Topic: Evolution

Quotes

Leda Cosmides, Clark Barrett, & John Tooby, “Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence” (2010)

• The computational problems our ancestors faced were not drawn randomly from the universe of all possible problems; instead, they were densely clustered in particular, recurrent families (e.g., predator avoidance, foraging, mating) that occupy only miniscule regions of the space of possible problems.#

Robert Boyd, “Is the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma a Good Model of Reciprocal Altruism?” (1988)

• It is important to distinguish between mutualism and altruism because quite different selective processes must be invoked to account for the two classes of behaviors. Once common, mutualistic behavior will remain common under the influence of natural selection, even if individuals interact at random. In contrast, altruistic behavior can remain common only if some process causes altruistic morphs to interact assortatively. #

Eddie Dekel, Jeffrey Ely, & Okan Yilankaya, “Evolution of Preferences” (2007)

• If others cannot observe one’s preferences, and hence condition their behaviour on that, there is no advantage in having preferences that differ from the fitness function, which is the determinant of evolutionary success.#

Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

• Only where meanings don’t matter is ‘syntactical’ complexity free to evolve.#
• Zahavi’s… move was to divide ‘natural selection’ into two distinct categories. First, ‘utilitarian selection’ – selection for ever greater efficiency in, say, locomotion, circulation or vision. The other category is what Zahavi terms ‘signal selection’, whose logic is the reverse. Signal selection (which includes sexual selection) is selection for ‘wastefulness’.#
• The communicative use of language presupposes anomalously high levels of mutual cooperation and trust – levels beyond anything which current Darwinian theory can explain.#

Kazuo Okanoya, “Sexual display as a syntactical vehicle: the evolution of syntax in birdsong and human language through sexual selection” (2002)

• As soon as a signal is under voluntary control, it can be produced both honestly and for the purposes of deceit. Thus, it is no longer reliably honest like a reflex, limbic signal is. It follows that there is no possibility of creating voluntary strings of semantic tokens (that is, meaningful language) without sacrificing the guarantee of honesty.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

Amotz Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece in Darwin’s Puzzle (1997)

• The reliability required in signaling militates against efficiency. Handicaps increase the reliability of signals not despite the fact that they make an animal less efficient, but because they do. Any improvement in a signal must be accompanied by a cost to the signaler – that is, must make the signal’s bearer less well-adapted to its environment.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)
• In signals, cost is of the very essence; it is necessary to the existence of the signal. If there is no cost, nothing prevents cheaters from using a signal to their benefit and to the detriment of the receivers, and that signal will lose its value as a signal.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

Ronald Heiner, “The Origin of Predictable Behavior” (1983)

• Appropriately structured behavioral rules will not necessarily arise [from selection]. Rather, they will evolve to the extent that selection processes quickly eliminate poorly administered behavior. This will more likely occur when agents are involved in highly competitive interactions that themselves indirectly result from scarcity. However, if weak selection processes are present, relatively vulnerable or dysfunctional behavior may evolve.#
• In general, evolutionary processes will not generate simulations to optimizing behavior. Rather, they will tend to produce rules that systematically restrict the flexibility of behavior compared to that which would be exhibited by a full optimizer in the absence of uncertainty.#
• Fully optimizing agents responding with complete flexibility to every perturbation in their environment would not produce easily recognizable patterns, but rather would be extremely difficult to predict. Thus, it is in the limits to maximizing that we will find the origin of predictable behavior… Evolutionary selection processes will in general not produce approximations to optimizing behavior. Rather, predictable behavior will evolve only to the extent that uncertainty prevents agents from successfully maximizing.#

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.#

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.#

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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• 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.#

Roy Baumeister & E.J. Masicampo, “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.#

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.#