evolution - Rudy Garns on Diigo

Apr

22

2012

Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of the arts | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2012

Harvard Biologist E.O. Wilson Explains the Evolution of Culture: http://t.co/WDDGQjVg

harvardmagazine.com/...on-the-origins-of-the-arts

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Art evolution culture

May

3

2012

Scientists Show How a Gene Duplication Helped Our Brains Become ‘Human’ | Neuroscience News

neurosciencenews.com/lication-human-brain-evolution

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neuroscience gene evolution human-evolution brain

an extra copy of a brain-development gene, which appeared in our ancestors’ genomes about 2.4 million years ago, allowed maturing neurons to migrate farther and develop more connections.

Apr

28

2012

John Gray: The Knowns And The Unknowns | The New Republic

Darwinian explanation of morality, contending that moral behavior emerges from a natural process of competition among human groups.

www.tnr.com/...dt-morality-politics-scientism

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Haidt morality Darwin evolution

The core of the book is an attempt at a Darwinian explanation of morality, contending that moral behavior emerges from a natural process of competition among human groups.
Human beings “have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group,” an ability that “facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.”
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- But contrary to Haidt, this is not a frailty that can be avoided by relying on large, speculative ideas. If history shows anything, it is that acting on the basis of grand theories only makes human behavior even more unreasonable.
- Books such as Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, one of the more impressive of recent applications of Darwinism to ethics, assume that acting morally is a matter of following rules or principles having mainly to do with justice and the prevention of harm. This may seem self-evident to secular social scientists in American universities, but it hardly squares with how most human beings (or most Americans, for that matter) understand morality.
- like a tongue with six taste receptors.
- Clifford Geertz’s observation: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe ... is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”
- Notions of individual responsibility are not prominent in the Iliad, where moral life turns on issues of shame and social recognition; nor do they figure much in many non-Western cultures today.
- When “morality” becomes a term of art in a supposedly scientific discipline, there is no longer any difference between good and bad moralities.
- functionalist: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.”

Apr

20

2012

Species Concepts | EvoEcoLab, Scientific American Blog Network

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...species-concepts

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species concepts evolution biology

Dec

19

2008

Morality and Evolutionary Biology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/...morality-biology

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morality evolution philosophy

a strong, emotionally-laden sense of basic fairness, resentment of cheaters, and a desire that they be punished
what reasons the person had for making it—for thinking it to be true
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- whether evolutionary biology might shed light on the content of morality in the normative sense.
- In thinking about how we ought to live, do we get any insight from evolutionary theory?
- based on deep misunderstandings of evolution
- the pinnacle of evolution in its “highest phase”
- progressively “more evolved” (in the sense of “superior”) forms manifesting a greater “totality of life”
- the harmonious and mutually supportive behavior
- moral facts are themselves natural facts of some sort
- it is hard to see how such evolutionary facts can possibly have normative authority or force for a rational agent
- scientific evidence supports consequentialist ethical theories over deontological ones
- rationalized rather than resulting from moral reasoning
- able to grasp genuine truths even though those truths play no role in the story of how our basic mental capacities evolved.
- we have simply learned how to exercise them in developed cultural contexts to discover truths that go far beyond any that were relevant to the evolution of those underlying capacities.
- evolved emotional dispositions or “domain specific modules” that provide us with inherited moral instincts that shape our beliefs
- natural selection shaped those dispositions simply according to which variations best contributed to the biological fitness of our hominin ancestors, rather than in ways that would be expected to track independent moral truths, even if they existed.
- what is the relation between the evolutionary shaping of moral judgments and the independent moral truths posited by realists?
- deny that the evolutionary influence on the content of our moral beliefs is as pervasive as she claims
- our capacity to grasp moral truths—like our capacity to grasp philosophical truths about metaphysical necessity, say—is simply a byproduct of our general capacities for critical reasoning, combined with the evolved capacity for forming and employing normative concepts in our thinking and decision-making.

Jul

6

2009

Evolutionary Psychology Primer by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.

In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new ones. This chapter is a primer on the concepts and arguments that animate it.

www.psych.ucsb.edu/...primer.html

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psychology evolution tooby cosmides evolutionary-psychology cogsci

the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new ones.
the mind is a heterogeneous collection of these competences
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- experience, refracted through a small handful of innate mental procedures, inscribed content onto the mental slate
- blank slate to switchboard to general purpose computer
- a small number of general purpose mechanisms that are content-independent
- These circuits organize the way we interpret our experiences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. Beneath the level of surface variability, all humans share certain views and assumptions about the nature of the world and human action by virtue of these human universal reasoning circuits.
- content-independent or domain-general
- Such mechanisms, by definition, have no pre-existing content built-in to their procedures, they are not designed to construct certain contents more readily than others, and they have no features specialized for processing particular kinds of content.
- Standard Social Science Model -- the contents of human minds are primarily (or entirely) free social constructions, and the social sciences are autonomous and disconnected from any evolutionary or psychological foundation
- Evolutionary psychology provides an alternative framework that is beginning to replace it. On this view, all normal human minds reliably develop a standard collection of reasoning and regulatory circuits that are functionally specialized and, frequently, domain-specific.
- designed
- designed by natural selection
- the circuits of the brain are designed to generate motion -- behavior -- in response to information from the environment. The function of your brain -- this wet computer -- is to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.
- the function of your brain is to generate behavior that is "appropriate" to your environmental circumstances
- what did the actual designer of the human brain do, and why?
- They were designed by the evolutionary process, and natural selection is the only evolutionary force that is capable of creating complexly organized machines.
- it is a process in which a phenotypic design feature causes its own spread through a population
- the reason we have one set of circuits rather than another is that the circuits that we have were better at solving problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history than alternative circuits were. The brain is a naturally constructed computational system whose function is to solve adaptive information-processing problems (such as face recognition, threat interpretation, language acquisition, or navigation). Over evolutionary time, its circuits were cumulatively added because they "reasoned" or "processed information" in a way that enhanced the adaptive regulation of behavior and physiology.
- Adaptive problems have two defining characteristics. First, they are ones that cropped up again and again during the evolutionary history of a species. Second, they are problems whose solution affected the reproduction of individual organisms
- The only kind of problems that natural selection can design circuits for solving are adaptive problems.
- Our ability to solve other kinds of problems is a side-effect or by-product of circuits that were designed to solve adaptive probl
- The only things you become aware of are a few high level conclusions
- divided into organs,
- our intuitions can deceive us
- our minds consist of a large number of circuits that are functionally specialized
- two rules of inference from the propositional calculus, a system that allows one to deduce true conclusions from true premises, no matter what the subject matter of the premises is
- a newborn's brain has response systems that "expect" faces to be present in the environment: babies less than 10 minutes old turn their eyes and head in response to face-like patterns
- strong ontological assumptions
- contain rigid objects that are continuous
- parsing the world into separate objects
- mind-reading" system,
- reasoning instincts and learning instincts
- hunter-gatherer societies
- Natural selection is a slow process, and there just haven't been enough generations for it to design circuits that are well-adapted to our post-industrial life.
- phylogenetic continuities implied by the inheritance of homologous features from common ancestors.
- application of adaptationist logic to the study of the architecture of the human mind.
- Evolutionary psychology is not just another swing of the nature/nurture pendulum.
- Evolutionary psychology seeks to characterize the universal, species-typical architecture of these mechanisms
- What is the universal, evolved architecture that we all share by virtue of being humans? (evolutionary psychology)
- Genes allow the environment to influence the development of phenotypes.
- This creates a selection pressure for cognitive designs that can detect and understand social conditionals reliably, precisely, and economcally
- the evolved architecture of the human mind would include inference procedures that are specialized for detecting cheaters.
- by switching the order of requirement and benefit within the if-then structure of the rule, one can elicit responses that are functionally correct from the point of view of cheater detection, but logically incorrect

Mar

10

2012

Signing, Singing, Speaking: How Language Evolved : NPR

www.npr.org/...story.php

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language evolution

Dec

5

2011

Biological Information (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/...information-biological

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information biology gene evolution

Many biologists think of the developmental processes by which organisms progress from egg to adult in terms of the execution of a “developmental program.
major transitions in evolution depend on expansions in the amount and accuracy with which information is transmitted across the generations.
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- an informational “domain” that exists alongside the domain of matter and energy
- anything is a source of information if it has a range of possible states, and one variable carries information about another to the extent that their states are physically correlated
- although contemporary mainstream biology is an overtly materialist field, it has come to employ concepts that philosophers will recognize as intentional or semantic ones, concepts
- Genes are crucial to both explaining the development of individual organisms, and to explaining the inheritance of characteristics across generations.
- the familiar chart representing the “genetic code,” that maps triplets of the DNA bases (C, A, T, G) to individual amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein molecules.
- In the weaker sense, informational connections between events or variables involve no more than ordinary correlations (or perhaps correlations that are “non-accidental” in some physical sense involving causation or natural laws).
- For Shannon, anything is a source of information if it has a number of alternative states that might be realized on a particular occasion. And any other variable carries information about the source if its state is correlated with the state of the source.
- there is no sense in which biological processes are being explained in terms of the use or manipulation of information
- The appeal to information has an inferential use that is no way explanatory.
- The term “causal” information is also sometimes used to refer to this concept, and it is essentially the same as what Grice (1957) referred to as “natural meaning” in his work in the philosophy of language.
- The more contentious question becomes whether or not biology needs another, richer concept of information as well. Information in this richer sense is sometimes called “semantic” or “intentional” information.
- In mammals, for example, chromosome structure predicts the sex of the adult animal.
- For environmental factors, not just genes, “carry information” about phenotypes, in Shannon's sense.
- if we are using Shannon's concept, then the informational relationship between genotype and phenotype is symmetrical.
- In addition, a message that carries “semantic information,” it is often thought, has the capacity to mis-represent, as well as accurately represent, what it is about. There is a capacity for error.
- Genes carry a message that is supposed to be expressed, whether or not it actually is expressed.
- a prescriptive or imperative content, as opposed to a descriptive or indicative one.
- When an entity has been subject to and shaped by a history of natural selection, this can provide the grounding for a kind of purposive or normative description of the causal capacities of that entity.
- the proposal of Sterelny, Smith and Dickison (1996), supposed that there is an intimate connection between evolutionary function and semantic properties in the case of biological structures that have been selected to play a causal role in developmental processes.
- Some non-genetic factors have the same status.
- ne problem is that any causal relation can look “arbitrary” if it operates via many intervening links, for there are many possible interventions on those links which would change the product of the causal chain.
- a producer and an consumer device
- In the case of an indicative signal or representation, the representation is supposed to affect the activities of the consumer in a way that will only further the performance of the consumer's biological functions if some state of affairs obtains. In the case of an imperative representation, the representation is supposed to affect the activities of the consumer by inducing them to bring some state of affairs about.
- genes “code for” the amino acid sequence of protein molecules, in virtue of the peculiar features of the “transcription and translation” mechanisms found within cells.
- This process makes eukaryotic DNA a much less straightforward predictor of the protein's amino acid sequence than it is in bacteria
- the standard genetic code is turning out to have more systematic and non-accidental structure than people had once supposed
- hormonal signaling systems, and other mechanisms by which one part of the body conditions the activities of another by means of an intermediate molecule.
- A central feature of this schema is the distinction between some mechanism that reads or consumes the signal, and the signal itself. The very notion of a “receptor,” seen so often in cell biology, suggests this schema. This explains why hormones seem to be such good candidates for a semantic characterization.
- proceeds reliably and predictably without any central control of the development
- genes can be said to code for protein molecules but not for anything further downstream.
- explanatory illusions and distortions
- these concepts distort our understanding of the causal processes in which genes are involved
- Preformationism, in its original form, in effect reduces development to growth
- informational models of genes and gene action make it very tempting to attribute a kind of causal primacy to these factors, even when many other causal factors are essential players in the process in question
- in biological systems the causal role of genes is in fact tightly interconnected with the roles of many other factors (often loosely lumped together as “environmental”)
- it is highly misleading to treat genes and only genes as carrying “messages” that are expressed in their effects.
- the idea of internal genetic messages may also foster a tendency towards a kind of essentialist thinking;
- information is a non-material posit masquerading as a high-level physical property
- Jablonka and Lamb hold that one of the useful features of informational descriptions is that they allow us to generalize across different heredity systems, comparing their properties in a common currency.
- intricate but orderly and well-coordinated nature of many processes in biological systems
- there is an informational “domain” that exists alongside the physical domain of matter and energy.

Cultural Evolution (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/...evolution-cultural

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evolution culture philosophy

the significance of cultural inheritance
vertical transmission—the inheritance of parental traits by offspring
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- learn from peers, authority-figures and so forth. This is known as horizontal transmission
- Forms of horizontal transmission are required to explain this transition, because if cultural transmission was always vertical, then the trait of having greater numbers of offspring would be maintained in the population by natural selection, albeit selection acting via cultural inheritance.
- The problem, then, is how to tune a learning mechanism so that beneficial behaviours are copied, while non-beneficial behaviours are not.
- prestige bias
- conformist bias
- decouple the causes of variation from the causes of selection
- integrate the effects of cultural inheritance into more standard biological models of evolution.
- necessary to find some form of cultural replicator that explains cultural inheritance
- limitations of the gene/meme analogy
- there is no known mechanism that could explain how memes are copied
- An idea can be copied simply through observation and inference:
- Ideas can also be copied using linguistic communication
- imitation is usually too error-prone to underpin replication
- attractors’—culturally shared patterns of thought, which enable representations to spread through a population without literal copying
- most cultural items are ‘re-produced’ in the sense that they are produced again and again—with, of course, a causal link between all these productions—but are not reproduced in the sense of being copied from one another
- Cultural units do not form lineages:
- ideas are rarely copied from a single source in a way that allows us to trace clear lineages
- if token ideas can appear in an individual in virtue of that individual's exposure to several sources or just one, then this makes it unlikely that anything close to Mendel's laws will be discovered within cultural evolution.
- one might worry that memetics merely offers a cosmetic re-packaging of a familiar set of stories about cultural change
- build models that allow for error-prone learning, and that acknowledge that an individual's beliefs are often the result of exposure to many sources, rather than copying from just one source.
- even if cultural change does not require cultural replicators, at least adaptive cultural change does.
- ‘conformist bias’ can overcome the effects of error-prone learning to produce reliable inheritance at the population level
- Less faithful copying demands stronger selective forces if adaptive variation is not to be lost.
- seek to explain the changes in trait frequencies in a population over time.
- ‘population thinking’
- general conditions required for evolvability
- the consequences of these individual-level dispositions for population-level properties
- Boyd and Richerson's claim in favour of the importance of prestige bias is primarily an effort to show how natural selection might have favoured cultural learning
- evolvability in a lineage
- The environment needs to cooperate: if selective pressures change very quickly then there will be no sustained environmental demands of the sort that might build complex adaptations over time. Development also matters. If ontogeny is set up in such a way that changes to any one trait tend to be accompanied by changes to all other traits, then the chances are that cumulative adaptation will be particularly hard to come by.
- suppression of ‘outlaws’

Jan

21

2008

Species (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The nature of species is controversial in biology and philosophy. Biologists disagree on the definition of the term 'species.' Philosophers disagree over the ontological status of species. A proper understanding of species is important for a number of reasons. Species are the fundamental taxonomic units of biological classification. Environmental laws are framed in terms of species. Even our conception of human nature is affected by our understanding of species. In this entry, three philosophical issues concerning species are discussed. The first is the ontological status of species. The second is whether biologists should be species pluralists or species monists. The third is whether the theoretical term 'species' refers to a real category in nature.

plato.stanford.edu/...species

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evolution species philosophy

This entry discusses three philosophical issues concerning species. The first issue is their ontological status. Are species natural kinds, individuals, or sets? The second issue concerns species pluralism. Monists argue that biologists should attempt to find the correct definition of ‘species.’ Pluralists disagree. They argue that there is no single correct definition of ‘species’ but a plurality of equally correct definitions. The third issue concerns the reality of species. Does the term ‘species’ refer to a real category in nature? Or, as some philosophers and biologists argue, is the term ‘species’ a theoretically empty designation?
Species are also units of evolution
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- fundamental units of biological classification
- all and only the members of a kind have a common essence
- the essence of a kind is responsible for the traits typically associated with the members of that kind
- knowing a kind's essence helps us explain and predict those properties typically associated with a kind
- The universality of a biological trait in a species is fragile.
- species have vague boundaries and that such vagueness is incompatible with the existence of species specific essences
- Contemporary biology can explain variation within a species without positing a species' essence. So according to Sober, species essentialism has become theoretically superfluous.
- Individuals, unlike classes, consist of parts that are spatiotemporally restricted.
- A number of processes can cause a trait to become prominent in a species. Hull highlights selection. Selection causes a trait to become prominent in a species only if that trait is passed down from one generation to the next. If a trait is not heritable, the frequency of that trait will not increase cumulatively. Hereditary relations, genetic or otherwise, require the generations of a species to be causally connected. Reproduction requires the generations of a species to be causally and hence spatiotemporally connected. So, if species are to evolve in non trivial ways by natural selection, they must be spatiotemporally continuous entities. Given that species are units of evolution, species are individuals and not classes.
- When Hull asserts that species are units of evolution, he does not simply mean that the gene frequencies of a species change from one generation to the next. He has a more significant form of evolution in mind, namely a trait going from being rare to being prominent in a species.
- the relationship between an organism and its species is not a member/class relation but a part/whole relation
- From an evolutionary perspective, there is no biological essence to being a human. There is no essential feature that all and only humans must have to be part of Homo sapiens. Humans are not essentially rational beings or social animals or ethical agents.
- Proximate explanations cite the more immediate cause of a trait, for example, the genes or developmental pathways that cause the occurrence of a trait in an organism. Ultimate explanations cite the evolutionary cause of a trait in a species, for example, the selection forces that caused the evolution of thumbs in pandas and their ancestors.
- species are natural kinds on a proper conception of natural kinds. These authors adopt Boyd's Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) theory of natural kinds. HPC theory assumes that natural kinds are groups of entities that share stable similarities.
- An HPC kind consists of entities that share similarities induced by that kind's homeostatic mechanisms. According to Boyd, species are HPC kinds and thus natural kinds because "species are defined . . . by . . . shared properties and by the mechanisms (including both "external" mechanisms and genetic transmission) which sustain their homeostasis" (1999b, 81)
- In addition to Boyd's ‘homeostatic’ mechanisms we need to recognize ‘heterostatic’ mechanisms that maintain species variation
- The Biological Species Concept defines a species as a group of organisms that can successfully interbreed and produce fertile offspring. The Phylogenetic Species Concept (which itself has multiple versions) defines a species as a group of organisms bound by a unique ancestry. The Ecological Species Concept defines a species as a group of organisms that share a distinct ecological niche.
- Perhaps there is a process or a pattern that occurs in species but not in other types of taxa.
- process of interbreeding
- stabilizing selection
- genetic and developmental homeostasis.
- species are bound by different types of processes
- ontological structure,

Feb

19

2012

Speciation. Teach Evolution and Make it Relevant

www.evoled.org/...speciation.htm

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evolution speciation

Feb

15

2012

Why “The Spandrels of San Marco” isn’t a good paper « Oikos Blog

oikosjournal.wordpress.com/...of-san-marco-isnt-a-good-paper

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spandrels gould lewontin evolution

Feb

12

2012

“I think”

www.jackscanlan.com/...i-think

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darwin evolution

Jan

29

2012

Richard Dawkins, "Replicators and Vehicles" 1982

www.stephenjaygould.org/...dawkins_replicators.html

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dawkins replicators genes evolution selection

What are DNA molecules for?
Living matter is nested in a hierarchy of levels
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- the dispute between individual and group is different in kind from the dispute between individual and gene.
- what we ought to mean
- most effective
- there are two ways in which we can characterize natural selection. Both are correct; they simply focus on different aspects of the same process.
- any entity in the universe of which copies are made
- A germ-line replicator, as distinct from a dead-end replicator
- an active, as distinct from a passive, replicator is a replicator that has some causal influence on its own probability of being propagated.
- When we say that an adaptation is "for the good of' something, what is that something? Is it the species, the group, the individual, or what? I am suggesting that the appropriate "something," the "unit of selection" in that sense, is the active germ-line replicator.
- It is their phenotypic effects that are the proximal subjects of selection
- Natural selection, of course, depends on the variation
- replicators may therefore be regarded as in competition with other replicators.
- each replicator is a competitor specifically of its alleles at its own locus on the chromosomes of the population
- that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency"
- a unit that is potentially immortal (Dawkins, 1976, chapter 3), a point I learned from Williams (1966). Briefly, the rationale is that an entity must have a low rate of spontaneous, endogenous change, if the selective advantage of its phenotypic effects over those of rival ("allelic") entities is to have any significant evolutionary effect.
- The asexual organism's genome may be considered a replicator, since any alteration in it tends to be preserved.
- there is a hierarchy of nested vehicles
- cell organelles, haploid organisms, and gametes are levels of selection with a higher heritability than diploid sexual genotypes, since the latter do not perfectly reproduce themselves, but undergo segregation and recombination in the course of their reproduction
- replicators are not directly visible to natural selection
- literally indivisibility-being sufficiently heterogeneous in form to be rendered nonfunctional if cut in half)
- in nature behaves as if it had a single purpose
- "The 'ramet' is the unit of clonal growth, the module that may often follow an independent existence if severed from the parent plant"
- The "genet," on the other hand, is the unit that springs from one single-celled zygote, the "individual" in the normal zoologists' sense.
- Each new vehicle comes into being through an act of reproduction. New parts of vehicles come into being through growth.
- In order to make complex adaptations at the level of multicellular organs—eyes, ears, hearts, etc.—a complex developmental process is necessary.
- given that death and reproduction do occur in a lineage, evolution in that lineage becomes possible
- reproduction as the process by which a new vehicle comes into existence, and growth as the process by which an existing vehicle develops
- genetic mosaics
- The whole "plant" would not function as a vehicle propagating the genes inside it, because different cells inside it would contain different genes. Cells would function as vehicles, and adaptations would not be for the good of the whole plant but for the good of smaller units within the plant. To qualify as a "vehicle," an entity must come into being by reproduction, not by growth.
- Groups do not go through a regular cycle of growth (development), alternating with "reproduction" (sending off a small "propagule" which eventually grows into a new group).
- "group selection" in the sense of D. S. Wilson (1980) can only work if there is some mechanism by which genetic variation between groups is kept higher than genetic variation within groups
- Kin-group selection is the special case of group selection in which individuals tend to be closely related to other members of their own group.
- the theory of kin selection does not need to assume discrete family groups
- Where they exist, tightly knit family bands, or "kin groups," may be regarded as vehicles.
- it must use phenotypic effects as intermediaries, but do these have to be bodies?
- When we look at an animal behaving, we may have to learn to say, not "How is it benefiting its inclusive fitness?" but rather "Whose inclusive fitness is it benefiting?"
- competing replicators in germ lines
- Any particular phenotypic characteristic will have to be seen as the joint product of replicators whose influence converges from many different sources, many different bodies belonging to different species, phyla, and kingdoms. This is the doctrine of the "extended phenotype."
- neither the organism nor the group is a replicator

Jan

22

2012

Origin of the Species ch 14 Recapitulation

www.literature.org/...chapter-14.html

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evolution Darwin

one long argument
descent with modification through natural selection
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- the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor
- gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct
- all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable
- there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct
- some species have retained the same specific form for very long periods, enormously long as measured by years
- time sufficient for any amount of organic change
- The number of specimens in all our museums is absolutely as nothing compared with the countless generations of countless species which certainly have existed.
- sufficiently constant and distinct from other forms
- we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species.
- It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Jan

23

2012

Evolution Is Still Happening: Beneficial Mutations in Humans | Daylight Atheism | Big Think

bigthink.com/40500

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Darwin evolution human-evolution

People with the Apo-AIM gene have significantly lower levels of risk than the general population for heart attack and stroke
Mutations which impair the function of LRP5 are known to cause osteoporosis. But a different kind of mutation can amplify its function
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- People with just one copy of this gene are 29% less likely to get malaria, while people with two copies enjoy a 93% reduction in risk.
- The gene for one kind of cone, which responds most strongly to blue, is found on chromosome 7. The two other kinds, which are sensitive to red and green, are both on the X chromosome. Since men have only one X, a mutation which disables either the red or the green gene will produce red-green colorblindness, while women have a backup copy. This explains why this is almost exclusively a male condition.

Jan

21

2012

Origin of Species ch 4 Natural Selection

www.literature.org/...chapter-04.html

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evolution origin species Darwin natural-selection

infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life.
This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.
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- having incomparably longer time at her disposal
- external and visible characters
- Can we wonder, then, that nature's productions should be far 'truer' in character than man's productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?
- We see nothing of these slow changes in progress
- In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community;
- This depends, not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring.
- Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being
- with animals and plants a cross between different varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives vigour and fertility to the offspring; and on the other hand, that close interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility
- no organic being self-fertilises itself for an eternity of generations; but that a cross with another individual is occasionally perhaps at very long intervals -- indispensable.
- Intercrossing plays a very important part in nature in keeping the individuals of the same species, or of the same variety, true and uniform in character.
- In a confined or isolated area, if not very large, the organic and inorganic conditions of life will generally be in a great degree uniform; so that natural selection will tend to modify all the individuals of a varying species throughout the area in the same manner in relation to the same conditions.
- isolation, by checking immigration and consequently competition, will give time for any new variety to be slowly improved;
- largeness of area is of more importance
- natural selection will always act with extreme slowness
- depends on there being places in the polity of nature, which can be better occupied by some of the inhabitants of the country undergoing modification of some kind
- this very slow, intermittent action of natural selection accords perfectly well with what geology tells us of the rate and manner at which the inhabitants of this world have changed.
- Natural selection acts solely through the preservation of variations in some way advantageous, which consequently endure.
- so will the less favoured forms decrease and become rare.
- rare species will be less quickly modified or improved within any given period, and they will consequently be beaten in the race for life by the modified descendants of the commoner species.
- each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them.
- varieties, even strongly-marked ones, though having somewhat of the character of species as is shown by the hopeless doubts in many cases how to rank them yet certainly differ from each other far less than do good and distinct species
- varieties are species in the process of formation, or are, as I have called them, incipient species.
- How, then, does the lesser difference between varieties become augmented into the greater difference between species?
- Mere chance, as we may call it, might cause one variety to differ in some character from its parents, and the offspring of this variety again to differ from its parent in the very same character and in a greater degree; but this alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species and species of the same genus.
- the principle of divergence, causing differences, at first barely appreciable, steadily to increase, and the breeds to diverge in character both from each other and from their common parent.
- better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.
- only by its varying descendants seizing on places at present occupied by other animals
- organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation
- a severe struggle for life
- The more diversified in habits and structure the descendants of our carnivorous animal became, the more places they would be enabled to occupy
- if variations useful to any organic being do occur
- strong principle of inheritance
- sexual selection
- Sexual selection will also give characters useful to the males alone, in their struggles with other males.
- judged of by the general tenour and balance of evidence given in the following chapters
- more living beings can be supported on the same area the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution
- Natural selection, also, leads to divergence of character
- modification of the descendants
- In an extremely small area, especially if freely open to immigration, and where the contest between individual and individual must be severe, we always find great diversity in its inhabitants.
- Natural selection, as has just been remarked, leads to divergence of character and to much extinction of the less improved and intermediate forms of life.
- On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic beings; but, to the best of my judgment, it is explained through inheritance and the complex action of natural selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character, as we have seen illustrated in the diagram.
- represented by a great tree
- in the general economy of any land, the more widely and perfectly the animals and plants are diversified for different habits of life, so will a greater number of individuals be capable of there supporting themselves.

Jan

22

2012

Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists

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evolution evolutionary-psychology 110 315

Jan

21

2012

origin of species ch 3 struggle for existence

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evolution origin species Darwin

individual variability
how is it that varieties, which I have called incipient species, become ultimately converted into good and distinct species, which in most cases obviously differ from each other far more than do the varieties of the same species?
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- Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring
- Natural Selection
- all organic beings are exposed to severe competition
- dependence of one being on another
- success in leaving progeny
- there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.
- naturally increases at so high a rate
- The condor lays a couple of eggs and the ostrich a score
- the real importance of a large number of eggs or seeds is to make up for much destruction at some period of life;
- The amount of food for each species of course gives the extreme limit to which each can increase
- serving as prey to other animals
- Climate plays an important part in determining the average numbers of a species
- epidemics
- in many cases, a large stock of individuals of the same species, relatively to the numbers of its enemies, is absolutely necessary for its preservation
- cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir
- yet in the long-run the forces are so nicely balanced, that the face of nature remains uniform for long periods of time, though assuredly the merest trifle would often give the victory to one organic being over another
- so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!
- When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this!
- Throw up a handful of feathers, and all must fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is this problem compared to the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on the old Indian ruins!
- But the struggle almost invariably will be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers
- As species of the same genus have usually, though by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other, than between species of distinct genera.
- the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings, with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys.
- I suspect that the chief use of the nutriment in the seed is to favour the growth of the young seedling, whilst struggling with other plants growing vigorously all around.
- our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings
- each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio
- struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction
- the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Jul

7

2009

Charles Darwin the Young Adventurer

Charles Darwin was only twenty-two years old when he was offered the opportunity of a lifetime. Those years afloat have become part of history. Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle is famous for turning his mind toward evolutionary theory, for giving him the intellectual stamina and materials to support such a theory, and for the romantic symbolism of his movement toward such an unexpected yet magnificent goal.

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Darwin Beagle evolution

High among these was the question of the “design” of living beings. In Darwin’s day, most naturalists believed that all organisms, including humans, were created ideally suited for the conditions in which they were to live. While there was debate over exactly how this might happen, and anxiety over those cases where animals or plants did not seem to be “perfectly adapted” to their place in nature, the general view was that the world presented a harmonious collection of living kinds, a concept usually referred to as the balance of nature. Many believed that God was the source of this harmonious design, although increasing numbers of radical critics and nonconformists were starting to put forward alternative suggestions
were the mammal fossils he found in Uruguay and Argentina, which displayed a continuity with current species of the area.
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- those relationships across time—the fossil and the modern—might mirror relationships across the landscape, where one species replaced another in the topographical sense. This feature of the animal world suggested some kind of underlying genealogical tree.
- the diversification of species on separate islands
- all changes in the earth’s surface were the result of a gradual accumulation of many small events. Darwin took this idea, applied it to biology, and turned it into a lasting methodology that lies at the heart of his Origin of Species. For the rest of his life, he remained committed to the concept that many small changes can add up to larger effects.

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