Definitely something to consider.
D.
On 26/06/2012 6:01 AM, Ray Harrell wrote:
*REH*
**
*JUNE 24, 2012, 5:00 PM, NYTimes
*http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/evolution-and-our-inner-conflict/?scp=4&sq=Opinionator&st=Search**
*Evolution and Our Inner Conflict*
*/By /**/EDWARD O. WILSON/*
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/edward-o-wilson/>*//*
Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of
evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of
good? Are we built to pledge our lives to a group, even to the risk of
death, or the opposite, built to place ourselves and our families
above all else? Scientific evidence, a good part of it accumulated
during the past 20 years, suggests that we are all of these things
simultaneously. Each of us is inherently complicated. We are all
genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners - not because humanity
has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal -
but because of the way our species originated across millions of years
of biological evolution.
Don't get me wrong. I am not implying that we are driven by instinct
in the manner of animals. Yet in order to understand the human
condition, it is necessary to accept that we do have instincts, and
will be wise to take into account our very distant ancestors, as far
back and in as fine a detail as possible. History is not enough to
reach this level of understanding. It stops at the dawn of literacy,
where it turns the rest of the story over to the detective work of
archaeology; in still deeper time the quest becomes paleontology. For
the real human story, history makes no sense without prehistory, and
prehistory makes no sense without biology.
Within biology itself, the key to the mystery is the force that lifted
pre-human social behavior to the human level. The leading candidate in
my judgment is multilevel selection by which hereditary social
behavior improves the competitive ability not of just individuals
within groups but among groups as a whole. Its consequences can be
plainly seen in the caste systems of ants, termites and other social
insects. Between-group selection as a force operating in addition to
between-individual selection simultaneously is not a new idea in
biology. Charles Darwin correctly deduced its role, first in the
insects and then in human beings - respectively in "On the Origin of
Species" and "The Descent of Man."
Even so, the reader should be warned that the revival of multilevel
selection as the principal force of social evolution remains a hotly
contested idea. Its opponents believe the principal force to be kin
selection: when individuals favor kin (other than offspring), the
evolution of altruistic behavior is favored. The loss suffered by the
genes of the altruist are compensated by genes in the recipient made
identical by common descent of the altruist and recipient. If the
altruism thus created is strong enough it can lead to advanced social
behavior. This seems plausible, but in 2010 two mathematical
biologists, Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, and I demonstrated that
the mathematical foundations of the kin selection theory are unsound,
and that examples from nature thought to support kin selection theory
are better explained as products of multilevel selection.
A strong reaction from supporters of kin selection not surprisingly
ensued, and soon afterward more than 130 of them famously signed on to
protest our replacement of kin selection by multilevel selection, and
most emphatically the key role given to group selection. But at no
time have our mathematical and empirical arguments been refuted or
even seriously challenged. Since that protest, the number of
supporters of the multilevel selection approach has grown, to the
extent that a similarly long list of signatories could be obtained.
But such exercises are futile: science is not advanced by polling. If
it were, we would still be releasing phlogiston to burn logs and
navigating the sky with geocentric maps.
I am convinced after years of research on the subject that multilevel
selection, with a powerful role of group-to-group competition, has
forged advanced social behavior - including that of humans, as I
documented in my recent book "The Social Conquest of Earth." In fact,
it seems clear that so deeply ingrained are the evolutionary products
of group selected behaviors, so completely a part of the human
condition, that we are prone to regard them as fixtures of nature,
like air and water. They are instead idiosyncratic traits of our
species. Among them is the intense, obsessive interest of people in
other people, which begins in the first days of life as infants learn
particular scents and sounds of the adults around them. Research
psychologists have found that all normal humans are geniuses at
reading the intentions of others, whereby they evaluate, gossip,
proselytize, bond, cooperate and control. Each person, working his way
back and forth through his social network, almost continuously reviews
past experiences while imagining the consequences of future scenarios.
A second diagnostic hereditary peculiarity of human behavior is the
overpowering instinctual urge to belong to groups in the first place.
To be kept in solitude is to be kept in pain, and put on the road to
madness. A person's membership in his group - his tribe - is a large
part of his identity. It also confers upon him to some degree or other
a sense of superiority. When psychologists selected teams at random
from a population of volunteers to compete in simple games, members of
each team soon came to think of members of other teams as less able
and trustworthy, even when the participants knew they had been
selected at random.
All things being equal (fortunately things are seldom equal, not
exactly), people prefer to be with others who look like them, speak
the same dialect, and hold the same beliefs An amplification of this
evidently inborn predisposition leads with frightening ease to racism
and religious bigotry.
It might be supposed that the human condition is so distinctive and
came so late in the history of life on Earth as to suggest the hand of
a divine creator. Yet in a critical sense the human achievement was
not unique at all. Biologists have identified about two dozen
evolutionary lines in the modern world fauna that attained advanced
social life based on some degree of altruistic division of labor. Most
arose in the insects. Several were independent origins, in marine
shrimp, and three appeared among the mammals, that is, in two African
mole rats, and us. All reached this level through the same narrow
gateway: solitary individuals, or mated pairs, or small groups of
individuals built nests and foraged from the nest for food with which
they progressively raised their offspring to maturity.
Until about three million years ago the ancestors of /Homo
sapiens/ were mostly vegetarians, and they most likely wandered in
groups from site to site where fruit, tubers, and other vegetable food
could be harvested. Their brains were only slightly larger than those
of modern chimpanzees. By no later than half a million years ago,
however, groups of the ancestral species /Homo erectus/ were
maintaining campsites with controlled fire - the equivalent of nests -
from which they foraged and returned with food, including a
substantial portion of meat. Their brain size had increased to
midsize, between that of chimpanzees and modern /Homo sapiens/. The
trend appears to have begun one to two million years previously, when
the earlier prehuman ancestor /Homo habilis/ turned increasingly to
meat in its diet. With groups crowded together at a single site, and
an advantage added by cooperative nest building and hunting, social
intelligence grew, along with the centers of memory and reasoning in
the prefrontal cortex.
Probably at this point, during the habiline period, a conflict ensued
between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with
other individuals in the same group, versus group-level selection,
with competition among groups. The latter force promoted altruism and
cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality
and a sense of conscience and honor. The competitor between the two
forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: within groups selfish
individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat
groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification,
individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.
So it appeared that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory
of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly
changing locations between the two extreme forces that created us. We
are unlikely to yield completely to either force as an ideal solution
to our social and political turmoil. To yield completely to the
instinctual urgings born from individual selection would dissolve
society. To surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn
us into angelic robots - students of insects call them ants.
The eternal conflict is not God's test of humanity. It is not a
machination of Satan. It is just the way things worked out. It might
be the only way in the entire universe that human-level intelligence
and social organization can evolve. We will find a way eventually to
live with our inborn turmoil, and perhaps find pleasure in viewing it
as a primary source of our creativity.
/Edward O. Wilson is Honorary Curator in Entomology and University
Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University. He has received more
than 100 awards for his research and writing, including the U. S.
National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize and two Pulitzer Prizes
in non-fiction. His most recent book is "The Social Conquest of Earth."/
*From:*[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Ray Harrell
*Sent:* Tuesday, June 26, 2012 7:55 AM
*To:* 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
*Subject:* Re: [Futurework] 17 banknote warehouses
Does this mean that the most sane systems in the world are Asian
Socialist?
REH
*From:*[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Keith Hudson
*Sent:* Tuesday, June 26, 2012 3:14 AM
*To:* RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION
*Subject:* [Futurework] 17 banknote warehouses
In the 17 countries of the Eurozone there are 17 warehouses stuffed
with adequate numbers of brand-new bank-notes of what, at the moment,
are their former currencies -- lira, pesetas, guilders, francs,
deutschemarks. drachmas, whatever. It cannot be imagined that any
self-respecting civil service would not already have organized this
within at least the last two years of heightened concern about the
future of the euro. It may even be the case that some prescient
treasury departments didn't incinerate their old banknotes ten years
ago and simply stillaged them in a convenient salt mine, ready for
re-use if necessary.
At the same time, if statements here and there are to be believed,
scores, perhaps hundreds, of transnational corporations will have
already set up parallel accountancy systems which could be activated
if any or all the Eurozone countries go native. Certainly all banks
will have done so. Indeed, a day or two ago, investment experts at
Deutsche Bank have said that the collapse of the Eurozone "is a very
likely scenario". Silvio Berlusconi, former prime minister of Italy
and clown though he is, is thinking of leading his party on a
return-to-lira ticket. Given that prime minister Mario Monti's
austerity measures are already causing riots in Italy then Berlusconi
might well be onto a winner unless the authorities find some pretext
of locking him up after a quick trial. (And, goodness knows, there's
already plenty of evidence of corruption on which his colleagues have
already been found guilty.)
Oh! and by way of a postscript, we might mention that many sensible
Eurozone individuals are also trying to insure themselves against a
calamitous collapse of the Eurozone. Every now and again a plane load
of krugerrands is flown from South Africa to Europe. Gold dispensing
machines are being installed in some German hotels. The Pan Asia Gold
Exchange, knowing a good market when it sees one, is intending to open
depots in Europe where internet-purchasers of gold can store it or
collect it.
Meanwhile, senior Eurozone politicians and bureaucrats will continue
to assert that all will be well. And, because most of masses are
totally bewildered by all the financial jiggery-pokery going on, and
are always inclined to believe good news rather than disaster, the
propagandists will be believed. Right up to the last moment.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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