Quotes from Noise Matters

By R Haven Wiley (2015)

• To the extent that an individual’s own interests become dependent on its group, the group becomes a superordinate unit of selection.#
  Evolution
• Categorization of other individuals is perhaps the fundamental cognitive process in social behavior.#
  SignalingCooperation
• The inevitability of noise, in all analyses, derives from the diminishing returns of perfection, for both signaler and receiver.#
  Signaling
• Sensitivity to input in general and specificity for a particular signal are not entirely compatible.#
  Epistemology
• To produce a new phenotype, natural selection oft en must both change the effects of one part of the genome and stabilize the concomitant effects on the rest… Because it is always more difficult to coordinate multiple changes at once, rather than one change at a time, the pleiotropic effects of genes can retard or inhibit the effects of natural selection.#
  Science
• Perhaps a tendency to think in terms of simple causation evolved because, no matter how important it might be to understand nature, it has been even more important to allocate blame in our social relationships.#
  Cooperation
• There arises the tradeoff between the rate of transmission and the efficacy of transmission in noise. At a noisy cocktail party or in any other noisy gathering, this tradeoff no doubt constrains us humans to vapid conversation. Over megaphones in crowds we are constrained to platitudes. Likewise, in general, noise favors ritualization—efficiency—over depth of information.#
  Signaling
• Any behavior that elicits a response from another individual, without providing all of the power for that response, is a signal that conveys information from the actor to the recipient.#
  Signaling