I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not. After all, group selection sounds like a reasonable extension of evolutionary theory and a plausible explanation of the social nature of humans. Also, the group selectionists tend to declare victory, and write as if their theory has already superseded a narrow, reductionist dogma that selection acts only at the level of genes. In this essay, I'll explain why I think that this reasonableness is an illusion. The more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it fits the facts of human psychology and history.

THE REALITY CLUB:  Stewart Brand, Daniel Everett, David C. Queller, Daniel C. Dennett, Herbert Gintis, Harvey Whitehouse & Ryan McKay, Peter J. Richerson, Jerry Coyne, Michael Hochberg, Robert Boyd & Sarah Mathew, Max Krasnow & Andrew Delton,Nicolas Baumard, Jonathan Haidt, David Sloan Wilson, Michael E. Price, Joseph Henrich, Randolph M. Nesse, Richard Dawkins, Helena Cronin, John Tooby.  

STEVEN PINKER REPLIES 

Group selection has become a scientific dust bunny, a hairy blob in which anything having to do with "groups" clings to anything having to do with "selection." The problem with scientific dust bunnies is not just that they sow confusion; … the apparent plausibility of one restricted version of "group selection" often bleeds outwards to a motley collection of other, long-discredited versions. The problem is that it also obfuscates evolutionary theory by blurring genes, individuals, and groups as equivalent levels in a hierarchy of selectional units; ... this is not how natural selection, analyzed as a mechanistic process, really works. Most importantly, it has placed blinkers on psychological understanding by seducing many people into simply equating morality and culture with group selection, oblivious to alternatives that are theoretically deeper and empirically more realistic.

STEVEN PINKER is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology; Harvard University. Author, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined, The Language Instinct, and How the Mind Works.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

[photo credit: Max Gerber]

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THE FALSE ALLURE OF GROUP SELECTION

Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare of the person and his or her kin? If so, does the theory of natural selection have to be revamped to designate "groups" as units of selection, analogous to the role played in the theory by genes?

Several scientists whom I greatly respect have said so in prominent places. And they have gone on to use the theory of group selection to make eye-opening claims about the human condition.^[1] They have claimed that human morailty, particularly our willingness to engage in acts of altruism, can be explained as an adaptation to group-against-group competition. As E. O. Wilson explains, "In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals." They have proposed that group selection can explain the mystery of religion, because a shared belief in supernatural beings can foster group cohesion. They suggest that evolution has equipped humans to solve tragedies of the commons (also known as collective action dilemmas and public goods games), in which actions that benefit the individual may harm the community; familiar examples include overfishing, highway congestion, tax evasion, and carbon emissions. And they have drawn normative moral and political conclusions from these scientific beliefs, such as that we should recognize the wisdom behind conservative values, like religiosity, patriotism, and puritanism, and that we should valorize a communitarian loyalty and sacrifice for the good of the group over an every-man-for-himself individualism.

Chris Anderson, Samuel Arbesman, Dan Ariely, Scott Atran, John D. Barrow, Mary Catherine Bateson, Roy Baumeister, Gregory Benford, Jesse Bering, Nick Bilton, Max Brockman, John Brockman, David Brooks, Benedict Carey, Noam Chomsky, George Church, Patricia Churchland, Douglas Coupland, Brian Cox, Austin Dacey, Antonio Damasio, Richard Dawkins, Emanuel Derman, Keith Devlin, David Deutsch, Peter Diamandis, Cory Doctorow , George Dyson, David M. Eagleman, Dylan Evans, Daniel L. Everett, Stuart Firestein, Michael Gazzaniga, James Geary, David Gelernter, Herbert Gintis, Rebecca Goldstein, John Gottman, Jonathan Gottschall, A. C. Grayling, Brian Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Paul Harris, Mark Henderson, Roger Highfield, Bruce Hood, John Horgan, Arianna Huffington, Walter Isaacson, Alok Jha, Steven Johnson, Daniel Kahneman, Eric R. Kandel, Andrew Keen, Christian Keysers, Lawrence M. Krauss, Robert Kurzban, Jonah Lehrer, John Lloyd, Benoit Mandelbrot, Gary Marcus, Annalena Mcafee, Tom Mccarthy, Pamela Mccorduck, John Mcwhorter, Evgeny Morozov, Steve Nadis, John Naughton, Alva Noë, Martin Nowak, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mark Pagel, Elaine Pagels, Heinz R Pagels, Bruce Parker, Clifford Pickover, Steven Pinker, William Poundstone, Robert Provine, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Lisa Randall, Martin Rees, Ed Regis, Howard Rheingold, Steven Rose , Robin S. Rosenberg, Carlo Rovelli, Rudy Rucker, Douglas Rushkoff, Dimitar Sasselov, Martin Seligman, Karoly Simonyi, Laurence C. Smith, Christopher Stringer, Steven Strogatz, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Don Tapscott, Eric J. Topol, M.D., Robert Trivers, Sherry Turkle, Neil Turok, Ai Weiwei, Margaret Wertheim, Timothy D. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, E. O. Wilson, Naomi Wolf, Nathan Wolfe, Shing- Tung Yau, Carl Zimmer, Phil Zuckerman

Today, what you want is you want to have resilience and agility, and you want to be able to participate in, and interact with the disruptive things. Everybody loves the word 'disruptive innovation.' Well, how does, and where does disruptive innovation happen? It doesn't happen in the big planned R&D labs; it happens on the edges of the network. Most important ideas, especially in the consumer Internet space, but more and more now in other things like hardware and biotech, you're finding it happening around the edges.
 

JOI ITO is MIT Media Lab Director and a leading thinker and writer on innovation, global technology policy, and the role of the Internet in transforming society in substantial and positive ways. A vocal advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom, Ito is board chair (and former CEO) of Creative Commons, and sits on the Boards of The New York Times Company, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS, and Global Voices. 

Joichi Ito's Edge Bio Page

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INNOVATION ON THE EDGES

[JOI ITO:] I grew up in Japan part of my life, and we were surrounded by Buddhists. If you read some of the interesting books from the Dalai Lama talking about happiness, there's definitely a difference in the way that Buddhists think about happiness, the world and how it works, versus the West. I think that a lot of science and technology has this somewhat Western view, which is how do you control nature, how do you triumph over nature? Even if you look at the gardens in Europe, a lot of it is about look at what we made this hedge do.

What's really interesting and important to think about is, as we start to realize that the world is complex, and as the science that we use starts to become complex and, Timothy Leary used this quote, "Newton's laws work well when things are normal sized, when they're moving at a normal speed." You can predict the motion of objects using Newton's laws in most circumstances, but when things start to get really fast, really big, and really complex, you find out that Newton's laws are actually local ordinances, and there's a bunch of other stuff that comes into play.

"Robert Axelrod's 1980 tournaments of iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies have been condensed into the slogan, Don't be too clever, don't be unfair. Press and Dyson have shown that cleverness and unfairness triumph after all." — William Poundstone, from his Commentary

Introduction

In January I had the occasion to spend sometime in Munich with Freeman Dyson who informed me about a paper on "The Prisoner's Dilemma" he had co-authored with William H. Press, and he then briefly sketched out some of its ramifications. He indicated that they had come up with something new, a way to win the game. It's simple, he said. The winning strategy: go to lunch. And, he added, the only way to trump this strategy is to come up with a new theory of mind. I tried to go deeper but, he said, "I don't really understand game theory, I just did the math. This is really Bill Press's work."

The highly technical paper, "Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent" by William H. Press and Freeman J. Dyson has now been published in PNAS (May 22, 2012), which was followed by a PNAS Commentary by Alexander Stewart and Joshua Plotkin of the Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, entitled "Extortion and cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma" (June 18, 2012). Here's the Abstract of the paper:

"The two-player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game is a model for both sentient and evolutionary behaviors, especially including the emergence of cooperation. It is generally assumed that there exists no simple ultimatum strategy whereby one player can enforce a unilateral claim to an unfair share of rewards. Here, we show that such strategies unexpectedly do exist. In particular, a player X who is witting of these strategies can (i) deterministically set her opponent Y’s score, independently of his strategy or response, or (ii) enforce an extortionate linear relation between her and his scores. Against such a player, an evolutionary player’s best response is to accede to the extortion. Only a player with a theory of mind about his opponent can do better, in which case Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is an Ultimatum Game."

Edge asked William Poundstone, author of  the book The Prisoner's Dilemma, to explain the paper in non-technical terms. In his Commentary below, he writes:

"Robert Axelrod's 1980 tournaments of iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies have been condensed into the slogan, Don't be too clever, don't be unfair. Press and Dyson have shown that cleverness and unfairness triumph after all."

Also below are responses by William Press to Poundstone and by Freeman Dyson to Stewart and Plotkin.

To kick off a Reality Club conversation, mathematician Karl Sigmund at University of Vienna, and biological mathematician Martin Nowak of Harvard, two pioneers of evolutionary game theory, comment below.

— JB

THE REALITY CLUB: Karl Sigmund & Martin Nowak

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"The idea that the brain is somehow fixed in early childhood, which was an idea that was very strongly believed up until fairly recently, is completely wrong. There's no evidence that the brain is somehow set and can't change after early childhood. In fact, it goes through this very large development throughout adolescence and right into the 20s and 30s, and even after that it's plastic forever, the plasticity is a baseline state, no matter how old you are. That has implications for things like intervention programs and educational programs for teenagers."

Introduction

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a leading social neuroscientist of adolescent development. She has reawakened research interest into the puberty period by focusing on social cognition and its neural underpinnings. Part of her question is whether adolescence involves egocentrism, as many popular conceptions suggest, since this is testable. 

Part of her originality is to remind us of the remarkable changes in brain structure during adolescence, given the traditional focus of developmental psychology is on early childhood. Using a range of techniques, including conducting elegant MRI studies, she illuminates a neglected phase of cognitive development. Given that the sex steroid hormones are produced in higher quantities during this period, her research opens up interesting questions about whether the changes in the brain are driven by the endocrine system, or by changing social experience, or an interaction of these factors. 

—Simon Baron-Cohen

SARAH-JAYNE BLAKEMORE is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Full Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK. Blakemore’s research centers on the development of social cognition and executive function in the typically developing adolescent brain, using a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging methods. 

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's Edge Bio

SIMON BARON-COHEN, Psychologist, is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Author, The Science of Evil; The Essential Difference.

Simon Baron-Cohen's Edge Bio

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I seem to be saying two things that contradict each other. On the one hand, we trust scientific knowledge, on the other hand, we are always ready to modify in-depth part of our conceptual structure about the world. But there is no contradiction, because the idea of a contradiction comes from what I see as the deepest misunderstanding about science: the idea that science is about certainty.                    

Introduction
by Lee Smolin 

Carlo Rovelli is a leading contributor to quantum gravity, who is also made influential proposals regarding the foundation of quantum mechanics and the nature of time. Shortly after receiving his Ph.D he did work which made him regarded as one of the three founders of the approach to quantum gravity called loop quantum gravity-the other two being Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin. Over the last 25 years he has made numerous contributions to the field, the most important of which developed the spacetime approach to quantum gravity called spin foam models.These have culminated over the last five years in a series of discoveries which give strong evidence that loop quantum gravity provides a consistent and and plausible quantum theory of gravity.  

Rovelli's textbook, Quantum Gravity has been the main introduction to the field since its publication in 2004, and his research group in Marseille has been a major center for incubating and developing new talent in the field in Europe.Carlo Rovelli's approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics is called relational quantum theory, he also, with the mathematician Alain Connes, proposed a mechanism by which time could emerge from a timeless world called the thermal time hypothesis.

– Lee Smolin

CARLO ROVELLI is a theoretical physicist, working on quantum gravity and on foundations of spacetime physics. He is professor of physics at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France and member of the Intitut Universitaire de France. He is the author of The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy; and Quantum Gravity.

Carlo Rovelli's Edge Bio Page
Lee Smolin's Edge Bio Page

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This is a hormone that has fascinated me. It's a small molecule that seems to be doing remarkable things. The variation we see in this hormone comes from a number of different sources. One of those sources is genes; many different genes can influence how much testosterone each of us produces, and I just wanted to share with you my fascination with this hormone, because it's helping us take the science of sex differences one step further, to try to understand not whether there are sex differences, but what are the roots of those sex differences? Where are they springing from? And along the way we’re also hoping that this is going to teach us something about those neuro-developmental conditions like autism, like delayed language development, which seem to disproportionately affect boys more than girls, and potentially help us understand the causes of those conditions.

Introduction by John Brockman

"I thoroughly enjoyed the evening last week," emailed Brian Eno. "A lot of interesting people got connected together and everyone told me they enjoyed themselves."

He was referring the first-ever London Edge Reality Club meeting, featuring a presentation by Cambridge research psychologist Simon-Baron Cohen which Eno hosted at his studio in Notting Hill before an assembled group that included artists, curators, museum directors, writers, playwrights, scientists in fields such as biology, math, psychology, zoology, the editors and correspondents of Nature, The Economist, Wired, The Guardian. ... [CONTINUED]

SIMON BARON-COHEN, Psychologist,  is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Author, The Science of Evil; The Essential Difference.

Simon Baron-Cohen's Edge Bio Page

"What we're missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us?

"We're missing a tremendous opportunity. We're asleep at the switch because it's not a metaphor. In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that's not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It's a physical reality."

GEORGE DYSON is a Science Historian; Author, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe; Darwin Among the Machines.

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Introduction

In June of 1998, Edge published two pieces in an attempt to get at the big issues behind the news in the technology world: the then current Microsoft-Justice Department litigation. "Code" was a conversation between science historian and third culture thinker George Dyson and myself. Dyson argued that "turning this into a political issue-Government versus Microsoft-is diverting attention from something much more significant: the growth of multi-cellular forms of organization on the Net. ... The development of multi-cellular operating systems is a separate issue from the question of whether what Microsoft does is fair or legal in a business sense".

"The analogy with biological organisms is highly tenuous—as Edge readers will be flooding your inbox to point out. It's just the beginnings of something, in a faintly metazoan sense. The operating system used to be the system that operated a computer. Now it is becoming something else."

"Now, there are moves afoot to get the same code-Windows, or Windows CE, or Windows NT or whatever, not to mention underlying protocols-running everywhere. Running on your desktop, running on your network, running in your car, running in your toaster, running on the credit card you have in your wallet-it's all going to run this same code. And if it's not Windows it'll be something else. The thing is, it's happening. Which is very much what's gone on in the world of biology. In biology there is one operating system, and it's the one we're stuck with-the DNA/RNA operating system. All living organisms, with very rare exceptions, run that same system. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but ..."

This was followed by "Code II", a debate between complexity researcher J. Doyne Farmer of the SantaFe Institute, and computer scientist Charles Simonyi, the chief software architect at Microsoft which addressed subjects such as monopoly as well as the effect of corporate control of society's replication machinery for ideas. 

What has changed in the past fourteen years is that the analogy with biological organisms is no longer highly tenuous. In fact, this conversation is at the forefront of some of the most interesting intellectual conversations today. I am pleased to note that in this regard, Edge is leading the way. And, in this regard, nobody is thinking about these issues more deeply than George Dyson. 

For a rich background on these topics, revisit the following Edge Features, Seminars, and Master Classes and browse through the videos and texts...

"Rethinking "Out of Africa": A Conversation with Christopher Stringer (2011)
"A Short Course In Synthetic Genomics", The Edge Master Class with George Church & Craig Venter (2009)
"Eat Me Before I Eat You! A New Foe For Bad Bugs": A Conversation with Kary Mullis (2010)
"Mapping The Neanderthal Genome" A Conversation with Svante Pääbo (2009)
"Engineering Biology": A Conversation with Drew Endy (2008)
"Life: A Gene-Centric View" A Conversation in Munich with Craig Venter & Raichard Dawkins (2008)
"Ants Have Algorithms": A Talk with Ian Couzin (2008)
"Life: What A Concept", The Edge Seminar, Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Dimitar Sasselov, Seth Lloyd, Robert Shapiro (2007)
"Code II" J. Doyne Farmer v. Charles Simonyi (1998)

John Brockman
 

GEORGE DYSON is a Science Historian; Author, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe; Darwin Among the Machines.

George Dyson's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB:  Stewart Brand. Nicholas Carr, George Dyson

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George Dyson's Edge Bio Page

"The self is something that is central to a lot of psychological questions and, in fact, a lot of psychologists have difficulty describing their work without positing the notion of a self. It's such a common daily, profound, indivisible experience for most of us. Some people do manage to achieve states of divided self or anatta, no self, they're really skilled Buddhists. But for the majority of us the self is a very compulsive experience. I happen to think it's an illusion and certainly the neuroscience seems to support that contention. Simply from the logical positions that it's very difficult to, without avoiding some degree of infinite regress, to say a starting point, the trail of thought, just the fractionation of the mind, when we see this happening in neurological conditions. The famous split-brain studies showing that actually we're not integrated entities inside our head, rather we're the output of a multitude of unconscious processes."

BRUCE HOOD is a British experimental psychologist who holds the Chair in Developmental Psychology in Society at Bristol Cognitive Development Centre. He is well known for his ideas on humans being hard-wired for supernatural beliefs. He is the author of Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable, and most recently, The Self Illusion: How the Brain Creates Identity. In 2011, he presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, "Meet Your Brain" which was broadcast on the BBC.

Bruce Hood's Edge Bio Page

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  Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds

To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it's true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and Brockman is indeed a successful literary agent who represents an enviable stable of high-profile scientists and communicators, in both cases the description rather understates the reality. More accurate ways of describing Brockman would be to say that he is a "cultural impresario" or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an "intellectual enzyme". (Brand goes on helpfully to explain that an enzyme is "a biological catalyst – an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things".)

The first thing you notice about Brockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow's "Two Cultures" – the parallel universes of the arts and the sciences. When profilers ask him for pictures, one he often sends shows him with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, no less. Or shots of the billboard photographs of his head that were used to publicise an eminently forgettable 1968 movie, . But he's also one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call.   . . . [Download Guardian Digital pdf of print edition]      [Photo Credit: Peter Yang]