Eliezer,

Well, the statement from Tooby that you quote says exactly nothing precise. He refers to a "tangle," but nothing specific. Then he gives his shopping list of evolutionary biologists whom he considers more important/worthy than Gould. Fine, some of those certainly are and some others may be. This is hardly some slam dunk comment, but reeks all too much of the jealousy of the less popular for the more popular. I might as well get all bent out because Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan have written bigger selling books than I have.

Regarding Williams' argument, the issue is indeed the locus of evolution. Saying that it is the gene that gets passed on does not cut it. The question is the locus of activity that determines which genes get passed on. In the case of Dawkins and Williams this locus was generally (pretty much always in the case of Dawkins) the individual. Williams actually allowed for higher level selection as an occasional possibility. However, he ruled it out in general, and did so on essentially prisoner's dilemma, game theoretic grounds, the basis of Maynard Smith's position as well, the developer of the concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy. Maynard Smith was also very impressed with how easy it is for individuals to undermine cooperative strategies.

So, now we know better. Groups that cooperate can outcompete and replace groups that degenerate into internal back-stabbing and cheating. The evolution of such cooperation remains one of the really big questions out there. It turns out that the Crow-Hamilton-Price equations in fact give conditions for when such higher level evolutionary processes can become the dominating factor in determining which genes get passed on.

Regarding Gould, again, I am not going to defend him against all criticisms. I am not surprised that he has not always properly cited others. Certainly he had a large ego and did a lot of self-advertising. And I am perfectly willing to accept that he may have engaged in some oversimplifications or even obfuscations and confusions regarding evolution in terms of public knowledge. This is unfortunate to the extent it is true. But his debates with Dawkins and Williams and Maynard Smith were serious debates, regarding which on at least some issues the consensus is moving more in his direction now.

As for people dumping on his politicis, fine. But please do not pretend that you are making scientific arguments. These are essentially ad hominem arguments of the worst sort.

Eliezer,

You are in way over your head on this one. It is clear that you are behind on current literature. The "selfish gene" is old hat and out of date. Multi-level evolution is increasingly widely accepted by many geneticists, with such mechanisms as reciprocal altruism being keys. The equations for when the Williams argument on this matter breaks down have been around since James F. Crow first put them out back in 1953, although they were re-codfied and more widely distributed in the 1970s as the Hamilton-Price equations.

I am in my office where I do not have copies of the relevant books, and I never read the one by Gould that has you most worked up. It may well be that Gould claims excessive credit for ideas that were due to Williams in it. I do not know. I do know that while they disagreed on various things, Gould certainly does cite Williams in other places and writings and clearly recognized his role in various matters, at least in other places, if not in this particular book. There is little doubt that you are wildly exaggerating his sins in this particular matter.

Also, while one can find the idea of a variable rate of evolution in Darwin, there is no doubt that he saw evolution as fundamentally continuous and extremely gradual. "Nature non facit saltum" is the frontispiece for all editions of his Origin of Species, which comes ultimately from Leibniz. The guy you linked to dismisses Gould's (and Eldredge's) idea of "punctuated equilibrium" as already known to Darwin and thus derivative. Excuse me, but this is horse manure. Gould and Eldredge may have overstated the case, but they completely altered the discourse, and the awareness of the possibility of much more rapid evolution is now much more widely accepted.

Indeed, these ideas are linked, as I suspect you know. The possibility of more rapid evolution is indeed tied up with the idea of multi-level evolution, if only partially. It is indeed a "hardline, fundamentalist Darwinian" position that denies this, as it has been by Dawkins (and Williams earlier).

Not sure if this is cranky or not, but when I was youthful I noticed that the Lorentz transformation of space-time due relativistic effects, square root of one minuc v squared over c squared, implies an imaginary solution for an v greater than c, that is for traveling faster than the speed of light. Now, most sci fi stories suggest that one would go backwards in time if one exceeded the speed of light, but I deduced that one would go into a second time dimension.

Of course the problem is that as long as Einstein is right, it is simply impossible to exceed the speed of light, thereby making the entire speculation irrelevant.

Eliezer,

This is about to scroll off, but, frankly, I do not know what you mean by "normative" in this context. The usual usage of this term implies statements about values or norms. I do not see that anything about this has anything to do with values or norms. Perhaps I do not understand the "wholel point of Bayes' Theorem." Then again, I do not see anything in your reply that actually counters the argument I made.

Bottom line: I think your "law" is only true by assumption.

Eliezer,

I do not necessarily believe that likelihood ratios are fixed for all time. The part of me that is Bayesian tends to the radically subjective form a la Keynes.

Also, I am a fan of nonstandard analysis. So, I have no problem with infinities that are not mere limits.

Furthermore, I remind one and all that Bayes' Theorem is asymptotic. Even if the conditions hold, the "true" probability is approached only in the infinite time horizon. This could occur so slowly that it might stay on the "wrong" side of 50% well past the time that any finite viewer might hang around to watch.

There is also the black swan problem. It could move in the wrong direction until the black swan datum finally shows up pushing it in the other direction, which, again, may not occur during the time period someone is observing. This black swan question is exactly the frame of discussion here, as it is Taleb who has gone on and on about this business about evidence and absence thereof.

Tom,

Bayes' Theorem has its limits. The support must be continuous, the dimensionality must be finite. Some of the discussion here has raised issues here that could be relevant to these kinds of conditiosn, such as fuzziness about the truth or falsity of H. This is not as straightforward as you claim it is.

I would agree that the lack of sabotage cannot be argued as support for accepting an increase in the probability of the existence of a fifth column. But it may not be sufficient to lower the probability that there is a fifth column, and certainly may not be sufficient to lower a prior of greater than 50% to below 50%, even assuming that one is a Bayesian.

Eliezer,

Of course you are assuming a strong form of Bayesianism here. Why do we have to accept that strong form?

More precisely, I see no reason why there need be no change in the confidence level. As long as the probability is greater than 50% in one direction or the other, I have an expectation of a certain outcome. So, if some evidence slightly moves the expectation in a particular direction, but does not push it across the 50% line from wherever it started, what is the big whoop?

This is one of those rare moments where the usually horribly heterodox economist, me, defends orthodox economic theory. So, looked at very closely, orthodox microeconomic says nothing at all about peoples' preferences themselves, which presumably involve their emotional reactions to various things. What is assumed is certain things about these preferences, that people know what they are, that they exhibit continuity, that they have a degree of internal consistency in the sense of exhibiting transitivity, and it also makes people behave more "rationall" and exhibit continuous demand functions if their utility functions exhibit convexity. So, rationality is not about what your preferences are or the degree to which they are based on one's emotions. They are that one know what they are, that they have a degree of internal coherence or consistency, and the, the biggie, that people actually act on the basis of their real preferences.

A lot of the problems regarding "irrationality" involve people behaving in internally consistent manners, especially over time. Behavioral economists are now arguing it out whether one should deal with this via multiple personality (or preference systems) models or approaches that stress focusing on "rationality" and keeping mind one's "real" preferences. Thus, hyperbolic discounting involves "time inconsistency." I want things now that I shall regret having wanted so much later. I eat the candy bar now and wake up fat later, etc. etc. Is this a combat of two preference systems or just "irrationality," People like Matthew Rabin who tend to use the latter approch, in fact say that the goal is to have people be "rational," to know their own real preferences and to act on them. If they really do not mind being fat, then go ahead and eat the candy bar. But in any case, it is perfectly OK either way to have the caring about being fat or not caring about being fat to be based on one's emotional reactions. One should undertand one's own emotional reactions. That is rationality.