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The group selection part is really interesting evolution-wise. It seems a very slow and difficult method of selection. I had never considered how something dyin

by tibbon 2y ago

The group selection part is really interesting evolution-wise. It seems a very slow and difficult method of selection. I had never considered how something dying, and not passing along their genetics, could enforce a genetic trait.

odyssey7 2y ago
It requires such a depth of evolution as to make it absurd to imagine that the genus homo is the point at which altruism emerged. Animals care about each other.
crazydoggers 2y ago
“Group selection” is not a thing. The article hand waves this always with > some biologists still get really triggered about group selection and deny its evolutionary importance Which is dishonest at best. The vast majority of biologist have realized group selection doesn’t work as proposed. [0] What people thought was group selection was just kin selection working over time. All evolution works at the level of the gene. Genes “want” to reproduce more of themselves. And if the same gene is in a kin, then it can favor enhancing the survival of kin that carry copies of itself. At a macro level this can be misreported as group selection, but to be sure, the selection is happening at the level of the gene, and reaches at most to kin sharing genes. The article then goes on to say > The nice story I told above about the evolution of altruism could just have easily been applied to humans. Yet we do not exist in eusocial colonies, so there must be something else going on And he then talks about gene selection and the fact that bees are haplodiploidy, which is indeed the cause of the “altruism” we see. His dismissal of haplodiploidy at the end of the article is a weak argument. Just because haplodiploidy in other species doesn’t lead to eusocial groups, or that eusocial groups can occur without haplodiploidy are not sufficient arguments that dismiss the effects of haplodiploidy and kin selection favoring altruism in eusocial bees. I highly recommend people interested in these topics to read the seminal Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [1] 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
- glenstein 2y ago
  Agreed, it's a disappointing and discrediting detour in an article that's about a fascinating topic. As you note, this has been worked out via haplodiploidy, which doesn't require venturing into theorizing about group selection or altruism. And just to take a beat, and explain why group selection "triggers" people (in the author's wording), it's because it violates our fundamental, bedrock idea of causality which is no small thing, and anyone having a cavalier attitude about that probably doesn't belong in a room where these ideas are being deliberated. We understand physics to be causally closed, and expect "higher level" explanations to be compatible with the constraints of physics. A model example in taking causality seriously, and proceeding with extreme care and extreme caution about challenging that intuition, I think is best exhibited in Quantum Mechanics, where, after excruciatingly careful examination of data and lots of hard thinking about implications, and lots of accounting for it's almost vulgar challenge to our intuitions, do we dare offer a model that challenges our basic idea of causation. That deviation is appropriately treated as profound, by contrast with the fast and loose invocation of group selection you find in some evolutionary explanations.
  - crazydoggers 2y ago
    Yes! To put a finer point on it, group selection theories don’t have a specific physical explanation for how they operate, instead veering into philosophical explanations. Ultimately natural selection must operate on the gene. Genes are the only source of information that gets passed to offspring through germ line cells in sexual reproduction or mitosis in asexual reproduction (don’t get me started on the fad of epigenetics, which is just a fancy term for standard DNA controlled embryological differentiation.) The replication of genes and the information they encode, are the physical cause of the effect of phenotypes. Group selection theorists (of which there are few) have no physical cause that allows selection to occur on the level of the group, and there’s no sound hypothesis of such that I have heard of. You’d need some physical mechanism for information flow between individuals in a group for that to be the case, and outside of kin inheritance, there’s nothing like that that exists.
hbn 2y ago
Think about how most people are naturally scared of heights, or snakes. A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake. The ones that aren't afraid of those things are more likely to die from falling off a cliff or being injected with venom. I'm personally someone who is freaked out heavily by insects. I know logically a house centipede or a harmless spider can't hurt me, but seemingly my brain has something in it that overrides my entire body when I see one and disgusts me. Usually it's irrational, but it probably helps humanity on a larger scale to avoid the ones that are dangerous! There's a lot about the humans body that naturally gives us non-logical instincts that help us to survive and breed. People like having sex, regardless of whether they want a baby. There's no logic to it, but we know what we like! The more advanced we get, the more it becomes apparent that we're just monkeys in shoes.
- caseyohara 2y ago
  > A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake. Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the shape and color resembles a snake. Here’s a funny compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU
  - FartyMcFarter 2y ago
    > Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the shape and color resembles a snake. Here’s a funny compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU It's funny in a way, but if you think about it it's actually abusive. Would you think it's funny if you were terrified of snakes and someone randomly put a fake snake next to you when you were just relaxing?
s1artibartfast 2y ago
group selection works a lot better when the sacrificing individuals are sterile, with no other hope of passing on their genetics. See also Eunuchs and Castration as a way to recreate a similar dynamic with humans. Castration had the fascinating ability to bind the interests of the Eunuchs more closely with the power structures and rules, by removing the option of family and progeny of their own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#Asia_and_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#Asia_and_Africa [Edit] As crazydoggers points out, it is probably better to view this through the lens of kin selection, with reproducers as the evolutionary agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749677
DontchaKnowit 2y ago
Is that not essentially the only way that selection happens? You are just desvribing basic natural selection
gus_massa 2y ago
It's somewhat explained near the end of the article. Sex in bees (and ants) is weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system Humans use XY system, so we share 50% of your genes with your children, parents and siblings (in average). Bees and ants use X0 system. A female bee share 50% of your genes with their own daughters, 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents and 75% with their female siblings (in average). So, from the bee's genes point of view instead of having their own children it's better to kidnap their mother and force her to have more female children. And a consequence is that instead of running away to form their new family in a safe place it's better to die protecting their mother.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents Are these different things for bees?
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    Sorry, cut&paste typo.
- penteract 2y ago
  Your conclusion is right, but in bees, sex is determined by Haplodiploidy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy ), not X0. Also, the daughters have the same number of chromosomes as the mother so they share 50%, not 75% of their genes with their mother (they do share an average of 75% of their genes with their sisters).

by tibbon 2y ago

odyssey7 2y ago

It requires such a depth of evolution as to make it absurd to imagine that the genus homo is the point at which altruism emerged. Animals care about each other.

crazydoggers 2y ago

“Group selection” is not a thing. The article hand waves this always with > some biologists still get really triggered about group selection and deny its evolutionary importance Which is dishonest at best. The vast majority of biologist have realized group selection doesn’t work as proposed. [0] What people thought was group selection was just kin selection working over time. All evolution works at the level of the gene. Genes “want” to reproduce more of themselves. And if the same gene is in a kin, then it can favor enhancing the survival of kin that carry copies of itself. At a macro level this can be misreported as group selection, but to be sure, the selection is happening at the level of the gene, and reaches at most to kin sharing genes. The article then goes on to say > The nice story I told above about the evolution of altruism could just have easily been applied to humans. Yet we do not exist in eusocial colonies, so there must be something else going on And he then talks about gene selection and the fact that bees are haplodiploidy, which is indeed the cause of the “altruism” we see. His dismissal of haplodiploidy at the end of the article is a weak argument. Just because haplodiploidy in other species doesn’t lead to eusocial groups, or that eusocial groups can occur without haplodiploidy are not sufficient arguments that dismiss the effects of haplodiploidy and kin selection favoring altruism in eusocial bees. I highly recommend people interested in these topics to read the seminal Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [1] 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Criticism 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

glenstein 2y ago
Agreed, it's a disappointing and discrediting detour in an article that's about a fascinating topic. As you note, this has been worked out via haplodiploidy, which doesn't require venturing into theorizing about group selection or altruism. And just to take a beat, and explain why group selection "triggers" people (in the author's wording), it's because it violates our fundamental, bedrock idea of causality which is no small thing, and anyone having a cavalier attitude about that probably doesn't belong in a room where these ideas are being deliberated. We understand physics to be causally closed, and expect "higher level" explanations to be compatible with the constraints of physics. A model example in taking causality seriously, and proceeding with extreme care and extreme caution about challenging that intuition, I think is best exhibited in Quantum Mechanics, where, after excruciatingly careful examination of data and lots of hard thinking about implications, and lots of accounting for it's almost vulgar challenge to our intuitions, do we dare offer a model that challenges our basic idea of causation. That deviation is appropriately treated as profound, by contrast with the fast and loose invocation of group selection you find in some evolutionary explanations.
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  Yes! To put a finer point on it, group selection theories don’t have a specific physical explanation for how they operate, instead veering into philosophical explanations. Ultimately natural selection must operate on the gene. Genes are the only source of information that gets passed to offspring through germ line cells in sexual reproduction or mitosis in asexual reproduction (don’t get me started on the fad of epigenetics, which is just a fancy term for standard DNA controlled embryological differentiation.) The replication of genes and the information they encode, are the physical cause of the effect of phenotypes. Group selection theorists (of which there are few) have no physical cause that allows selection to occur on the level of the group, and there’s no sound hypothesis of such that I have heard of. You’d need some physical mechanism for information flow between individuals in a group for that to be the case, and outside of kin inheritance, there’s nothing like that that exists.

hbn 2y ago

Think about how most people are naturally scared of heights, or snakes. A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake. The ones that aren't afraid of those things are more likely to die from falling off a cliff or being injected with venom. I'm personally someone who is freaked out heavily by insects. I know logically a house centipede or a harmless spider can't hurt me, but seemingly my brain has something in it that overrides my entire body when I see one and disgusts me. Usually it's irrational, but it probably helps humanity on a larger scale to avoid the ones that are dangerous! There's a lot about the humans body that naturally gives us non-logical instincts that help us to survive and breed. People like having sex, regardless of whether they want a baby. There's no logic to it, but we know what we like! The more advanced we get, the more it becomes apparent that we're just monkeys in shoes.

caseyohara 2y ago
> A lot of dogs get freaked out by snakes too, or if you play with a hair clip in front of them, which looks like a snake. Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the shape and color resembles a snake. Here’s a funny compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU
- FartyMcFarter 2y ago
  > Some cats are afraid of cucumbers, presumably because the shape and color resembles a snake. Here’s a funny compilation: https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU https://youtu.be/oDpQ2uGLUKU It's funny in a way, but if you think about it it's actually abusive. Would you think it's funny if you were terrified of snakes and someone randomly put a fake snake next to you when you were just relaxing?

s1artibartfast 2y ago

group selection works a lot better when the sacrificing individuals are sterile, with no other hope of passing on their genetics. See also Eunuchs and Castration as a way to recreate a similar dynamic with humans. Castration had the fascinating ability to bind the interests of the Eunuchs more closely with the power structures and rules, by removing the option of family and progeny of their own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#Asia_and_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#Asia_and_Africa [Edit] As crazydoggers points out, it is probably better to view this through the lens of kin selection, with reproducers as the evolutionary agents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749677

DontchaKnowit 2y ago

Is that not essentially the only way that selection happens? You are just desvribing basic natural selection

gus_massa 2y ago

It's somewhat explained near the end of the article. Sex in bees (and ants) is weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system Humans use XY system, so we share 50% of your genes with your children, parents and siblings (in average). Bees and ants use X0 system. A female bee share 50% of your genes with their own daughters, 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents and 75% with their female siblings (in average). So, from the bee's genes point of view instead of having their own children it's better to kidnap their mother and force her to have more female children. And a consequence is that instead of running away to form their new family in a safe place it's better to die protecting their mother.

JadeNB 2y ago
> 75% with their mother and 75% with their female parents Are these different things for bees?
- gus_massa 2y ago
  Sorry, cut&paste typo.
penteract 2y ago
Your conclusion is right, but in bees, sex is determined by Haplodiploidy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy ), not X0. Also, the daughters have the same number of chromosomes as the mother so they share 50%, not 75% of their genes with their mother (they do share an average of 75% of their genes with their sisters).