Darwin, Kant, and Hamilton

Jim Menegay said:

For a young person growing up in bourgeois Western
society, one of the vicissitudes of the process of
socialization is that perfectly natural self-serving
behaviors will be met with the query: "What if everyone
did that?".

It is a difficult question to even understand, let alone
answer. I have always been partial to Dunbar's response in
Heller's "Catch 22": "Well, if everyone did it, then I
would be a damned fool to do any differently!"

I have heard that this query can be blamed, ultimately, on
Emmanuel Kant. (If I have heard wrong, don't expect me to
actually READ Kant to educate myself - I have recently
gone thru the ordeal of reading Hamilton, and that was bad
enough.)

Kant' proposed a "rational test" of a moral claim - did it
match what he called the categorical imperative? That is,
could it be said that you acted this way in the knowledge
that if all acted that way, the result would be good. Your
precis is good enough.

Quoted message said:

It has recently occurred to me that in Darwin's Natural
Selection, Nature never asks Kant's question. Organisms
are expected to behave self-servingly, even though "if
everyone did that" the self is ill-served. Ironically,
Nature sees to it that everyone does do that, though She
doesn't take the inevitable consequences of Her own
actions into account. As a result, every individual may
suffer from an evolutionary change that was to the benefit
of each individual. To claim that this is paradoxical is
to commit the fallacy of composition, as that fallacy is
defined by economists.

I has also recently occurred to me that in Hamilton's kin
selection model, Nature DOES ask a watered down version of
Kant's question. In Hamilton's model, Nature asks the
question: "What if everyone whose genome is correlated
with yours did that?". Or better, "What if everyone did
that to the extent that their genome is correlated with
yours?".

Please note the use of the words "correlated with", rather
than "similar to". I have just been thru this issue with
Hoelzer and McGinn. If everyone is similar, then no one is
correlated.

Food for thought, even if Dr. Wilkins will disapprove of
the anthropomorphism.

I'm reading _The Narrow Roads of Gene Land vol I_ right now,
and the way WDH tells it, there is no danger of
anthropomorphising at all :-) He even discusses the use of
words like "altruism" and the misunderstandings this cas
caused, and so realises that without scare quotes they are
dangerous words...

Nice metaphor/analogy. I'll steal it at an appropriate time,
of course.
--
Dr John Wilkins [email hidden]
wilkins.id.auwilkins.id.auOpen ↗ "Men mark it when they hit, but do not
mark it when they miss"
- Francis
Bacon

Hi Jim,

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 6/24/04 10:28 PM:

Quoted message said:

For a young person growing up in bourgeois Western
society, one of the vicissitudes of the process of
socialization is that perfectly natural self-serving
behaviors will be met with the query: "What if everyone
did that?".

It is a difficult question to even understand, let alone
answer. I have always been partial to Dunbar's response in
Heller's "Catch 22": "Well, if everyone did it, then I
would be a damned fool to do any differently!"

I have heard that this query can be blamed, ultimately, on
Emmanuel Kant. (If I have heard wrong, don't expect me to
actually READ Kant to educate myself - I have recently
gone thru the ordeal of reading Hamilton, and that was bad
enough.)

It has recently occurred to me that in Darwin's Natural
Selection, Nature never asks Kant's question. Organisms
are expected to behave self-servingly, even though "if
everyone did that" the self is ill-served. Ironically,
Nature sees to it that everyone does do that, though She
doesn't take the inevitable consequences of Her own
actions into account. As a result, every individual may
suffer from an evolutionary change that was to the benefit
of each individual. To claim that this is paradoxical is
to commit the fallacy of composition, as that fallacy is
defined by economists.

I has also recently occurred to me that in Hamilton's kin
selection model, Nature DOES ask a watered down version of
Kant's question. In Hamilton's model, Nature asks the
question: "What if everyone whose genome is correlated
with yours did that?". Or better, "What if everyone did
that to the extent that their genome is correlated with
yours?".

Please note the use of the words "correlated with", rather
than "similar to". I have just been thru this issue with
Hoelzer and McGinn. If everyone is similar, then no one is
correlated.

And I think your argument is a good one, although I also
think it succeeds by dropping some of the most cherished
notions about KIN selection held by its more fervent
advocates.

Quoted message said:

Food for thought, even if Dr. Wilkins will disapprove of
the anthropomorphism.

This is indeed an interesting idea. However, I think you
might be misreading Hamilton's model a bit. The model does
not have Nature asking a question. It does not even posit
that Nature cares about the future. Instead, Hamilton's
model illustrates a mechanistic way in which Nature tends to
blindly explore the population level consequences of
mutations that affect fitness-altering social behavior. In
my view, this was the genius of Hamilton's model. He was the
first AFAIK to model a dynamical evolutionary system that
included a positive feedback loop, thus potentiating an
engine of evolutionary change. Viewed in this way, the model
of kin selection shares fundamental similarities with models
for the evolution of any signaling system, including the
coevolution of mutualistic species interactions.

More food for thought (I hope),

Guy

[email hidden] (Jim Menegay) wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

For a young person growing up in bourgeois Western
society, one of the vicissitudes of the process of
socialization is that perfectly natural self-serving
behaviors will be met with the query: "What if everyone
did that?".

It is a difficult question to even understand, let alone
answer. I have always been partial to Dunbar's response in
Heller's "Catch 22": "Well, if everyone did it, then I
would be a damned fool to do any differently!"

I have heard that this query can be blamed, ultimately, on
Emmanuel Kant. (If I have heard wrong, don't expect me to
actually READ Kant to educate myself - I have recently
gone thru the ordeal of reading Hamilton, and that was bad
enough.)

It has recently occurred to me that in Darwin's Natural
Selection, Nature never asks Kant's question. Organisms
are expected to behave self-servingly, even though "if
everyone did that" the self is ill-served. Ironically,
Nature sees to it that everyone does do that, though She
doesn't take the inevitable consequences of Her own
actions into account. As a result, every individual may
suffer from an evolutionary change that was to the benefit
of each individual. To claim that this is paradoxical is
to commit the fallacy of composition, as that fallacy is
defined by economists.

I has also recently occurred to me that in Hamilton's kin
selection model, Nature DOES ask a watered down version of
Kant's question. In Hamilton's model, Nature asks the
question: "What if everyone whose genome is correlated
with yours did that?". Or better, "What if everyone did
that to the extent that their genome is correlated with
yours?".

Please note the use of the words "correlated with", rather
than "similar to". I have just been thru this issue with
Hoelzer and McGinn. If everyone is similar, then no one is
correlated.

Food for thought, even if Dr. Wilkins will disapprove of
the anthropomorphism.

This is essentially the Tragedy of the Commons, as outlined
by Hardin in 1968, and LLoyd George a long while before
that. And yes, it can be solved by relatedness, for exactly
the reason you mentioned. Well done!

"Guy Hoelzer" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
"]news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

[Hamilton] was the first AFAIK to model a dynamical
evolutionary system that included a positive feedback
loop, thus potentiating an engine of evolutionary change.
Viewed in this way, the model of kin selection shares
fundamental similarities with models for the evolution of
any signaling system, including the coevolution of
mutualistic species interactions.

More food for thought (I hope),

Unfortunately, there are also some fundamental differences.
If you look at the literature that grew out of Hamilton and
Axelrod's (1980?) paper, you will see that there are
enormous complexities in even figuring out whether one
strategy is superior to another. The space of possible
strategies is infinite-dimensional. And if you take a look
at the Hofbauer and Sigmund book, you will see that there
are huge difficulties in understanding the dynamics, even if
you are offered a small finite collection of strategies "on
a platter".

Agreed that signalling and mutualism are the next stage. But
I have no illusions that these phenomena will be understood
in the sense of being rigorously modeled any time soon.
Nonlinearity makes everything much, much more difficult.
AFAIK Prigogine's school has still not extended the minimum
entropy production theorem to systems that are far from
equilibrium. And they are working with effectively infinite
populations with a fixed dynamics. The evolution of
signaling strikes me as considerably more difficult still
because the invention of new ways to cheat is a
nondeterministic source of continuing perturbations.

Hamilton's rule for unilateral altruism was "easy".
Reciprocity and signaling are going to be very hard. IMHO.

Guy Hoelzer said:

GH:- Greetings

JE:- Thanks for your reply.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

JM:- I have always been partial to Dunbar's response in
Heller's "Catch 22": "Well, if everyone did it, then I
would be a damned fool to do any differently!" I have
heard that this query can be blamed, ultimately, on
Emmanuel Kant. (If I have heard wrong, don't expect me
to actually READ Kant to educate myself - I have
recently gone thru the ordeal of reading Hamilton, and
that was bad enough.) It has recently occurred to me
that in Darwin's Natural Selection, Nature never asks
Kant's question. Organisms are expected to behave self-
servingly, even though "if everyone did that" the self
is ill-served. Ironically, Nature sees to it that
everyone does do that, though She doesn't take the
inevitable consequences of Her own actions into
account. As a result, every individual may suffer from
an evolutionary change that was to the benefit of each
individual. To claim that this is paradoxical is to
commit the fallacy of composition, as that fallacy is
defined by economists.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

JE:- The fallacy that is common to Kant, Hamilton and
"economists" is:
_____________________________________
A relative gain for an absolute cost where the relative
gain < absolute cost.
_____________________________________

"If everyone did it" but it only produced a relative
gain < absolute cost, then everyone _loses_ including
the relative winner.

Quoted message said:

GH:- The meaning of "if everyone did it" escapes me
here,..

JE:- The meaning of "everyone" IS unambiguous: it means all
concerned, no exceptions. So, why did you write that it
"escapes me here"?

Quoted message said:

GH:- but I think the issue of relative vs. absolute
fitness costs is an important one to resolve. Let's take a
closer look at the relative fitness model when relative
fitness gains come at the expense of absolute fitness. A
classic example from the

Quoted message said:

subsumes the relative fitness model. The Fisherian model
shows that a mutation, say for very attractive epigamic
traits at the expense of gamete viability or production,
will increase in frequency in a population if it reduces
the number of offspring produced by others more than it
reduces the number of offspring produced by the mutant.
So, the population size is declining as the attractive/low
fecundity allele increases in frequency. This process of
selection MIGHT lead the population to extinction, but it
MIGHT not. The population size at the new state attractor
of the system would depend strongly on the relative
fitness outcomes of interactions among mutants, which
could conceivably even be synergistic. In that case the
population size would be drawn to higher numbers as the
attractive/low fecundity allele approaches fixation.

JE:- Your argument refutes the position that a relative
increase can win over an absolute decrease. It can't. In the
situation where "the relative fitness outcomes of
interactions among mutants which could conceivably even be
synergistic" is just a case where absolute fitness INCREASED
because the relationship had become MUTUALISTIC.

Quoted message said:

GH:- When an altruism mutation causes relative fitness to
increase (rb>c) and absolute fitness to decrease, the the
"winner" wins relatively. This is true whether selection
is pushing the population to extinction or not.

JE:- To my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested, including
myself, that it was not true that: "When an altruism
mutation causes relative fitness to increase (rb>c) and
absolute fitness to decrease, then the "winner" wins
relatively." What REMAINS to be debated is: can just a
relative win, at just one point in time be sufficient to
determine that the gene has spread? The answer is NO simply
because Hamilton's rule cannot discriminate between a
reduction of altruism (+c) which requires just a relative
measure and mutualism (-c) which requires an absolute
measure. Mutualism and altruism stand in absolute
contradiction to each other.

--------------quote----------------------

1) 22/01/2004:

JE:- What is the difference between a reduced positive c and
a negative c? If c was an abolute measure of fitness then
yes, a real difference exists. However c is only a relative
fitness cost and not an absolute fitness cost, so what is
the difference?

BOH:-

As far as the rule is concerned, none.

----------- end quote -------------------- The rule cannot
discriminate between a reduced +c and -c because no general
term exists within it that represents the total Darwinian
fitness of the actor. Without it organism fitness altruism
(OFM) cannot be separated from organism fitness mutualism
(OFM) within the rule proving the rule is biologically
unintelligible.

Darwinian fitness is only implied as the negative value cmax
(the maximum cost c to the actor). This value does not
appear anywhere within the rule as a general term so
altruism can never be established. Hamilton's rule cannot
know if just a relative win at just one point in time
produces an absolute cost > or < relative win to recipients
so the rule cannot determine if the altruistic gene is
moving towards extinction or not! If an accountant audited a
companies books where that company only indicated that it
made a big profit for one week but omitted to say that it
made a massive loss over that financial year, (relative gain
at an absolute loss) or the company decided to enter debits
as credits because the accounting rule allowed it (the rule
could not discriminate between a reduction in non profitable
losses and mutualistic (traded) gains, then that companies
books would be deemed fraudulent.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

JE:- This is the logic of war which is explicit within
Van Valen's incomplete Red Queen hypothesis. Nature does
not use such a logic because it leads to mutualised
extinction.

Quoted message said:

GH:- John - If I didn't know better I'd swear you were a
group selectionist at heart. How, in your view of
evolution, could individual selection avoid driving
populations to extinction sometimes?

JE:- Of course populations can become extinct no matter how
hard each individual within it attempts to increase its own
Darwinian fitness. A population becomes extinct simply
because all of the individuals within it make a continual
absolute fitness loss. Why? because none of them are up to
the Darwinian task within that environment (possibly because
they employed Hamilton's faulty logic but I doubt if nature
is as stupid as we are). My point is a VERY simple one:
Extinction cannot be SELECTED FOR within any rational
evolutionary theory. At the Darwinian level of selection
this means exactly: No Darwinian selectee can be selected to
reduce its own Darwinian fitness,
i.e. it cannot be selected to reduce the total number of
fertile forms it reproduces into one population.
However it MUST do this to prove OFA. This is why OFA
refutes Darwinism.

Quoted message said:

GH:- If selection acted exclusively at the individual
level, then individuals should not act "for the good of
the species", right?If the logic of natural selection
biases evolution toward an adaptive response to
extinction, then natural selection must have acted on the
population level.

JE:- False. Natural selection produced organism fitness
mutualism which can be _erroneously_ interpreted as a group
selective effect.

Regards,

John Edser Independent Researcher PO Box 266 Church Pt NSW
2105 Australia

[email hidden]