Kin and Kind - A Fight about the Genetics of Altruism

Jonah Lehrer
New Yorker - Dept. of Science
05 March 2012

Journal of Theoretical Biology (1964) by William Hamilton
--Genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit of an action exceeded the cost ot the individual once relatedness was taken into account.
--Altruism isn't really altruism.  It's just another means of spreading our genes by saving kin instead of having sex.
--Haplodiploidy--Female insects emerged from fertilzied while males emerged from unfertilized one.  Therefore, female insects protected the queen because they were more related to her than the males which is basically genetic greed.
--Eusociality--Indiviual insects live in vast cooperative societues like wasps and ants.

E.O. Wilson (entomologist) studied ants and doesn't believe the equation works (2000)
--Tens of thousands of insects that develped haplodiploidy did not evolve eusociality--so that relationship is statistically insignificant which contracticts Hamilton's thesis.
Eusociality is rare because it requires a long list of preadaptations before it happens.
----Cohesion of the group must come first.
----The female insects might then construct a defensible nest
----Genetic adaptations for eusocialty begins to happen (feeding larvae; division of labor)
----Once this happens, natural selection takes over allowing altruistic lifestyle to reproduce fast.
The relatedness of the ant colony is a consequence of eusociality, not the cause.

Darwin's The Descent of Man
Generosity evolved as an emergent principle of the group, not the individual.
Group Selection - While costly for the individual, generosity helped sustain the group which made individuals in the group more likely to survive.
This is mostly dismissed because the tangible benefits of group generosity are are less tangible than selfishness.

E.O. Wilson
If our behaviour was driven by group selection, we'd be like automotons in an ant colony.  If indiviual selection was the only thing that mattered, then we'd be entirely selfish.  We're shaped by both forces and stuck somewhere in between.

Group Think - The Brainstorming Myth

Jonah Lehrer
Annals of Ideas - 30 January 2012

Alex Osborn - Your Creative Power (1948)
--Brainstorming is characterized by the absence of criticism and negative feedback

Decades of research has shown that brainstorming sessions produce fewer ideas than same number of people who work individually and then pull their ideas.

Charles Nemeth 2003 Berkely Professor
--Debate conditions - groups that debate and criticize each others ideas.
--Debate conditions do not inhibit ideas, but stimulate them relative to every other condition.
--Stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with others and to reassess our viewpoints
--Even when ideas may be wrong, it expands our creative potential

The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together--It is the human friction that makes the spark.

The Sanctuary-The World's Oldest Temple and the Dawn of Civilization

Elif Batuman - The New Yorker
Dept. of Archaeology - 26 December 2011

Hunter Gatherers are believed to have lacked...
1) complex symbolic systems
2) social hierarchies
3) the division of labor.
...three things probably needed to build mega temples

The 22 acre mega temple at Gobelki Tepe in Turkey suggests that the need to build a sacred site might have obliged the hunter gatherers to mobilize a workforce, secure a stable food supply and spend long periods of time in one place

Hunter-gatherers weren't supposed to make large scale human representation sculptures because it conflicts with the animistic, non-hierarchical point of view.

The Neolithic Revolution, coined by V. Gordon Childe believed that the hunter-gatherers transition to subsistence and ultimately domestication was a result of climate changes.

Jacques Cauvin in the 70's proposed that a cult of the bull and fertility goddess, an ancient religion, had fostered a fertility oriented world view that engendered a shift to agriculture.
Gobelki Tepe may support this theory of an ideological trigger.

Studies of Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers shows that they spend about 20 hours a week gathering food, while farmers toiled all day. Paleoarchaeological data shows that early farmers had more anemia and vitamin deficiencies, died younger, had worse teeth, and were more prone to infectious diseases from close proximity to people and animals.
Why would people choose to be farmers?

Hunter-gatherers had it good until population growth caught up with increased food production, so they had to spend more time producing food to keep everyone alive. The farmers, because they were larger in number, killed off other hunter-gatherers or drove them off the land.
Was this the beginning of social and sexual inequality?

Some pople think Gobelki Temple is the Garden of Eden

Eve: "pain of childbirth....your husband will rule over you..." may refer to the decline of women's health and the need to produce babies to work the land.

Cain kills Abel and founds the first city.
Is this the beginning of terriotorial feuds, sibling rivalry, the constant threat of exile?