[FRIAM] Group Selection IS a metaphor.

Fri Aug 8 17:50:57 EDT 2025

Great Peiter, 

But you didnpt answer my question.  I know it’s the hardest kind of question to answer, but give it a go.  What is your hankering?  Where do you hope this will all come out?   What would group selection look like in human beings?  Would you approve of it or disapprove of it?  What is a group, after all?  Is a species a group?  Is a race a group? Is a village a group? Etc.  

DS Wilson I think lost interest in the question that most interested me (what are the elemental forces that led to the evolution of complex organisms) and became more interested in in the forces that lead to human groupish behavior.  To me human groupishness seems wildly overdetermined.  Its like asking why is the pope a Christian.  But that’s a wildly unsatisfying answer to some one who is genuinely surprized to find that the pope is indeed a Christian.  

Lets go back and forth like this for a few more exchanges.

Meantime, I enclose a short article in BBS that reprises a much larger article by W and S.   I have a pdf of the larger article on my hard drive and will send it to you when I figure out how to bypass friam’s restrictions on large files. 

But please don’t let that get in the way of you taking a shot at answers to the questions I posed.

Nick

.  

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Friday, August 8, 2025 4:21 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection IS a metaphor.

Nick,

Too good to miss — I’m in. Lead me into the jungle of group selection, especially the human variety.

What I’m after: a clear, simple (but not dumbed-down) take on what group selection in humans is, and why it might explain our behaviour better than individual selection alone.

Happy to start at the very beginning — dawn of the argument, cave paintings, whatever you think works.

And yes, send me that Famous Great Amateur reading list. I promise to read it with respect… and just enough suspicion to keep it fun.

On Fri, 8 Aug 2025 at 17:05, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Hi, Pieter, 

Let me be a George to you as you explore this topic.  I will try to respond off hand, quickly, and unself-consciously as you think along.  I think this whole topic is fascinating both substantively, and historically.   The literature seems to track (or lead?) the Zeitgeist so precisely from post war peace-nikery (Wynne-Edwards), to the revanchist academic Reaganism (Williams-Dawkins), to chaos (evodevo). It's really hard to take the whole argument seriously once one begins to understand how complex and multi layered are the mechanisms by which parents do and dont resemble their children.   One of the tools to thinking straight is to own up to one's hankerings before one dives into the literature.  What are you hoping to find?  Post war peace-nikery was covertly deistic,  hoping to find that there was some sort of over arching regulatory agency that would keep the species and the planet safe.  Academic Reaganism said good luck with that!   Success is virtue.  And then evodevo, the bull in the china shop of that whole argument.  I recommend reading the biologist, Sean B. Carroll, (not the physicist), Endless forms most beautiful, and The making of the fittest.   It's really hard to take the whole argument seriously once one begins to understand how complex and multi layered are the mechanisms by which parents do and dont resemble their children. That there is any resemblance at all begins to seem like some sort of miracle.  Or perhaps just momentum.  One hankering that misleads us is naturalism, the idea that we can find some sort of MORAL guidance in the way things are.  Is the opposite hankering, existentialism?  The belief that what makes humans special is their power to CHOOSE.  You should remember that I am not a philosopher and am, in fact, an amateur in all things.  

"Any time you want to explore this issue, I  am here ready to help.  Would you like suggestions of articles to read by that Famous Amateur, Nick Thompson? "

signed, 

ChatNST

On Fri, Aug 8, 2025 at 5:19 AM Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za <mailto:pieters at randcontrols.co.za> > wrote:

Thanks, Nick. Just like you struggled to get your head around entropy, I’m battling to wrap my mind around how the basic but very powerful mechanism of evolution works in human groups. I can easily understand individual human selection, or even group selection in swarming insects where only the queen has babies.

I think I’ll take a page from your book and work with George to help guide me through this learning journey. Every now and then, I might check in with you and others here for a chat or to ask a question.

The only catch is that I’ve just started a really exciting AI project, so I might not have much time for my group-level evolution journey — but I’ll try to keep it going.

On Fri, 8 Aug 2025 at 03:40, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Thanks Pieter, 

Sorry I have taken so long to get back to you.  If FRIAM ever started a journal, it should be called “the emperors new clothes”.  We are not committed to anything if not to the validity of an “amateur’s” perspective.  As people will be quick to tell you, mine has always been of that sort. 

If I read you carefully, the position you take is that laid out in Dawkins The Extended Phenotype – that the genes are the basic unit of selection.  But as Dave Wilson has been pointing out for years, Who made that decision?   For one thing, as epigenic studies have made clear, when one looks in detail, it is really hard to find a thing that is exactly the gene.  For another, that decision runs the risk of confusing the the thing that is selected with the forces that are selecting it.  Whatever level you care to calculate the impact of selection, it is differential group success that is driving selection or it is not group selection.  And if it  is differential group success that is driving selection, then it is group selection.  I think you might quite enjoy The Extended Phenotype.   For a whild ride, have a look at Elliott Sober and D. S. Wilson’s Reintroducing Group Selection to the human behavioral sciences.  There is a wonderful metaphor in there about two riders riding three horses.  It was the article that broke the tide for me.  I had been totally up Dawkins ass for the preceding 20 years. 

Here is the citation, courtesy og George Patrick Tremblay IV  

Wilson, D. S., & Sober, E. (1994). Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17(4), 585–608. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00036104 en.wikipedia.org+15philpapers.org+15 <https://philpapers.org/rec/WILRGS?utm_source=chatgpt.com> ….

Nick 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp
Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 12:55 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection IS a metaphor.

Nick, I'm genuinely impressed. Honestly, I feel a bit out of my depth trying to respond meaningfully on this topic.

So please take my reply in the same spirit I’d expect a response from my 10-year-old grandchild when debating computer programming with me. The gap between your understanding of evolution and mine feels about that wide.

That said, I’d still like to offer a response to your group selection argument—fully aware that it may come across as amateurish, and I'm okay with that.

Here's the question I’m grappling with:

Is the following valid?
Genes as the Unit of Selection:
Modern evolutionary theory generally views genes as the primary unit of selection. Natural selection acts on individuals, and the success of an individual is ultimately determined by the genes they carry. 
Group Selection as a Modifier:
Group selection can be seen as a process that influences the expression of genes. For example, if a group-level trait (like cooperative behavior) is advantageous, then genes that promote that behavior will be favored, even if those genes also have individual-level costs.

On Wed, 6 Aug 2025 at 00:12, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> > wrote:

Nick,

I wish to embody the fear of being dragged away from what you think you are supposed to be doing, to be engaged in the topic you raise in your paper.

I have read the paper before and, as then, I find it meritorious, well written, and reasonable in argument. I am, basically, convinced.

However; two points:

First, your use of the concept, "metaphor," is the way that I use the term, in a manner that glen pointed out is inconsistent with the literal definition of the term. I speak of metaphor when there is some thing of which I think I know something and I have a suspicion that some other thing might be of the same ilk. I use what I think I know to craft a 'model', one that suggests particular points and particular relations that, if my suspicion is correct, will have direct analogs in the unknown thing. I check them out individually and in combinations and, if substantiated, confirm my suspicion. If unconfirmed, the metaphor is refuted.

This seems to me to be what you are doing in the paper, albeit it more abstractly and academically. Please correct me if wrong.

Second, and here is the real time sink, would it be possible to make your ideas concrete, real groups with actual history and demonstrated differential "success." If you were amenable to such a conversation, I would propose the Mormons as a test case.

One of 20 or so "religions"/"societies" to emerge from the "Burnt Over District" of western New York. The only one still extant.

Disproportionately successful, (in material and social terms), to their neighbors. Smith was living in a two-story New England style home while down the road, Abe Lincoln, was living in a log cabin with mud floor.

A schism immediately after Smith's death, with the Reformed LDS barely evident while the main group flourished. (Last time I checked, Mormonism and Sokka Gokai, in Japan, were the two fastest growing religions.)

In Utah there was a concerted effort to spawn multiple small groups by sending out colonies. Because each group was originally "seeded" with four or five families, you get a strong genetic/heritance component as well as "traits." (It is still possible to identify what part of Utah someone is from (especially females) by their physical appearance.)

Some interesting "adaptations" at the trait level, e.g., when Smith was alive blacks were included in the community and held the priesthood—something that Missourians, at the time, could not abide. Brigham Young 'suspended' (restored in 1978 with the admission that the suspension was not for theological, but merely political reasons) black priesthood membership and gave up polygamy (de jure only) to appease the Federal Government and avoid a second martyrdom.

davew

On Tue, Aug 5, 2025, at 1:10 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Colleagues in FRIAM,

Sometimes, if I am going to get anything done, I just have to ignore Friam, and keep my head down, and work at the thing I am working at.  It always seems, on that occasion, that you-guys dangle in front of me some enticing topic so I must scream and put my fingers in my ears to keep focus on my work.  So it was that when I decided I must fish or cut bait on entropy or it would take me to my grave, that almost immediately you-guys started not one but two conversations close to my heart: on the centrality of metaphor to science and on the group selection controversy. 

A couple of decades ago I brought those two interests together in  a paper called “Shifting the Natural Selection  Metaphor to the Group Level.  There are two things about this paper that make it salient for me.  The first is that I think it is the best paper I ever wrote.  The second is that for each of the two people whom I most hoped to reach when I wrote it, D. S. Wilson and Elliott  Sober, it is a piece of  crap. In it, I try to show that the problem with metaphors is not with their use in scientific thinking: on the contrary, it is with their ill-disciplined use.  Metaphors need to be worked in a systematic way, not simply flung out in a gust of poetic exuberance.  This lesson  I try to teach by working the natural selection metaphor in a systematic way to show that if it had been treated seriously in the first place, the whole dispute about group selection might have been  avoided.  Thus the paper is not only arrogant, but meta-arrogant.  

Nothing is more pitiable than the retired academic who would do anything to have anybody read his moribund essays.  But, alas, I simply am such a person.  So, I am attaching a copy of the paper  in the hope that it will have some value to you within the context of your two discussions. 

Mumble,

Nick

--

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology

Clark University

nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson

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-- 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology

Clark University

nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson

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