, i.e. by reading positive psychology and acting on it). To some extent, it is also true that a lot of what goes on during courtship does not take place while actively and consciously focusing on courtship. It is one thing to keep those misconceptions and advices in mind, and a whole different thing to be obsessed about them and use them as cognitive canonical maxims for behaving, the point of writing this is to help, if it stops being helpful, stop using it.

Edit: Scrambled sources:

At a recent Reddit AMA, Eric Lander, a professor of biology who played an important part in the Human Genome Project, answered this question:

Do you think immortatility is technically possible for human beings?

His response:

I don't think immortality is technically possible -- evolution has installed many many mechanisms to ensure that organisms die and make room for the next generation. I bet it is going to be very hard to completely overcome all these mechanisms.

This seems to me, at first blush, to exhibit the Evolution of Species Fairy fallacy. Evolution doesn't work to benefit species, populations, or the "next generation". If a mutation arises that increases longevity, and has no other downsides, then animals with that mutation should become more common in the gene pool, because they die less often. I remember reading that the effect would not be very strong, because most animals don't die of old age. But why would there be the opposite effect?

I am loath to attribute a very basic error to a distinguished professor of biology. Is there another explanation? Is the claim that evolution selects for mortality true?

Note: Eric went on to add:

I'm also not convinced immortality is such a good idea. A lot of human progress depends on having a new generation with new ideas. Immortality may equal stagnation.

This seems to be blatant rationalization of a preconceived idea that death is good. (I doubt he truly believes that extra progress is worth everybody dying.) So perhaps his first statement is also a form of rationalization. But it seems improbable to me that he would make such a statement about biology if he didn't think it well-founded. More likely there's something I'm misunderstanding.

ETA: one of the first Google results is this page at nature.com, The Evolution of Aging by Daniel Fabian, which goes into some depth on the subject. The bottom line is that it agrees with my expectation that evolution does not select for mortality. Choice quotes:

The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, for example, argued in his De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) that aging and death are beneficial because they make room for the next generation (Bailey 1947), a view that persisted among biologists well into the 20th century. [...] 

A more parsimonious evolutionary explanation for the existence of aging therefore requires an explanation that is based on individual fitness and selection, not on group selection. This was understood in the 1940's and 1950's by three evolutionary biologists, J.B.S. Haldane, Peter B. Medawar and George C. Williams, who realized that aging does not evolve for the "good of the species". Instead, they argued, aging evolves because natural selection becomes inefficient at maintaining function (and fitness) at old age. Their ideas were later mathematically formalized by William D. Hamilton and Brian Charlesworth in the 1960's and 1970's, and today they are empirically well supported. Below we review these major evolutionary insights and the empirical evidence for why we grow old and die. 

How could a distinguished professor of biology, a leader of the HGP and advisor to the US President, get something so elementary wrong, when even a biology undergrad dropout like myself notices this seems wrong?

ETA #2: Gwern points to the Wikipedia article on Evolution of Ageing, which lists several competing theories of the evolution of aging (and therefore mortality). This shows the subject is more complex than I had thought and there may be good reason to believe mortality is selected for by evolution (or at least is reliably linked to something else that is selected). 

I should be glad that I didn't discover an obvious error being committed by a distinguished professional, even if he may be ultimately wrong!

I was surprised to see the high number of moral realists on Less Wrong, so I thought I would bring up a (probably unoriginal) point that occurred to me a while ago.

Let's say that all your thoughts either seem factual or fictional.  Memories seem factual, stories seem fictional.  Dreams seem factual, daydreams seem fictional (though they might seem factual if you're a compulsive fantasizer).  Although the things that seem factual match up reasonably well to the things that actually are factional, this isn't the case axiomatically.  If deviating from this pattern is adaptive, evolution will select for it.  This could result in situations like: the rule that pieces move diagonally in checkers seems fictional, while the rule that you can't kill people seems factual, even though they're both just conventions.  (Yes, the rule that you can't kill people is a very good convention, and it makes sense to have heavy default punishments for breaking it.  But I don't think it's different in kind from the rule that you must move diagonally in checkers.)

I'm not an expert, but it definitely seems as though this could actually be the case.  Humans are fairly conformist social animals, and it seems plausible that evolution would've selected for taking the rules seriously, even if it meant using the fact-processing system for things that were really just conventions.

Another spin on this: We could see philosophy as the discipline of measuring, collating, and making internally consistent our intuitions on various philosophical issues.  Katja Grace has suggested that the measurement of philosophical intuitions may be corrupted by the desire to signal on the part of the philosophy enthusiasts.  Could evolutionary pressure be an additional source of corruption?  Taking this idea even further, what do our intuitions amount to at all aside from a composite of evolved and encultured notions?  If we're talking about a question of fact, one can overcome evolution/enculturation by improving one's model of the world, performing experiments, etc.  (I was encultured to believe in God by my parents.  God didn't drop proverbial bowling balls from the sky when I prayed for them, so I eventually noticed the contradiction in my model and deconverted.  It wasn't trivial--there was a high degree of enculturation to overcome.)  But if the question has no basis in fact, like the question of whether morals are "real", then genes and enculturation will wholly determine your answer to it.  Right?

Yes, you can think about your moral intuitions, weigh them against each other, and make them internally consistent.  But this is kind of like trying to add resolution back in to an extremely pixelated photo--just because it's no longer obviously "wrong" doesn't guarantee that it's "right".  And there's the possibility of path-dependence--the parts of the photo you try to improve initially could have a very significant effect on the final product.  Even if you think you're willing to discard your initial philosophical conclusions, there's still the possibility of accidentally destroying your initial intuitional data or enculturing yourself with your early results.

To avoid this possibility of path-dependence, you could carefully document your initial intuitions, pursue lots of different paths to making them consistent in parallel, and maybe even choose a "best match".  But it's not obvious to me that your initial mix of evolved and encultured values even deserves this preferential treatment.

Currently, I disagree with what seems to be the prevailing view on Less Wrong that achieving a Really Good Consistent Match for our morality is Really Darn Important.  I'm not sure that randomness from evolution and enculturation should be treated differently from random factors in the intuition-squaring process.  It's randomness all the way through either way, right?  The main reason "bad" consistent matches are considered so "bad", I suspect, is that they engender cognitive dissonance (e.g. maybe my current ethics says I should hack Osama Bin Laden to death in his sleep with a knife if I get the chance, but this is an extremely bad match for my evolved/encultured intuitions, so I experience a ton of cognitive dissonance actually doing this).  But cognitive dissonance seems to me like just another aversive experience to factor in to my utility calculations.

Now that you've read this, maybe your intuition has changed and you're a moral anti-realist.  But in what sense has your intuition "improved" or become more accurate?

I really have zero expertise on any of this, so if you have relevant links please share them.  But also, who's to say that matters?  In what sense could philosophers have "better" philosophical intuition?  The only way I can think of for theirs to be "better" is if they've seen a larger part of the landscape of philosophical questions, and are therefore better equipped to build consistent philosophical models (example).

This essay at Edge touches on a few possible meanings for the term "group selection." Pinker argues that as a form of memetic theory it has no explanatory power, and that group selection for genes does not fit the evidence. He focuses on humans with some mention of insects that live in hives. So the essay doesn't seem surprising, but it does seem rather Hansonian.

An interesting new article, "Cooperation and the evolution of intelligence", uses a simple one-hidden-layer neural network to study the selection for intelligence in iterated prisoners' dilemma and iterated snowdrift dilemma games.

The article claims that increased intelligence decreased cooperation in IPD, and increased cooperation in ISD.  However, if you look at figure 4 which graphs that data, you'll see that on average it decreased cooperation in both cases.  They state that it increased cooperation in ISD based on a Spearman rank test.  This test is deceptive in this case, because it ignores the magnitude of differences between datapoints, and so the datapoints on the right with a tiny but consistent increase in cooperation outweigh the datapoints on the left with large decreases in cooperation.

This suggests that intelligence is an externality, like pollution.  Something that benefits the individual at a cost to society.  They posit the evolution of intelligence as an arms race between members of the species.

ADDED: The things we consider good generally require intelligence, if we suppose (as I expect) that consciousness requires intelligence.  So it wouldn't even make sense to conclude that intelligence is bad.  Plus, intelligence itself might count as a good.

However, humans and human societies are currently near some evolutionary equilibrium.  It's very possible that individual intelligence has not evolved past its current levels because it is at an equilibrium, beyond which higher individual intelligence results in lower social utility.  In fact, if you believe SIAI's narrative about the danger of artificial intelligence and the difficulty of friendly AI, I think you would have to conclude that higher individual intelligence results in lower expected social utility, for human measures of utility.

I recently read (in Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale) about the Alu sequence, and went on to read about transposons generally.  Having as I do a rather broad definition of life, I concluded that Alu (and others like it) are lifeforms in their own right, although parasitic ones.  I found the potential ethical implications somewhat staggering, especially given the need to shut up and multiply those implications by the rather large number of transposon instances in a typical multicellular organism.

I have written out my thoughts on the subject, at http://jttlov.no-ip.org/writings/alulife.htm.  I don't claim to have a well-worked out position, just a series of ideas and questions I feel to be worthy of discussion.

ETA: I have started editing the article based on the discussion below.  For reference with the existing discussion, I have preserved a copy of the original article as well, linked from the current version.

Summary

We should not expect evolution of complex psychological and cognitive adaptations in the timeframe in which, morphologically, animal bodies can only change by very little. The genetic alteration to the cognition for speech shouldn't be expected to be dramatically more complex than the alteration of vocal cords.

Evolutions that did not happen

When humans descended from trees and became bipedal, it would have been very advantageous to have an eye or two on back of the head, for detection of predators and to protect us against being back-stabbed by fellow humans. This is why all of us have an extra eye on the back of our heads, right? Ohh, we don't. Perhaps the mate selection resulted in the poor reproductive success of the back-eyed hominids. Perhaps the tribes would kill any mutant with eyes on the back.

There are pretty solid reasons why none the above has happened, and can't happen in such timeframes. The evolution does not happen simply because the trait is beneficial, or because there's a niche to be filled. A simple alteration to the DNA has to happen, causing a morphological change which results in some reproductive improvement; then DNA has to mutate again, etc. The unrelated nearly-neutral mutations may combine resulting in an unexpected change (for example, the wolves have many genes that alter their size; random selection of genes produces approximately normal distribution of the sizes; we can rapidly select smaller dogs utilizing the existing diversity). There's no such path rapidly leading up to an eye on back of the head. The eye on back of the head didn't evolve because evolution couldn't make that adaptation.

The speed of evolution is severely limited. The ways in which evolution can work, too, are very limited. In the time in which we humans have got down from the trees, we undergone rather minor adaptation in the shape of our bodies, as evident from the fossil record - and that is the degree of change we should expect in rest of our bodies including our brains.

The correct application of evolutionary theory should be entirely unable to account for outrageous hypothetical like extra eye on back of our heads (extra eye can evolve, of course, but would take very long time). Evolution is not magic. The power of scientific theory is that it can't explain everything, but only the things which are true - that's what makes scientific theory useful for finding the things that are true, in advance of observation. That is what gives science it's predictive power. That's what differentiates science from religion. The power of not explaining the wrong things.

Evolving the instincts

What do we think it would take to evolve a new innate instinct? To hard-wire a cognitive mechanism?

Groups of neurons have to connect in the new ways - the neurons on one side must express binding proteins, which would guide the axons towards them; the weights of the connections have to be adjusted. Majority of the genes expressed in neurons, affect all of the neurons; some affect just a group, but there is no known mechanism by which an entirely arbitrary group's bindings may be controlled from the DNA in 1 mutation. The difficulties are not unlike those of an extra eye. This, combined with above-mentioned speed constraints, imposes severe limitations on which sorts of wiring modifications humans could have evolved during the hunter gatherer environment, and ultimately the behaviours that could have evolved. Even very simple things - such as preference for particular body shape of the mates - have extreme hidden implementation complexity in terms of the DNA modifications leading up to the wiring leading up to the altered preferences. Wiring the brain for a specific cognitive fallacy is anything but simple. It may not always be as time consuming/impossible as adding an extra eye, but it is still no little feat.

Junk evolutionary psychology

It is extremely important to take into account the properties of evolutionary process when invoking evolution as explanation for traits and behaviours.

The evolutionary theory, as invoked in the evolutionary psychology, especially of the armchair variety, all too often is an universal explanation. It is magic that can explain anything equally well. Know of a fallacy of reasoning? Think up how it could have worked for the hunter gatherer, make a hypothesis, construct a flawed study across cultures, and publish.

No considerations are given for the strength of the advantage, for the size of 'mutation target', and for the mechanisms by which the mutation in the DNA would have resulted in the modification of the circuitry such as to result in the trait, nor to the gradual adaptability. All of that is glossed over entirely in common armchair evolutionary psychology, and unfortunately, even in the academia. The evolutionary psychology is littered with examples of traits which are alleged to have evolved over the same time during which we had barely adapted to walking upright.

It may be that when describing behaviours, a lot of complexity can be hidden into very simple-sounding concepts; and thus it seems like a good target for evolutionary explanation. But when you look at the details - the axons that have to find the targets; the gene must activate in the specific cells, but not others - there is a great deal of complexity in coding for even very simple traits.

Note: I originally did not intend to make an example of junk, for thou should not pick a strawman, but for sake of clarity, there is an example of what I would consider to be junk: the explanation of better performance at Wason Selection Task as result of evolved 'social contracts module', without a slightest consideration for what it might take, in terms of DNA, to code a Wason Selection Task solver circuit, nor for alternative plausible explanation, nor for a readily available fact that people can easily learn to solve Wason Selection Task correctly when taught - the fact which still implies general purpose learning, and the fact that high-IQ people can solve far more confusing tasks of far larger complexity, which demonstrates that the tasks can be solved in absence of specific evolved 'social contract' modules.

There is an example of non-junk: the evolutionary pressure can adjust strength of pre-existing emotions such as anger, fear, and so on, and even decrease the intelligence whenever the higher intelligence is maladaptive.

Other commonly neglected fact: the evolution is not a watchmaker, blind or not. It does not choose a solution for a problem and then work on this solution! It works on all adaptive mutations simultaneously. Evolution works on all the solutions, and the simpler changes to existing systems are much quicker to evolve. If mutation that tweaks existing system improves fitness, it will, too, be selected for, even if there was a third eye in progress.

As much as it would be more politically correct and 'moderate' for e.g. evolution of religion crowd to get their point across by arguing that the religious people have evolved specific god module which doesn't do anything but make them believe in god, than to imply that they are 'genetically stupid' in some way, the same selective pressure would also make the evolution select for non-god-specific heritable tweaks to learning, and the minor cognitive deficits, that increase religiosity.

Lined slate as a prior

As update for tabula rasa, picture lined writing paper; it provides some guidance for the handwriting; the horizontal lined paper is good for writing text, but not for arithmetic, the five-lines-near-eachother separated by spacing is good for writing music, and the grid paper is pretty universal. Different regions of the brain are tailored to different content; but should not be expected to themselves code different algorithms, save for few exceptions which had long time to evolve, early in vertebrate history.

edit: improved the language some. edit: specific what sort of evolutionary psychology I consider to be junk, and what I do not, albeit that was not the point of the article. The point of the article was to provide you with the notions to use to see what sorts of evolutionary psychology to consider junk, and what do not.

Introduction

When people on LW want to explain a bias, they often turn to Evolutionary psychology. For example, Lukeprog writes

Human reasoning is subject to a long list of biases. Why did we evolve such faulty thinking processes? Aren't false beliefs bad for survival and reproduction?

I think that ''evolved faulty thinking processes'' is the wrong way to look at it and I will argue that some biases are the consequence of structural properties of the brain, which 'cannot' be affected by evolution.

Brain structure and the halo effect

I want to introduce a simple model, which relates the halo effect to a structural property of the brain. My hope is that this approach will be useful to understand the halo effect more systematically and shows that thinking in evolutionary terms is not always the best way to think about certain biases.

One crucial property of the brain is that it has to map a (essentially infinite) high-dimensional reality onto a finite low-dimensional internal representation. (If you know some Linear Algebra, you can think of this as a projection from a high-dimensional space into a low-dimensional space.) This is done more or less automatically by the limitation of our senses and brain's structure as a neural network.

An immediate consequence of this observation is that there will be many states of the world, which are mapped to an almost identical inner representation. In terms of computational efficiency it makes sense to use overlapping set of neurons with similar activation level to represent similar concepts. (This is also a consequence of how the brain actually builds representations from sense inputs.)

Now compare this to the following passage from here.

The halo effect is that perceptions of all positive traits are correlated. Profiles rated higher on scales of attractiveness, are also rated higher on scales of talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence.

This shouldn't be a surprise, since 'positive' ('feels good') seems to be one of the evolutionary hard-wired concepts. Other concepts that we acquire during our life and associate with positive emotions, like kindness and honesty are mapped to 'nearby' neural structures. When one of those mental structures is activated, the 'closed ones' will be activated to a certain degree as well.

Since we differentiate concepts more when we are learning about a subject, the above reasoning should imply that children and people with less education in a certain area should be more influenced by this (generalized) halo effect in that area.

Conclusion

Since evolution can only modify the existing brain structure but cannot get away from the neural network 'design', the halo effect is a necessary by-product of human thinking. But the degree of 'throwing things in one pot' will depend on how much we learn about those things and increase our representation dimensionality.

My hope is that we can relief evolution from the burden of having to explain so many things and focus more on structural explanations, which provide a working model for possible applications and a better understanding.

PS: I am always grateful for feedback!

Say, that we have the following observational data:

The minimal, the maximal distance between a planet and the Sun (both in thousands of kilometres) and the number of (Earth) days for one revolution around the Sun. Above is only the empirical data and no binding algorithm among the three quantities. The celestial mechanics rules which go by the name of the Kepler's laws. Can those rules be (re)invented by a computer program and how?

The following program code will be put into a simulator:

//declarations of the integer type variables
$DECLAREINT bad perihelion aphelion orbit guess dif temp zero temp1
 
//table with the known data in a simulator friendly format
$INVAR perihelion(46001) aphelion(69816) orbit(88)
$INVAR perihelion(107476) aphelion(108942) orbit(225)
$INVAR perihelion(147098) aphelion(152098) orbit(365)
$INVAR perihelion(206669) aphelion(249209) orbit(687)
$INVAR perihelion(740573) aphelion(816520) orbit(4332)
$INVAR perihelion(1353572) aphelion(1513325) orbit(10760)
$INVAR perihelion(2748938) aphelion(3004419) orbit(30799)
$INVAR perihelion(4452940) aphelion(4553946) orbit(60190)
$INVAR perihelion(4437000) aphelion(7311000) orbit(90613)

// variables orbit and bad can't be touched by the simulator
//to avoid a degeneration to a triviality
$RESVAR orbit bad 

//do NOT use if clause, while clause do not set direct numbers ...
$RESCOM if while val_operation inc_dec

//bad is the variable, by which the whole program will be judged
//a big value of bad is bad. By this criteria programs will be wiped out
//from their virtual existence. A kind of anti-fitness
$PENVAL bad 

//do show the following variables when simulating
$SHOWVAR bad,orbit,guess,dif 

//penalize any command with 0 (nothing) and every line by 1 point
$WEIGHTS commands=0 lines=1

//minimize the whole program to 20 lines or less
$MINIMIZE lines 20 

$BES
 

//the arena, where algorithms will be
//created and the fittest only will survive

$EES

//testing area where the simulator has no write access to
//here the bad (the penalized variable) is calculated
//bigger the difference between the known orbit and the variable guess
//worse is the evolved algorithm
dif=orbit-guess;
dif=abs(dif);
bad=dif;
temp=dif;
temp*=10000;
temp1=temp/orbit;
temp=temp1*temp1;
bad=bad+temp;
//end of the testing area

After several hours the following C code has been evolved inside of the $BES - $EES segment.

aphelion=perihelion+aphelion;
aphelion=aphelion+aphelion;
aphelion=aphelion+aphelion;
guess=12;
aphelion=aphelion>>guess;
temp=aphelion/guess;
aphelion=aphelion-temp;
dif=sqrt(aphelion);
aphelion=guess|aphelion;
aphelion=aphelion*dif;
aphelion=guess^aphelion;
guess=aphelion/guess;

What the simulator does? It bombards the arena segment with a random C commands. Usually it then just notices a syntax error and repairs everything to the last working version. If everything is syntactically good, the simulator interprets the program and checks if the mutated version causes any run-time error like division by zero, a memory leak and so on. In the case of such an error it returns to the last good version. Otherwise it checks the variable called "bad", if it is at least as small as it was ever before. In the case it is, a new version has just been created and it is stored.

The evolutionary pressure is working toward ever better code, which increasingly well guesses the orbit time of nine planets. In this case the "orbit" variable has been under the $RESVAR clause and then the "gues" variable has been tested against the "orbit" variable. Had been no "$RESVAR orbit" statement, a simple "guess=orbit;" would evolve quickly. Had been no "$RESVAR bad" statement a simple "bad=-1000000;" could derail the process.

Many thousands of algorithms are born and die every second on a standard Windows PC inside this simulator. Million or billion generations later, the digital evolution is still running, even if an excellent solution has been already found.

And how good approximation for the Kepler (Newton) celestial mechanics of the Solar system we have here?

This good for the nine planets where the code evolved:

And this good for the control group of a comet and six asteroids:

Could be even much better after another billion generations and maybe with even more $INVAR examples. Generally, you can pick any three columns from any integer type table you want. And see this way, how they are related algorithmically. Can be more than three columns also.

The name of the simulator (evoluator) is Critticall and it is available at http://www.critticall.com

Yay a new cool post is up on West Hunters blog! It is written by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending with whom most LWers are probably already familiar with (particularly this awesome entry). It raises some interesting points on biases in academia.

I was contemplating Conan the Barbarian, and remembered the essay that Robert E. Howard wrote about the  background of those stories – The Hyborian Age.  I think that the flavor of Howard’s pseudo-history is a lot more realistic than the picture of the human past academics preferred over the past few decades.

In Conan’s world, it’s never surprising to find a people that once mixed with some ancient prehuman race.  Happens all the time.  Until very recently, the vast majority of workers in human genetics and paleontology were sure that this never occurred – and only changed their minds when presented with evidence that was both strong (ancient DNA)  and too mathematically sophisticated for them to understand or challenge (D-statistics).

Conan’s history  was shaped by the occasional catastrophe.  Most academics (particularly geologists) don’t like catastrophes, but they have grudgingly come to admit their importance – things like the Thera and Toba eruptions, or the K/T asteroid strike and the Permo-Triassic crisis.

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, evolution seems to have run pretty briskly, but without any pronounced direction.  Men devolved into ape-men when the environment pushed in that direction (Flores ?)  and shifted right back when the environment favored speech and tools.  Culture shaped evolution, and evolution shaped culture.  An endogamous caste of snake-worshiping priests evolved in a strange direction.  Although their IQs were considerably higher than average, they remained surprisingly vulnerable to sword-bearing barbarians.

In this world, evolution could happen on a time scale of thousands of years, and there was no magic rule that ensured that the outcome would be the same in every group.  It may not be PC to say it, but Cimmerians were smarter than Picts.

The basic idea of their book "The 10 000 Year Explosion" (LessWrong review, Amazon).

Above all, people in Conan’s world fought. They migrated: they invaded.  There was war before, during, and after civilization.  Völkerwanderungs were a dime a dozen. Conquerors spread.  Sometimes they mixed with the locals, sometimes they replaced them – as when the once dominant Hyborians, overrun by Picts, vanished from the earth, leaving scarcely a trace of their blood in the veins of their conquerors. They must have been U5b.

To be fair,  real physical anthropologists in Howard’s day thought that there had been significant population movements and replacements in Europe, judging from changes in skeletons and skulls that accompanied archeological shifts, as when people turned taller, heavier boned , and brachycephalic just as the Bell-Beaker artifacts show up. But those physical anthropologists lost out to people like Boas – liars.

Perhaps this little old entry is relevant here. ^_^

Given the chance (sufficient lack of information), American anthropologists assumed that the Mayans were peaceful astronomers. Howard would have assumed that they were just another blood-drenched snake cult: who came closer?

Now I’m not saying that Howard got every single tiny little syllable of prehistory right.  Not likely: so far, we haven’t seen any signs of Cthulhu-like visitors, which abound in the Conan stories.  So far. But Howard’s priors were more accurate than those of the pots-not-people archeologists: more accurate than people like Excoffier and  Currat, who assume that there hasn’t been any population replacement in Europe since moderns displaced Neanderthals. More accurate than Chris Stringer,  more accurate than Brian Ferguson.

Most important, Conan, unlike the typical professor, knew what was best in life.

Heh.

Cochran you are such a nerd.

So we say we know evolution is an alien god, which can do absolutely horrifying things to creatures. And surely we are aware that includes us, but how exactly does one internalize something like that? Something so at odds with default cultural intuitions. It may be just my mood tonight, but this short entry on the West Hunter (thanks Glados) blog really grabbed my attention and in a few short paragraphs on a hypothesis regarding the Hobbits of Flores utterly changed how I grok Eliezer's old post.

There is still doubt, but there seems to be a good chance that the Flores Hobbit was a member of a distinct hominid species, rather than some homo sap with a nasty case of microcephalic dwarfism.   If this is the case, the Hobbits are likely descended from a small, Australopithecus-like population that managed to move from Africa to Indonesia without leaving any fossils in between, or from some ancient hominid (perhaps homo erectus) that managed to strand themselves on Flores and then shrank, as many large animals do when isolated on islands.

Island dwarfing of a homo erectus population is the dominant idea right now.  However, many proponents are really bothered by how small the Hobbit’s brain was.  At 400 cc, it was downright teeny, about the size of a chimpanzee’s brain.  Most researchers seem to think that hominid brains naturally increase in size with time. They also suspect that anyone with a brain this small couldn’t be called sentient – and the idea of natural selection driving a population from sentience to nonsentience bothers them.

They should get over it.  Hominid brain volume has increased pretty rapidly over the past few million years, but the increase hasn’t been monotonic.  It’s decreased about 10% over the past 25,000 years. Moreover, we know of examples where natural selection has caused drastic decreases in organismal complexity – for example, canine venereal sarcoma, which today is an infectious cancer, but was once a dog.

I have to break here to note that was the most awesome fact I have learned in some time.

There is a mechanism that might explain what happened on Flores – partial mutational meltdown.  Classic mutational meltdown occurs when a population is too small for too long. Selection is inefficient in such a small population: alleles that decrease fitness by less than 1/N drift fairly freely, and can go to fixation.  At the same time, favorable mutations, which are very rare, almost never occur.  In such a situation, mutational load accumulates – likely further reducing population size – and the population spirals down into extinction. Since small population size and high genetic load increase vulnerability to disaster, some kind of environmental catastrophe usually nails such doomed, shrinking populations before they manage to die off from purely genetic causes.

In principle, if the  population is the right size and one adaptive function is considerably more complicated than others, presenting a bigger mutational target,  you might see a population suffer a drastic decline in that function while continuing to exist. There is reason to think that intelligence is the most complex adaptation in hominids. More than half of all genes are expressed in the brain, and it seems that a given degree of inbreeding depression – say cousin marriage – depressesIQ more than other traits.

Flores is not that big an island and the population density of homo-erectus type hunter-gatherers must have been low – certainly lower than that of contemporary hunter-gatherers, who have much more sophisticated tools.  Thus the hobbit population was likely small.  It may not have been possible to sustain a high-performing brain over the long haul in that situation.  Given that their brains performed poorly – while the metabolic costs were as high as ever – selection would have shrunk their brains.  Over hundreds of thousands of years, this could well have generated the chimp-sized brain we see in the LB1 skeleton.

Of course, this could only have happened if there was an available ecological niche that did not require human-level intelligence.  And there was such an opening: Flores had no monkeys.

That last sentence just struck me with utter horror.

A recent entry from the West Hunters blog (written by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending with whom most LWers are probably already familiar with) caught my eye: 

People who grow up in a small town, or an old and stable neighborhood, often know their neighbors.  More than than that, they know pretty much everything that’s happened for the past couple of generations, whether they want to or not.  For many Americans, probably most,  this isn’t the case. Mobility breeds anonymity.  Suburban kids haven’t necessarily been hanging out with the same peers since kindergarten, and even if they have, they probably don’t much about their friends’ sibs and parents.

If you do have that thick local knowledge, significant trait heritability is fairly obvious.  You notice that the valedictorians cluster in a few families, and you also know that those families don’t need to put their kids under high pressure to get those results. They’re just smart. Some are smart but too rebellious to play the game – and that runs in families too. For that matter, you know that those family similarities, although real and noticeable, are far from absolute.  You see a lot of variation within a family.

If you don’t have it, it’s easier to believe that cognitive or personality traits are generated by environmental influences – how your family toilet trained you, whether they sent you to a prep school, etc.  Easier to believe, but false.

So it isn’t all that difficult to teach quantitative genetics to someone with that background. They already know it, more or less.  Possession of this kind of knowledge must have been the norm in the human past. I’m sure that Bushmen have it.

The loss of this knowledge must have significant consequences, not just susceptibility to nurturist dogma.  In the typical ancestral situation, you knew a lot about the relatives of all potential mates.  Today, you might meet someone in college and know nothing about her family history.  In particular, you  might not be aware that schizophrenia runs in her family. You can’t weigh what you don’t know.  In modern circumstances, I suspect that the reproductive success of people with a fair-sized dose of alleles that predispose to schiz has gone up – with the net consequence that selection is less effective at eliminating such alleles. The modern welfare state has probably had more impact, though.  In the days of old, kids were likely to die if a parent flaked out.  Today that does not happen.

Seems quite coherent. It meshes well with findings that the more children parents have the less they subscribe to nurture, since they finally, possibly for the first time ever, get some hands on experience with the nurture (nurture as in stuff like upbringing not nurture as in lead paint) versus. nature issue. Note that today urban, educated, highly intelligent people are less likley to have children than possibly ever, how is this likley to effect intellectual fashions?

Perhaps somewhat related to this is also the transition in the past 150 years (the time frame depending on where exactly you live) from agricultural communities, that often raised livestock to urban living. What exactly "variation" and "heredity" might mean in a intuitive way thus comes another source short with no clear replacement.

If you're interested in evolution, anthropics, and AI timelines -- or in what the Singularity Institute has been producing lately -- you might want to check out this new paper, by SingInst research fellow Carl Shulman and FHI professor Nick Bostrom.

The paper:

How Hard is Artificial Intelligence? The Evolutionary Argument and Observation Selection Effects 

The abstract:

Several authors have made the argument that because blind evolutionary processes produced human intelligence on Earth, it should be feasible for clever human engineers to create human-level artificial intelligence in the not-too-distant future.  This evolutionary argument, however, has ignored the observation selection effect that guarantees that observers will see intelligent life having arisen on their planet no matter how hard it is for intelligent life to evolve on any given Earth-like planet.  We explore how the evolutionary argument might be salvaged from this objection, using a variety of considerations from observation selection theory and analysis of specific timing features and instances of convergent evolution in the terrestrial evolutionary record.  We find that a probabilistic version of the evolutionary argument emerges largely intact once appropriate corrections have been made.

I'd be interested to hear LW-ers' takes on the content; Carl, too, would much appreciate feedback.

This may be a question trivial for you, but: Why is there variation inside a species? On some instances, you could argue that the Nash equilibrum is mixed (for example, different men prefer different physical appearances of women, so women of different appearance can coexist), but: What the hell is the evolutionary advantage in having zits?

Probably, it has something to do with genes of different types (all of whom have a good reason to stay in the gene pool by a mixed Nash equilibrium) mixing up and producing zits, but: Why should evolution, that managed to create eyes and brains, be unable to get something against this working if other members of the same species can perfectly manage to avoid them? Because such a gene can easily exist in individuals that don't have that particular problem (and I can't think of any adverse effects this would have), it should be able to spread even if not all members of the species have a particular problem. The disturbing thing is that I imagine a working fix without adverse effects to require only pulling some hormonal levers, not coming up with the complication that is needed to make a proto-eye better by a positive amount (so that the mutation can survive).

I saw this in the Facebook "what's popular" box, so it's apparently being heavily read and forwarded. There's nothing earthshattering for long-time LessWrong readers, but it's a bit interesting and not too bad a condensation of the topic:

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another. Certitude works, however sharply it may depart from the truth. -- Cohen, Patricia "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth"

A glance at the comments [at the Times], however, seems to indicate that most people are misinterpreting this, and at least one person has said flatly that it's the reason his political opponents don't agree with him.

ETA: Oops, I forgot the most import thing. The article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html

We may feel sympathy when we read about people killed for protesting in Syria, Bahrain, Libya, and other countries.  But tyranny isn't just something happening to unfortunate people somewhere else.  It's an existential risk to human civilization.

Civilization - even tribalism - relies on altruism.  Altruism is defined as cooperation that is not the happy convergence of interests of rational self-interested agents.  That happens too; but we don't call it altruism.  Altruism is, roughly, helping others without the expectation of reciprocation or cooperation.  And it happens because humans like helping other humans.

Altruism is probably mostly genetic.  It's an evolutionary adaptation that instills the desire to help others into a species.  Social pressure can install some amount of altruism; but it's my opinion that this would not work at all without a pre-existing genetic basis.  Many species exhibit altruism to a level at least as great as that in humans.  Some insects, which are incapable of feeling social pressure, are far more altruistic than humans.

Two theories for how this happens are kin selection and group selection.  Regardless of which of these you prefer, both of them have two important weaknesses:

• They are both very weak effects compared to selection for traits that benefit their organism directly.
• They require special social conditions, on society size (on the order of 10 members per society in the case of kin selection) and immigration/emigration rate (extremely low in both cases).

It's not known whether humans are still evolving, or have begun devolving due to lack of selective pressure.  But in the case of altruism, we can be sure:  Even if some selective pressure still exists, most humans today do not live under the necessary conditions for either kin selection or group selection.  Humans are living off their evolutionary capital of altruism.

Tyranny, whether it's that of Syria, Iran, North Korea, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet bloc under Stalin, aggressively selects against altruism.  The most-altruistic people were among the first executed in all those places.  They are the people being shot while protesting in Syria.  Social activism under such a government is rarely in your best self-interest.  Tyranny selects for self-interest; people who are willing to help the state oppress others are given opportunities for advancement.  And it removes altruistic genes quickly from the population, likely undoing hundreds of years of evolution every year.  Those genes will never be replaced.

I'm not too worried when this occurs over a few short months or years.  But when a people lives under these conditions for generations, you may end up with a large population deficient in altruistic genes.

There's no solution at that point short of gene therapy.  The population can stay in place, resulting in a society that is at best hopelessly mired in corruption and poverty, and at worst a danger to the rest of the world.  Or it can disperse, and dilute altruistic genes around the globe.

ADDED:  Knowing whether this is a real problem or not, would require learning something about how many genes are involved in altruism, and what their distribution in the population is.  A legitimate objection to what I wrote is that if genes for altruism are distributed so that killing less than 1% of the population would have a major impact on their abundance, then they probably weren't very important to begin with.  Although, sociopaths are only around 1% of the population, and they have a major impact on society.  I wonder how much work has been done in studying the maintenance of alleles for which you only need a few members of the population to have them?

Sometimes we make a decision in a way which is different to how we think we should make a decision. When this happens, we call it a bias.

When put this way, the first thing that springs to mind is that different people might disagree on whether something is actually a bias. Take the bystander effect. If you're of the opinion that other people are way less important than yourself, then the ability to calmly stand around not doing anything while someone else is in danger would be seen as a good thing. You'd instead be confused by the non-bystander effect, whereby people (when separated from the crowd) irrationally put themselves in danger in order to help complete strangers.

The second thing that springs to mind is that the bias may exist for an evolutionary reason, and not just be due to bad brain architecture. Remember that evolution doesn't always produce the behavior that makes the most intuitive sense. Creatures, including presumably humans, tend to act in a way as to maximize their reproductive success; they don't act in the way that necessarily makes the most intuitive sense.

The statement that humans act in a fitness-maximizing way is controversial. Firstly, we are adapted to our ancestral environment, not our current one. It seems very likely that we're not well adapted to the ready availability of high-calorie food, for example. But this argument doesn't apply to everything. A lot of the biases appear to describe situations which would exist in both the ancestral and modern worlds.

A second argument is that a lot of our behavior is governed by memes these days, not genes. It's certain that the memes that survive are the ones which best reproduce themselves; it's also pretty plausible that exposure to memes can tip us from one fitness-maximizing behavioral strategy to another. But memes forcing us to adopt a highly suboptimal strategy? I'm sceptical. It seems like there would be strong selection pressure against it; to pass the memes on but not let them affect our behavior significantly. Memes existed in our ancestral environments too.

And remember that just because you're behaving in a way that maximizes your expected reproductive fitness, there's no reason to expect you to be consciously aware of this fact.

So let's pretend, for the sake of simplicity, that we're all acting to maximize our expected reproductive success (and all the things that we know lead to it, such as status and signalling and stuff). Which of the biases might be explained away?

The bystander effect

Eliezer points out:

We could be cynical and suggest that people are mostly interested in not being blamed for not helping, rather than having any positive desire to help - that they mainly wish to escape antiheroism and possible retribution.

He lists two problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, that the experimental setup appeared to present a selfish threat to the subjects. This I have no convincing answer to. Perhaps people really are just stupid when it comes to fires, not recognising the risk to themselves, or perhaps this is a gaping hole in my theory.

The other criticism is more interesting. Telling people about the bystander effect makes it less likely to happen? Well, under this hypothesis, of course it would. The key to not being blamed is to formulate a plausible explanation; the explanation "I didn't do anything because no-one else did either" suddenly sounds a lot less plausible when you know about the bystander effect. (And if you know about it, the person you're explaining it to is more likely to as well. We share memes with our friends).

The affect heuristic

This one seems quite complicated and subtle, and I think there may be more than one effect going on here. But one class of positive-affect bias can be essentially described as: phrasing an identical decision in more positive language makes people more likely to choose it. The example given is "saving 150 lives" versus "saving 98% of 150 lives". (OK these aren't quite identical decisions, but the difference in opinion is more than 2% and goes in the wrong direction). Apparently putting in the word 98% makes it sound more positive to most people.

This also seems to make sense if we view it as trying to make a justifiable decision, rather than a correct one. Remember, the 150(ish) lives we're saving aren't our own; there's no selective pressure to make the correct decision, just one that won't land us in trouble.

The key here is that justifying decisions is hard, especially when we might be faced with an opponent more skilled in rhetoric than ourselves. So we are eager for additional rhetoric to be supplied which will help us justify the decision we want to make. If I had to justify saving 150 lives (at some cost), it would honestly never have occurred to me to phrase it as "98% of 153 lives". Even if it had, I'd feel like I was being sneaky and manipulative, and I might accidentally reveal that. But to have the sneaky rhetoric supplied to me by an outside authority, that makes it a lot easier.

This implies a prediction: when asked to justify their decision, people who have succumbed to positive-affect bias will repeat the postive-affective language they have been supplied, possibly verbatim. I'm sure you've met people who quote talking points verbatim from their favorite political TV show; you might assume the TV is doing their thinking for them. I would argue instead that it's doing their justification for them.

Trolley problems

There is a class of people, who I will call non-pushers, who:

• would flick a switch if it would cause a train to run over (and kill) one person instead of five, yet
• would not push a fat man in front of that train (killing him) if it could save the five lives

So what's going on here? Our feeling of shouldness is presumably how social pressure feels from the inside. What we consider right is (unless we've trained ourselves otherwise) likely to be what will get us into the least trouble. So why do non-pushers get into less trouble than pushers, if pushers are better at saving lives?

It seems pretty obvious to me. The pushers might be more altruistic in some vague sense, but they're not the sort of person you'd want to be around. Stand too close to them on a bridge and they might push you off. Better to steer clear. (The people who are tied to the tracks presumably prefer pushers, but they don't get any choice in the matter). This might be what we mean by near and far in this context.

Another way of putting it is that if you start valuing all lives equally, and not put those closest to you first, then you might start defecting in games of reciprocal altruism. Utilitarians appear cold and unfriendly because they're less worried about you and more worried about what's going on in some distant, impoverished nation. They will start to lose the reproductive benefits of reciprocal altruism and socialising.

Global risk

In Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks, Eliezer lists a number of biases which could be responsible for people's underestimation of global risks. There seem to be a lot of them. But I think that from an evolutionary perspective, they can all be wrapped up into one.

Group Selection doesn't work. Evolution rewards actions which profit the individual (and its kin) relative to others. Something which benefits the entire group is nice and all that, but it'll increase the frequency of the competitors of your genes as much as it will your own.

It would be all to easy to say that we cannot instinctively understand existential risk because our ancestors have, by definition, never experienced anything like it. But I think that's an over-simplification. Some of our ancestors probably have survived the collapse of societies, but they didn't do it by preventing the society from collapsing. They did it by individually surviving the collapse or by running away.

But if a brave ancestor had saved a society from collapse, wouldn't he (or to some extent, she) become an instant hero with all the reproductive advantage that affords? That would certainly be nice, but I'm not sure the evidence backs it up. Stanislav Petrov was given the cold shoulder. Leading climate scientists are given a rough time, especially when they try and see their beliefs turned into meaningful action. Even Winston Churchill became unpopular after he helped save democratic civilization.

I don't know what the evolutionary reason for hero-indifference would be, but if it's real then it pretty much puts the nail in the coffin for civilization-saving as a reproductive strategy. And that means there's no evolutionary reason to take global risks seriously, or to act on our concerns if we do.

And if we make most of our decisions on instinct - on what feels right - then that's pretty scary.

Evolution. Morality. Strategy. Security/Cryptography. This hits so many topics of interest, I can't imagine it not being discussed here. Bruce Schneier blogs about his book-in-progress, The Dishonest Minority:

Humans evolved along this path. The basic mechanism can be modeled simply. It is in our collective group interest for everyone to cooperate. It is in any given individual's short-term self interest not to cooperate: to defect, in game theory terms. But if everyone defects, society falls apart. To ensure widespread cooperation and minimal defection, we collectively implement a variety of societal security systems.

I am somewhat reminded of Robin Hanson's Homo Hypocritus writings from the above, although it is not the same. Schneier says that the book is basically a first draft at this point, and might still change quite a bit. Some of the comments focus on whether "dishonest" is actually the best term to use for defecting from social norms.

The standard story when dealing with inclusive fitness in evolutionary arguments is that my sibling's life is worth half of mine and my cousin's life is worth a quarter of mine.

But I obviously share more than half my genes with my sister because my parents are not unrelated.  My parents must share a lot of ancestors enough generations back that nobody has tracked them, since they resemble each other insofar as they both look human.  If I take into account that my parents are both human, I should be related to my sister much more than 50%.

So why do they assume a sibling has half your genes when reasoning about inclusive fitness?

My wife is Chinese, and both of my parents are of European descent.  Should I expect my kids to like each other less than I like my sister, because they are less closely related? 

This is an intellectual question about evolutionary psychology, not an anxious question about my family relationships.  We're all doing fine, don't worry.

Robin Hanson has made several recent posts on Overcoming Bias about upload economics. I remain mystified why he doesn't link to or otherwise reference or comment on Carl Shulman's 2010 paper, Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms, which mentions many of the same ideas and seems to have taken them to their logical conclusions. I was going to complain again in the comments section over there, but then I noticed that the paper hasn't been posted or discussed here either. So here's the abstract. (See above link for the full paper.)

Many scientists expect the eventual development of intelligent software programs capable of closely emulating human brains, to the point of substituting for human labor in almost every economic niche. As software, such emulations could be cheaply copied, with copies subsequently diverging and interacting with their copy-relatives. This paper examines a set of evolutionary pressures on interaction between related emulations, pressures favoring the emergence of superorganisms, groups of emulations ready to self-sacrifice in service of the superorganism. We argue that the increased capacities and internal coordination of such superorganisms could pose increased risks of overriding human values, but also could facilitate the solution of global coordination problems.

Edit: For an in-depth discussion of precisely this topic, see Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg's 2008 paper "The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement", available as a pdf here.  This post was written before reading the paper.

There doesn't seem to be a thread discussing Eliezer's short-short story X17.  While I enjoyed the story, and agreed with most of its points, I disagree with one assertion in it (and he's said it elsewhere, too, so I'm pretty sure he believes it).  Edit: The story was written over a decade ago.  Eliezer seems to have at least partially recanted since then.

Eliezer argues that there can't possibly be a simple surgical procedure that dramatically increases human intelligence.  Any physical effect it could have, he says, would necessarily have arisen before as a mutation.  Since intelligence is highly beneficial in any environment, the mutation would spread throughout our population.  Thus, evolution must have already plucked all the low-hanging fruit.

But I can think of quite a few reasons why this would not be the case.  Indeed, my belief is that such a surgery almost certainly exists (but it might take a superhuman intelligence to invent it).  Here are the possibilities that come to mind.

1. The surgery might introduce some material a human body can't synthesize.¹
2. The surgery might require intelligent analysis of the unique shape of a subject's brain, after it has developed naturally to adulthood.
3. The necessary mutation might simply not exist.  The configuration space for physically possible organisms must surely be larger than the configuration space for human-like DNA (I get the sense I'm taking sides in a longstanding feud in evolutionary theory with this one).
4. The surgery might have some minor side effect that would drastically reduce fitness in the ancestral environment, but isn't noticeable in the present day.  Perhaps it harnesses the computing power of the subject's lymphocytes, weakening the immune system.

I am looking for books on evolution of conscience. Please suggest. I searched but nothing good came out.

I don't know if this is the right place for such requests.

If this is not the right place, pls tell me, i will delete this post.

Thanks.

It is a cultural universal that people are discouraged from having sex as often and with as many people as they want to.  Every culture I've ever heard of imposes many restrictions on sex.  I've never heard of a culture that shames people for being too stingy with sex.

If we assume that culture is adaptive, this means that the human sex drive is too strong for humans in society.  Why is this?  As sex drive is a phenotypic feature with extraordinarily strong selective pressure, why haven't we evolved to have the proper sex drive?

One reason could be that reduced sex drive is selected for at the level of the group, while higher sex drive is selected for at the level of the individual.

I originally titled this post "The Less Wrong wiki is wrong about group selection", because it seemed wildly overconfident about its assertion that group selection is nonsense. The wiki entry on "group selection" currently reads:

People who are unfamiliar with evolutionary theory sometimes propose that a feature of the organism is there for the good of the group - for example, that human religion is an adaptation to make human groups more cohesive, since religious groups outfight nonreligious groups.

Postulating group selection is guaranteed to make professional evolutionary biologists roll up their eyes and sigh.

However, it appears that the real problem is not that the wiki is overconfident (that's a problem, but it's only a symptom of the next problem) but that the traditional dogma on the viability of group selection is wrong, or at least overconfident. I make this assertion after stumbling across a paper by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson titled "The evolution of eusociality", which appeared in Nature in August of this year. I found a PDF of this paper through Google scholar, click here. A blog entry discussing the paper can be found here (bias alert: it is written by a postdoc working in Martin Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics program at Harvard).

Here's some quotes (bolding is mine):

It has further turned out that selection forces exist in groups that diminish the advantage of close collateral kinship. They include the favouring of raised genetic variability by colony-level selection in the ants Pogonomyrmex occidentalis and Acromyrmex echinatior—due, at least in the latter, to disease resistance. The contribution of genetic diversity to disease resistance at the colony level has moreover been established definitively in honeybees. Countervailing forces also include variability in predisposition to worker sub-castes in Pogonomyrmex badius, which may sharpen division of labour and improve colony fitness—although that hypothesis is yet to be tested. Further, an increase in stability of nest temperature with genetic diversity has been found within nests of honeybees and Formica ants. Other selection forces working against the binding role of close pedigree kinship are the disruptive impact of nepotism within colonies, and the overall negative effects associated with inbreeding. Most of these countervailing forces act through group selection or, for eusocial insects in particular, through between-colony selection.

Yet, considering its position for four decades as the dominant paradigm in the theoretical study of eusociality, the production of inclusive fitness theory must be considered meagre. During the same period, in contrast, empirical research on eusocial organisms has flourished, revealing the rich details of caste, communication, colony life cycles, and other phenomena at both the individual- and colony-selection levels. In some cases social behaviour has been causally linked through all the levels of biological organization from molecule to ecosystem. Almost none of this progress has been stimulated or advanced by inclusive fitness theory, which has evolved into an abstract enterprise largely on its own

...

The question arises: if we have a theory that works for all cases (standard natural selection theory) and a theory that works only for a small subset of cases (inclusive fitness theory), and if for this subset the two theories lead to identical conditions, then why not stay with the general theory? The question is pressing, because inclusive fitness theory is provably correct only for a small (non-generic) subset of evolutionary models, but the intuition it provides is mistakenly embraced as generally correct.

Check out the paper for more details. Also look at the Supplementary Information if you have access to it. They perform an evolutionary game theoretic analysis, which I am still reading.

Apparently this theory is not that new. In this 2007 paper by David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson, they argue (I'm just pasting the abstract):

The current foundation of sociobiology is based upon the rejection of group selection in the 1960s and the acceptance thereafter of alternative theories to explain the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behaviors. These events need to be reconsidered in the light of subsequent research. Group selection has become both theoretically plausible and empirically well supported. Moreover, the so-called alternative theories include the logic of multilevel selection within their own frameworks. We review the history and conceptual basis of sociobiology to show why a new consensus regarding group selection is needed and how multilevel selection theory can provide a more solid foundation for sociobiology in the future.

From the other camp, this seems to be a fairly highly-cited paper from 2008. They concluded:

(a) the arguments about group selection are only continued by a limited number of theoreticians, on the basis of simplified models that can be difficult to apply to real organisms (see Error 3); (b) theoretical models which make testable predictions tend to be made with kin selection theory (Tables 1 and 2); (c) empirical biologists interested in social evolution measure the kin selection coefficient of relatedness rather than the corresponding group selection parameters (Queller & Goodnight, 1989). It is best to think of group selection as a potentially useful, albeit informal, way of conceptualizing some issues, rather than a general evolutionary approach in its own right.

I know (as of yet) very little biology, so I leave the conclusion for readers to discuss. Does anyone have detailed knowledge of the issues here?

>Elisabeth Lloyd: I don’t actually know. I think that it’s at a very problematic intersection of topics. I mean, you’re taking the intersection of human evolution, women, sexuality – once you take that intersection you’re bound to kind of get a disaster. More than that, when evolutionists have looked at this topic, I think that they’ve had quite a few items on their agenda, including telling the story about human origins that bolsters up the family, monogamy, a certain view of female sexuality that’s complimentary to a certain view of male sexuality. And all of those items have been on their agenda and it’s quite visible in their explanations.

>Natasha Mitchell: I guess it’s perplexed people partly, too, because women don’t need an orgasm to become pregnant, and so the question is: well, what’s its purpose? Well, is its purpose to give us pleasure so that we have sex, so that we can become pregnant, according to the classic evolutionary theories?

>Elisabeth Lloyd: The problem is even worse than it appears at first because not only is orgasm not necessary on the female side to become pregnant, there isn’t even any evidence that orgasm makes any difference at all to fertility, or pregnancy rate, or reproductive success. It seems intuitive that a female orgasm would motivate females to engage in intercourse which would naturally lead to more pregnancies or help with bonding or something like that, but the evidence simply doesn’t back that up.

The whole discussion. It backs my theory that using evolution to explain current traits seriously tempts people to make things up.