Sunday, May 16, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
The End of the Journey
Along the way there were roadblocks and frustrations. Despite seeing a veritable glut of similarities and links between these two fields, the potential for abuse was too great. As I noted in my post about the faux pas of social science, biology is all too often applied superficially to explain things we see in society. The most egregious mistakes were often cases of using biology to back a political agenda, citing some trivial fact and claiming biology as proof of an entirely unrelated concept (eg see David Brooks' article). Yet, the misuse of biology to describe society manifested itself in subtler forms as well.
Stimulated by my work in multicellularity, I soon began looking at the evolutionary concept of levels of selection, seeking to understand the conflicts which can occur between individuals and wholes in the formation of a group. In biology, levels-of-selection ways of thinking are crucial to dispelling myths about group selection and understanding the conflicts and policing mechanisms which occur in evolutionary transitions, like the advent of multicellularity. In the spirit of my original goals, I soon tried to apply such thinking to human society, but in doing so ignored a very important, fundamental difference. While nested groupings in nature, such as the organization of genes into chromosomes, chromosomes into nuclei, and cells into bodies, are all necessarily products of evolution, the human societies which we see today are not. Evolution undoubtedly played a role in crafting the societies which have emerged, played out through the evolution of our very brains and the emotions like empathy and morality it produces. Yet, it is not reasonable to look at different types of societies, whether they be conceptions of social justice or systems of free market democracy, and to look at how evolution has shaped them. For this, we have the study of memetics, which I believe will boom in coming years as neuroscience advances and we begin to understand the proximate mechanisms of memory and learning.
Cells do not simply decide to organize themselves into bodies. A wide range of literature in the past fifteen years has begun to address this issue, and there are several main problems to be overcome in the construction of a multicellular body. Not all cells in a body will pass their genes to the next generation. Think of your arm cells for example. What makes them satisfied with your gonads getting exclusive access to the next generation? In the case of animals, this problem has been solved largely through reduction of intra-organismal variation- your arm is okay with your gonads doing all of the long-term reproducing because the genes in your arm and your gonads are ideally identical. In other taxonomic groups besides animals (yes, many other groups exist, like slime molds, chromalveolates and fungi to superficially name a few) this problem has been remedied in very different ways. For example, slime molds are made up of many multicellular individuals aggregating into slithering sluglike forms (they actually do look like slugs, it's very cool). If two of these slugs cross paths, they can mix and reform, with the two emerging slugs having possibly traded segments, or else even have 'stolen' parts from one another. These slime molds really challenge our notions of what it means to be an individual, and the policing mechanisms which have arisen in these slugs differ greatly from those found in our own bodies.
But to return to human societies, people can simply decide to form social groups, there is no conclusive evidence to date that free market democracy is a direct result of evolutionary transitions involving natural selection. As such, these societies do not necessarily operate on the same principles as biological groupings and are not always subject to the same constraints. So how is it anything but glaringly superficial to equate human society with cell society? The parallels between our communities and those found in other parts of nature are truly great, but we must be diligent not to make comparisons where there truly are none, and not to get carried away in our thought experiments.
If anything, maybe it will be useful to recognize precisely this point, that human society does not necessarily need to adhere to the rules of biology. Animal populations which exceed their carrying capacity will crash, and for every animal over this capacity the population will crash by roughly twice this number. However, people (I hope) don't need natural selection to keep our populations in check. We don't need to wait until human populations naturally stabilize (as suggested recently by Mark Koyama) in order to realize that we face an impending problem. Culture gives us the ability to cut off these problems before nature makes us learn the hard way.
Economic growth has undoubtedly led to prosperity, allowing the poor to access a growing array of commodities and raising the living standard so that the lower economic classes of society can live far better lives than Charlemagne ever aspired to. But are there natural limits to this growth, and if not, is there reason to impose them? If there do in the end exist meaningful ways of finding overlap between science and the study of economy and society, then perhaps this is a direction worth venturing towards. If not, then at least the semester-long search for such consilience has been eye opening for one young scholar at Brown University.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
The (Potentially) Calamitous Case of the Crickets of Kauai

Field crickets in Kauai are facing a bit of a crisis. Flesh-eating maggots (Ormia ochracea) have invaded the Hawaiian island, and they have begun devouring the crickets -- from inside out. The maggots are only able to locate and parasitize those male crickets that sing to attract females. They cannot find silent crickets.
- Humans tend to care for other people. Sure, we're not as altruistic-acting as termites, but Americans, for instance, really don't want to see Africans die, and they often spend a great deal of money trying to make sure that doesn't happen. They aren't callous to the suffering of others.
- For the above reason, we don't want the struggle for existence that would select for certain traits that would help us fix our problems. Struggle for existence = poverty, starvation, disease, and death. Not good. Let's not go there.
- Unlike field crickets, humans can make decisions, even at the level of nations (though with decreasing effectiveness as we scale up the size of the decision-making bodies). Humans don't have to wait for natural selection to produce favorable results for the species. They can use cognition and communication to cooperate to achieve their ends.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Competing Cultures- the Limits of Population Limitation
Unfortunately, I think not. When delve a bit deeper into the matter, it is easy to see why Italy's decreasing population is in fact a grave problem. Although Italy's birth rate is in facts still positive, the percentage of births to Italian households as opposed to immigrants is exceedingly low. Unlike in the earlier part of the 20th century, when Italy was seen as an emigrating country, the last twenty years have been a time of mass immigration to Italy from western European countries such as Romania, Albania, Ukrain, Poland, etc., as well as a heavy influx of Africans and Asians as well.
So what happens if a country were to hypothetically decide to curb its population? It would likely be overrun in a similar way to what is happening in Italy, although due to different causes. Limiting populations as a result of intra-national policing is not a stable strategy, because it is vulnerable to exploitation from outside countries.
It is my view that history can be viewed as a series of transitions between levels of selection. Free floating DNA combined to create chromosomes, which eventually banded together to create genomes inside individual cells. The history of life then progressed along many parallel lineages to form multicellular bodies, many of which then aggregated to form communities of organisms. In some such communities, such as with social insects, policing mechanisms and the division of labor have been so extensive as to seemingly create a sort of 'super-organism'. Other societies, such as our own exhibit high degrees of functional specialization, yet we have not completed the sort of transition that would make, say the United States, into its own discrete level of selection. Or have we?
The history of such transition clearly tells us that that intra-group conflicts are almost always mediated by policing mechanisms put in place by the higher level of selection. Thus, as I see it we have two options. The first option would be to institute a global policing system that would limit birth rates for all countries, thereby keeping world populations in check. This would certainly be an effective mechanism, but it comes at a high price, namely many of the freedoms which we so cherish. It is exceedingly unlikely that there exists enough natural selective pressure as to naturally create such a policing mechanism (since to our knowledge there are not other planets with life and we are not in fact competing on a planetary level, so there is no selection), and so such a policing mechanism would be of our own devise. The second option is to continue on our current trajectory. Populations will grow, and most likely, unless we become adept at terraforming and colonize other planets (which would be really cool), populations will eventually crash as resources remain finite in the light of an increasing global human presence.
History tells us that policing mechanisms are a way to avoid disaster. We are at the crossroads- we have the option of deviating from history by policing ourselves in the absence of any selection, of creating a self-sustaining society without the tools of natural selection. But is that the kind of society we want? Sure, we might eventually have overpopulation and mass deaths, but is this worth compromising our current liberty and natural order? To foreshadow a future post by Chris, we may be crickets, but at least we're happy ones.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Justice Principle Meets Population Growth
Nowadays, industrially prepared foods and genetically modified crops are the new technological driver catalyzing population growth. As we reach our ecological carrying capacity on this planet, time and time again technology has served to raise this capacity. But what happens when we're packed into cities as close together as corn is packed in the fields? What happens to quality of life as the population skyrockets? Some people believe that population growth will eventually limit itself because this is what regularly happens in nature. But in nature, this stabilization comes in the wake of massive death rates which characterize the initial population collapse. This is quite a bleak prospect- now that we have the capacity for thought and concerted population limiting, do we really want to rely on the merciless processes of nature to cut us down?
Rawls' justice principle makes sense in a finite society, or even in one which expands slowly. To redistribute a portion of the wealth and provide safety nets can be rationalized if it is raising the standard of living of portions of society. But resources are limited. Imagine attending classes at Brown if there were twice as many students, or even getting a meal in the dining hall. To simply increase the amount of people is in most cases to fundamentally devalue those resources which we hold so dear. When the world population increases, relatively few people are born into such lives of luxury. Statistically, most births occur on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
So what happens if the 'least well off in society' category becomes increasingly populated? Can we still justify such wealth distribution? Is it really in our interest to detract from our current quality of life to make room for more people? Remember: there is a big difference between wanting to limit future population growth and from withholding resources from those alive today. Rawls' justice principle certainly has its merits, but is it fair to implement it in the light of our growing society? Or can limiting population growth provide a vehicle for continuing to uphold this noble ideal?
Social Justice and the American Dream
So what about Social Justice? Do liberal social democracies, with their steeply progressive taxation, health and education standards and social services in some way stymie the true American desire? Certainly free market democracy, in its attempt to use market mechanisms to produce social goods without democratic control, fits well with our conception of freedom and the American Dream; but it's also important to ask exactly whose freedoms are at risk of being restricted by embracing a system of social justice?
Redistributive taxation may come at the expense of the rich, but the social services and social safety nets it allows for are exceedingly important for those stuck in the lower economic rungs of society. Is it really such a bad thing to restrict some of these freedoms of the disgustingly rich in order to provide the bare systems of support needed by the poor?
The real question is: does the American Dream have limits? Should it? There must be a balance between the opportunities of a free market economy and the guarantees provided by liberal social democracies. Isn't it worth mildly restricting the American Dream of few in order to greatly facilitate that of many?
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Shellfishness in politics, and reflections on the role of science

Paragraphs like these make me scratch my head:
Democratic leaders this week pledged to move a comprehensive immigration bill through Congress this year, which would include a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. As a political issue, immigration has potential benefits and risks for Democratic candidates. But the focus by party leaders makes clear they see the it as an overall winner (sic).
Less clear is whether Congress will pass any legislation. Republicans may be hesitant to cooperate if immigration proposals are viewed as a pre-election tactic. Without Republican support, the measure cannot pass the Senate.
That's from today's Wall Street Journal.
What happened to cooperation? Even if the immigration legislation stands to help Democrats in November, why wouldn't the Republicans support it if they believe it is quality legislation? Furthermore, why is the "focus by [Democratic] party leaders" on immigration (probably rightly) assumed to convey the selfish interests of power-grabbing politicians? Why can't it just be a good idea that will help people? Whatever happened to being a servant of the state?
Politics has always been (and will continue to be) a dirty game. But is there any way we can rig incentives such that the interests of politicians better align with the interests of their constituents? How can we make politics more productive toward the end of prosperity?
This is a question into which evolutionary psychology might be able to provide some insight. It is a situation in which the normative claim -- politicians should work with their constituents' interests in mind prior to their own -- is fairly obvious, but also one in which the empirical claims -- i.e. politicians generally serve themselves more than others because xxxx, and doing xxxx will effectively move the system toward the normative standard -- are emphatically not obvious. Science can't answer normative questions, but it can answer empirical ones, and, when looking for the means to achieve normative standards, it is just as important to have the empirical answers as it is to have the normative answers.
The more we learn about our evolved (social) psychologies, the better chance we have at "nudging" ourselves and our societies in the right direction.