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Gene Expression: Evolution and trustworthiness
Using a model of trust and cooperation, we show how allowing individuals to monitor each other's cooperative tendencies, at a cost, can select for heritable polymorphisms in trustworthiness. This variation, in turn, favours costly 'social awareness' in some individuals. Feedback of this sort can explain the individual differences in trust and trustworthiness so often documented by economists in experimental public goods games across a range of cultures.
Tags: evolution, psychology, trust, economics, model, genetics, behavior on 2008-10-31 -All Annotations (1) -About
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Related: Heritability of the Ultimatum Game, Altruism and Risk-Taking: Kinda Heritable and Variation as the ultimate.
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Mind Hacks: Towards a neuropsychology of religion
follow links, see Amy Tan's TED talk on creativity - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amy_tan_on_creativity.html
Tags: religion, atheism, psychology, neuro, brain, evolution, culture, anthropology, philosophy, video on 2008-10-23 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (1) -About
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OnFiction: Research Bulletin: Entertainment as Play
don't bother signing up for 30-day access. Abstract here: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a791600399~db=all~order=page
Tags: psychology, film, art, fiction, emotion, play, evolution on 2008-10-21 -All Annotations (2) -About
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Tan argues that once we have separated proximal and distal causes, we can see that what links the proximal and the distal are emotions, which are immediate as well as being among the means by which genes pass on certain forms of motivation.
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Tan argues that once we have separated proximal and distal causes, we can see that what links the proximal and the distal are emotions, which are immediate as well as being among the means by which genes pass on certain forms of motivation.
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Seed: We've Seen The Future, And It Is Us - As we drive the evolution of species, humans may be building a future with ever more diverse pests and pathogens and without the creatures we value most.
the new centers of evolution are neither tropical forests nor east African lakes but, instead, those habitats and resources most closely allied with us—our human habitats and ourselves.
Tags: evolution, human, biodiversity on 2008-10-20 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Seed: Cultural Evolution - Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do?
A careful look at culture shows that any attempt to determine what is "advanced" is hopeless. Instead, Joseph Tainter and Robert Edgerton have established standards by which some societies may be considered "sick"—they follow cultural practices leading to their own destruction.
Tags: culture, evolution, history, human, polynesia, complexity, anthropology on 2008-10-20 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (4) -About
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Models of cultural change clearly need a large Lamarckian component.
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no Mendel has appeared to postulate exactly what is changing as culture evolves. Richard Dawkins's brave conjecture about "memes" (gene analogs) being discrete units of cultural inheritance has not proved entirely fruitful—and the analogy is in retrospect far-fetched. Genes are passed unidirectionally between parent and offspring, and the recipients must accept them. Memes could be passed hundreds of generations at a leap (Aristotle to you), horizontally among peers (gang member to gang member), backwards in generations (learning from your grandkids), and so on. And, unlike genes, not only can cultural inheritances be rejected but they can also be purposefully modified.
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We believed that the evolution of technological norms would generally be more rapid than that of ethical norms.
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Natural selection in this case appears to have favored gradual changes in structural design rather than rapid adoption of novelties. Presumably, selection slowed down the change in structural features because time-tested designs enhanced success and survival in migrations, fishing, and warfare more than the accidental variants in canoe construction.
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Seed: How We Evolve
Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.
Tags: human, genome, evolution, map, HapMap, model, intelligence, culture, complexity, climate_crisis on 2008-10-12 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (7) -About
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Fisher, a Brit, argued that, in fact, a large population was required, because only a large population can produce large numbers of mutations. Because most mutations are neutral, he reasoned, it takes a large number of mutations to produce one beneficial allele. American biologists were most influenced by Wright, but Fisher's work is where Hawks and Harpending find their support.
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"Intelligence builds on top of intelligence," says Lahn. "[Culture] creates a stringent selection regime for enhanced intelligence. This is a positive feedback loop, I would think." Increasing intelligence increases the complexity of culture, which pressures intelligence levels to rise, which creates a more complex culture, and so on. Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind.
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Is intelligence still being selected for? Parsimony and uniformitarianism would compel one to answer yes; things in the present are, by and large, as they were in the past. But the way evolution works, whereby mutations arise in one person and slowly spread throughout a population, makes such a question difficult to frame, for if intelligence is still under selection, that could mean that some populations at this very moment are slightly smarter than others — that, perhaps, even certain ethnicities are slightly smarter than others. In the West, speculation on the subject almost automatically tars the speculator as a eugenicist or a racialist.
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HapMap is a leaner and in some ways more powerful version of the Human Genome Project, as it compiles only those regions of the human genome — less than 1 percent — that have the potential to differ from person to person. In comparing different populations' genetic information, it's possible to tease out patterns of gene inheritance, how certain genes correlate with certain diseases, and even the likely geographic origin of some mutations.
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The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.
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"The fate of our civilization, and maybe our species," says Ehrlich, "may be determined by the next five generations. So I don't really give a shit what's happening to our genetic evolution." The global climate is changing too violently for DNA to respond by fiddling around with heat regulation and hair thickness; forests everywhere are being clear-cut too quickly for their inhabitants to adjust, and so food chains are coming undone; the collapse of global fisheries has been identified as an imminent calamity; and a nuclear disaster would constitute a catastrophe many orders of magnitude larger than what nature could readily absorb. If any of these nightmare scenarios comes to pass, Ehrlich fears, evolution will be unable to help us. It may be operating faster than we thought, but it's not that fast. Problems like smog and acid rain seem almost quaint, and even to be longed for.
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Writers urged by ex-poet laureate to defend wildlife
Tags: writing, fiction, climate_crisis, social_change, evolution on 2008-10-07 -All Annotations (1) -About
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"When I heard people at the Republican National Convention gleefully shouting, 'Drill, baby, drill' to get every last drop of oil, I thought the motto really was 'Abort, baby, abort,' " he said.
"There's something wrong with the American moral imagination to support this drive for oil in the face of the facts. It's still an uphill battle to get people to accept evolution."
Addressing that problem is the writer's role, Hass insisted.
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PLoS ONE: Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution
Tags: group_as_organism, evolution, game_theory, social_network on 2008-10-02 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (7) -About
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they typically do not capture the dynamic nature of coalitions and/or are not directly applicable to individuals lacking the abilities to enter into binding agreements and to obtain, process, and use complex information on costs, benefits, and consequences of different actions involving multiple parties [45]. These approaches do not account for the effects of friendship and the memory of past events and acts which all are important in coalition formation and maintenance.
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approach for studying the dynamics of alliance emergence applicable where game-theoretic methods are not practical
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increasing the frequency of interactions (which can be achieved in a number of ways) and decreasing the affinity decay rate. Most interestingly, the model shows that the shift from a state with no alliances to one or more alliances typically occurs in a phase-transition like fashion. Even more surprisingly, under certain conditions (that include some cultural inheritance of social networks) a single alliance comprising all members of the group can emerge in which the resource is divided evenly. That is, the competition among nonequal individuals can paradoxically result in their eventual equality. We emphasize that in our model, egalitarianism emerges from political dynamics of intense competition between individuals for higher social and reproductive success rather than by environmental constraints, social structure, or cultural processes.
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most known hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian [8]–[10]. Their weak leaders merely assist a consensus-seeking process when the group needs to make decisions
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increasing the frequency of interactions (which can be achieved in a number of ways) and decreasing the affinity decay rate. Most interestingly, the model shows that the shift from a state with no alliances to one or more alliances typically occurs in a phase-transition like fashion. Even more surprisingly, under certain conditions (that include some cultural inheritance of social networks) a single alliance comprising all members of the group can emerge in which the resource is divided evenly. That is, the competition among nonequal individuals can paradoxically result in their eventual equality. We emphasize that in our model, egalitarianism emerges from political dynamics of intense competition between individuals for higher social and reproductive success rather than by environmental constraints, social structure, or cultural processes.
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modern human behavior is strongly shaped by evolved culture [31] and might not be a good indicator of factors acting during its origin
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In our model, coalitions and alliances emerge from simple processes based on individuals using only limited “local” information
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The Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2007 | Dr. J. Craig Venter
see transcript: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/venter.dimbleby07/venter.dimbleby07_index.html
take-away: we need new disruptive technologies
Tags: synthetic_biology, bioengineering, innovation, genetics, evolution, climate_crisis, fuel, healthcare, video on 2008-09-30 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Born To Run: What Humans Really Evolved To Do
note responses
Tags: human_body, evolution, science_is_a_method, marathon on 2008-09-16 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (1) -About
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The Reality Club: Responses to WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt
Tags: psychology, religion, morality, voting, republican, democrat, genome-environment_interaction, computer, model, neuro, serotonin, dopamine, parenting, evolution, science_is_a_method, testing, social_network, jonathan_haidt on 2008-09-11 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (31) -About
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His research, if he is to use lofty adjectives (largely meaningless in my experience) such as 'innate' to describe social structures and desires, must encompass a wider range of societies.
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Happiness ratings are highest in the socialist societies, while lowest in right wing authoritarian societies. This list could be extended.
Why, then, do right wing partisans ignore this evidence and continue to support policies that are patently dysfunctional? I believe it is because, having stated a position, based on either their own family values or those dictated by their religion, they are loathe to change their minds and declare that they have been wrong.
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Right wing positions are more frequently associated with Protestant evangelicals and with traditional (Reagan) Catholics. Often the leaders of these groups (e.g. television evangelists, sinning priests) epitomize the opposite of the stated values. But both of these groups embrace forgiveness, absolution, being born again. Other groups—atheists, non-fundamentalist Jews and non-fundamentalist Protestants—do not have the option of absolution; they make firmer demands on themselves
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Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself.
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Only some professional philosophers, jurists, scientists and academics believe that the principal point of political argument (or most any argument) is, or ought to be, truth rather than persuasion, and that an argument's principal appeal should be reason rather than passion.
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Like other biological systems, moral intuition consists of an imperfect community of jerry-rigged faculties. Societies further combine these universal ingredients in creatively different ways.
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a rational analysis of voting suggests that the core act of modern democratic government makes absolutely no sense. Economists would literally call voting "irrational" because it violates the preferences of the people who engage in it. For some reason, people decide to vote even though they would not buy a lottery ticket with identical odds, cost, and payoff. Economists typically think that people who vote are making a mistake, or there are other benefits to voting that we have not considered. For example, early scholars noted that people might vote in order to fulfill a sense of civic duty or to preserve the right to vote. Later scholars have also pointed out that people might vote because they enjoy expressing themselves in the same way they enjoy expressing themselves when they cheer for their favorite team at a ballgame. But these explanations beg the question, "Why?" It is a tautology to say that people vote because they feel like voting.
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the rational analysis of voting overlooks important psychological features of human social networks that we have known about for some time.
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the media does not reach the masses directly. Instead, a group of "opinion leaders"—a coinage they may have invented—usually acts as intermediary,
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the more polarized we become by befriending only people with similar ideologies, the greater incentive we have to participate in politics.
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cascades are primarily local phenomena, occurring in a smaller part of the population closely connected to an individual. As it turns out, this is exactly what we have been finding in our other studies of the spread of obesity, smoking, and happiness. These phenomena can spread to our friends (1 degree of separation), our friends' friends (2 degrees), and our friends' friends' friends (3 degrees), but not much further. This "3 Degree Rule" suggests that the power of one individual to influence many is limited by the effect of competing waves of influence that emanate from everyone else in the network.
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In other words, one very important reason why people vote Republican is because their parents did. However, other studies have shown that the decision to affiliate with any political party and the strength of this attachment are significantly influenced by genes.
These initial twin studies suggested political ideas are heritable, but they said little about political behavior. That changed this year when we published a new study in the American Political Science Review that examined the heritability of voter participation.
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research to link specific genes to political phenotypes, we established a direct association between voter turnout and monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and a gene-environment interaction between turnout and the serotonin transporter (5HTT) gene among those who frequently participated in religious activities. In other research we have also found an association between voter turnout and a dopamine receptor (DRD2) gene that is mediated by a significant association between that gene and the tendency to affiliate with a political party. Thus we are beginning to find specific genes that can help us to predict who will vote and who won't.
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The philosophical framework of liberalism makes it hard for Democrats to articulate the intuitions that most people share. Caring for a particular, individual baby, even a "special needs" baby, and being part of a particular, individual family, even a complex, messy family, are intrinsic human goods. Politics should help people achieve them successfully.
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belief make tacit claims about normativity: claims not merely about how we human beings think and behave, but about how we should think and behave. Factual beliefs like "water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen" and ethical beliefs like "cruelty is wrong" are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe a proposition (whether about facts or values) is also to believe that one has accepted it for legitimate reasons.
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Despite the remonstrations of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Shweder, science has long been in the values business. Scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; it is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that reliably link their beliefs to reality, through valid chains of evidence and argument.
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This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It does not suggest that there isn't a single correct answer to the Monty Hall problem. While it might seem the height of arrogance to say it, the people who actually understand the Monty Hall problem really do hold the "logical high ground."
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Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to adopt, uncritically, the moral categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide in the name of "morality" deserves to be considered part its subject matter?
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counties of
the US that produce the wealth and innovation voted overwhelmingly
Democratic and the counties of the US that depend on government
subsidy or that simply underperform economically voted overwhelmingly
Republican. -
the Republican success of the last
generation, since Nixon and Reagan cracked the code, has been to
exploit irrelevant (to national policy) anxieties. We are at the
point where the national maneuvering for office has nothing to do with
argument (so much for folks who say that "the economy should be
Obama's best argument") and everything to do with positioning a
message between now and election day so that pulling the lever or
pushing the button or punching the chad for one candidate makes you
feel morally satisfied, which is to say, less anxious and guilty and
ashamed. -
the
humanistic culture of the orator from Demosthenes to Martin Luther
King Jr. is decisively gone. We don't fully understand what's
replacing it, but it's happening all around us—you might even call
it a third culture...
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It is common to make the assumption that people are thinking when they vote and they are making reasoned choices. I harbor no such illusion. No argument I have ever gotten into with these people, (despite avoiding talking to them, I sometimes can't resist saying something true) has ever convinced anyone of anything. They are not reasoning, nor do they want to try. They simply believe what they believe.
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It is all very nice to come up with complex analyses of what is going on. As is often the case, the real answer is quite simple. Most people can't think very well. They were taught not to think by religion and by a school system that teaches that knowledge of state capitals and quadratic equations is what education is all about and that well reasoned argument and original ideas will not help on a multiple choice test.
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they are not equipped to think about politics and, in my mind, they are not equipped to vote. The fact that we let them vote while failing to encourage them to think for themselves is a real problem for our society.
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New Computer Game, Spore, Takes Cues From Evolutionary Biology - NYTimes.com
Tags: video_game, Spore, evolution, complexity, game_theory, math, model, video on 2008-09-09 -All Annotations (7) -About
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After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is the best-selling computer game franchise of all time.
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Evolutionary biologists like Dr. Near and Dr. Prum, who have had a chance to try the game, like it a great deal. But they also have some serious reservations. The step-by-step process by which Spore’s creatures change does not have much to do with real evolution. “The mechanism is severely messed up,” Dr. Prum said.
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Nevertheless, Dr. Prum admires the way Spore touches on some of the big questions that evolutionary biologists ask. What is the origin of complexity? How contingent is evolution on flukes and quirks?
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One thing Mr. Wright and his colleagues decided Spore should reflect was evolution’s ability to produce life’s staggering diversity.
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evolution is not a simple kill-or-be-killed affair.
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In the real world, new traits evolve as mutations arise and spread gradually through entire populations. Winning Spore’s DNA points does not work even as a remote metaphor.
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Spore may also mislead players with the way it is set up as a one-dimensional march of progress from single-cell life to intelligence. Evolution is more like a tree than a line
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More Spore | The Loom | Discover Magazine
teaching vs piquing interest
Tags: video_game, Spore, evolution, education, video on 2008-09-09 -All Annotations (1) -About
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Having fun spawns interest, playing builds your intuition, and with cogitation you outgrow the model. I think it is reasonble to say that Spore is a way to get kids interested in biology, certainly. Teach them biology, probably not. But Wright isn’t saying it will, either.
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Seed: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Tags: computer, education, video_game, Spore, complexity, emergence, brain, cell, immuno, evolution on 2008-09-07 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (4) -About
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Santa Fe Institute study the link between the structure and emergent functions of complex systems, Spore uses similar ideas to procedurally generate creature animation.
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Emotiv EPOC, uses electroencephalography (EEG) technology to measure the voltage produced by the combined activity of thousands of neurons in one area of the brain. Its 16 electrodes can detect brain activity to recognize emotions, commands, and facial expressions, and link them to operations or keystrokes
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Scientists can experimentally determine the shapes of proteins, and computers can predict how a protein might fold, but these processes are long, laborious, and not very much fun. Now, a team of biologists and computer scientists led by the University of Washington biochemist David Baker is hoping to change all that
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Following algorithms that employ rules of natural selection and obey the laws of physics, the creatures gradually evolve, allowing the virtual process of evolution to be closely observed and studied
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Waking Up To Sleep - February 9th and 10th, 2007
to 42:30
Tags: video, neuro, brain, sleep, evolution on 2008-09-03 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Is Any Mesh of Literature and Science Doomed to Reductionism?
Is Any Mesh of Literature and Science Doomed to Reductionism?
Tags: science_in_fiction, philosophy, richard_rorty, consilience, literature, lit_crit, evolution, literary_darwinism on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Evolving Thoughts: Agriculture and the rise of religion
Tags: agriculture, religion, evolution, history on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Agriculture makes possible a society not based on close kinship, which makes religion the solution to that dilemma only after societies of that kind arise.
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the agricultural revolution was not, strictly speaking, a revolution at all. It probably occurred in these areas over several thousand years. It is a co-evolution. So, too, will the social institutions and behaviors be co-evolutionary.
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As population sizes rise with the introduction of managed herds, in a semi-nomadic lifestyle as herds are taken to seasonal food sources, interactions between non-kin will rise. Where territories are shared, a way to resolve disputes and increase cooperation is needed. Shared rituals are always how humans do this
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What the process of agricultural coevolution does is change the payoffs. Now, to get the benefit of these new carbs and fats, you have to cooperate with others who may cheat you at any time. So social institutions, rituals, and beliefs structures are shaped by these selective forces. To the extent this is a selection process (for there is still historical contingency to deal with), there is selection on variants, but they are not, mostly, genetic variants but social ones.
Once this process is underway, it sets up the fitness landscape for other evolutionary process to occur
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I think religion is a natural phenomenon, with Boyer, Dennett and others. I think it arises from the cognitive properties of human beings. In particular I think it arises from our nature as social dominance apes, as I have said before. My slogan is: give a chimp language and agriculture and you'll get religions.
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"...Think of Google as a life preserver..." - W. Daniel Hills
Tags: Google, information, data, intelligence, evolution on 2008-08-12 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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why do we need so much information? Here is where we can blame technology, at least in part. Technology has destroyed the isolation of distance, so more of what happens matters to us.
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We need to know more because we are expected to make more decisions.
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Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter: Scientific American
Tags: sleep, memory, cognition, learning, evolution, brain, neuro on 2008-08-11 and saved by11 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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sleep—in all its phases—does something to improve memory that being awake does not do.
To understand how that could be so, it helps to review a few memory basics. When we “encode” information in our brain, the newly minted memory is actually just beginning a long journey during which it will be stabilized, enhanced and qualitatively altered, until it bears only faint resemblance to its original form. Over the first few hours, a memory can become more stable, resistant to interference from competing memories. But over longer periods, the brain seems to decide what is important to remember and what is not—and a detailed memory evolves into something more like a story.
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Sleep changed the memory, making it robust and more resistant to interference in the coming day.
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it appears that as we sleep, the brain might even be dissecting our memories and retaining only the most salient details.
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During sleep, the brain reactivates patterns of neural activity that it performed during the day, thus strengthening the memories by long-term potentiation.
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Simply allowing time to pass enabled the brain to calculate and learn these transitive inferences.
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sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised
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Why did we evolve in such a way that certain cognitive functions happen only while we are asleep?Add Sticky Note
- two theories follow, evolutionary perspectiveposted by taryn930 on 2008-08-11
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