Tagged: Evolution

Quotes

Douglas Whitman, “Hayek Contra Pangloss on Evolutionary Systems” (1998)

• Individuals are not units of selection upon which selective forces operate, except insofar as an individual may be perceived as a conglomeration of multiple memes and genes. What is essential for a methodologically individualist account of the evolution of cultural outcomes is that individuals constitute a filter (i.e., a selective mechanism) through which memes must pass before they can begin to have systemic effects.#
• The real debate in biology, then, is not selection of individuals versus selection of groups, but selection of genes versus selection at multiple levels of a hierarchy.#
• To theorize that evolution could have led to a different and possibly superior outcome is fine, but to say precisely what that outcome would have been is an act of the imagination, and trying to realize an imaginary outcome in the real world is to engage, not in evolutionary theory, but in rational constructivist design.#

Jason Potts, The New Evolutionary Microeconomics (2000)

• The concept of a competitive selection process effecting optimal outcomes was once the paradigm of orthodox evolutionary biological theory and economics leant heavily upon this argument to buttress the analogue of a competitive market process. Biology, however, has now collected far too many exceptions to sustain this belief, and has reworked its underlying theory of the selection mechanism to reject the concept of global maximization applied to the concept of fitness. The theoretical reason for this rejection amounts to the fact that ‘biological space’ is not integral.#
• Selection as a filtering mechanism favors not the fastest, but the sufficiently fast; not the most profitable, but the sufficiently profitable. This is readily observable in nature and economy, whereby even the harshest selection environment yet still contains some measure of variety.#

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009)

• Imitation and conformity can create high degrees of intra-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity, and on a faster time scale than that of biological evolution.#
• Children soon learn to lie also, but that comes only some years later and presupposes preexisting cooperation and trust. If people did not have a tendency to trust one another’s helpfulness, lying could never get off the ground.#
• Guilt and shame are kinds of self-punishments that serve, first, to make it less likely that I will engage in the same transgression in the future, and second, to display to others that I indeed hew to the norm, even if I did not live up to it in this case. . . . Guilt and shame are thus biologically based emotional reactions, which presuppose the kinds of normative (or at least punitive) social environments that humans have constructed for themselves. They are thus particularly good exemplars of the co-evolutionary process between human biology and culture.#
• Advertising my eye direction for all to see could only have evolved in a cooperative social environment in which others were not likely to exploit it to my detriment.#

Peter Lewin, Capital in Disequilibrium (1999)

• The more dynamic the environment, the more abstract the nature of the organization’s constitution needs to be for it to survive, the more it needs to be like an order.#

Roy Baumeister, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface” (2010)

• The not entirely satisfactory answers regarding upright posture included freeing the hands for carrying things and making fire. (Extensive tool use came later.) The use of hands for gestural communication may well be a major part of the answer, however. Hominids who used their hands to communicate would then be able to use and share increasingly large quantities of information, which is what humans did. The proliferation of information would likely have created selection advantages for the larger brains—hence the subsequent expansion in brain size.#