Amanda Knox and evolutionary psychology—two of LessWrong’s favorite topics, together in one news article / opinion piece.
The author explains the anti-Knox reaction as essentially a spandrel of an ev. psych reaction. Money quote:
In our evolutionary past, small groups of hunter-gatherers needed enforcers, individuals who took it upon themselves to punish slackers and transgressors to maintain group cohesion. We evolved this way. As a result, some people are born to be punishers. They are hard-wired for it.
I’m skeptical of the ev. psych because it seems to require a fairly strong form of group selection pressure. But I thought folks might find it interesting.
The phenomenon of altruistic punishment itself is apparently not just a matter of speculation. Another quote from Preston’s piece:
Experiments show that when some people punish others, the reward part of their brain lights up like a Christmas tree. It turns out we humans avidly engage in something anthropologists call “altruistic punishment.”
He links to this PNAS paper which uses a computer simulation to model the evolution of altruistic punishment. (I haven’t looked at it in detail.)
Whatever the explanation for their behavior (and it really cries out for one), the anti-Knoxpeople are truly disturbing, and their existence has taught me some very unpleasant but important lessons about Homo sapiens.
(EDIT: One of them, incidentally, is a mathematician who has written a book about the misuse of mathematics in trials—one of whose chapters argues, in a highly misleading and even disingenuous manner, that the acquittal of Knox and Sollecito represents such an instance.)
Skimming the PNAS paper, it appears that the conclusion is that evolved group co-operation is not mathematically stable without evolved altruistic punishment. I.e. populations with only evolved co-operation drift towards populations without any group focused evolved traits, but altruistic punishment seems to exclude enough defectors that evolved co-operation maintained frequency in the population.
Which makes sense, but I’m nowhere close to qualified to judge the quality of the paper or its implications for evolutionary theory.
Amanda Knox and evolutionary psychology—two of LessWrong’s favorite topics, together in one news article / opinion piece.
The author explains the anti-Knox reaction as essentially a spandrel of an ev. psych reaction. Money quote:
I’m skeptical of the ev. psych because it seems to require a fairly strong form of group selection pressure. But I thought folks might find it interesting.
The phenomenon of altruistic punishment itself is apparently not just a matter of speculation. Another quote from Preston’s piece:
He links to this PNAS paper which uses a computer simulation to model the evolution of altruistic punishment. (I haven’t looked at it in detail.)
Whatever the explanation for their behavior (and it really cries out for one), the anti-Knox people are truly disturbing, and their existence has taught me some very unpleasant but important lessons about Homo sapiens.
(EDIT: One of them, incidentally, is a mathematician who has written a book about the misuse of mathematics in trials—one of whose chapters argues, in a highly misleading and even disingenuous manner, that the acquittal of Knox and Sollecito represents such an instance.)
Skimming the PNAS paper, it appears that the conclusion is that evolved group co-operation is not mathematically stable without evolved altruistic punishment. I.e. populations with only evolved co-operation drift towards populations without any group focused evolved traits, but altruistic punishment seems to exclude enough defectors that evolved co-operation maintained frequency in the population.
Which makes sense, but I’m nowhere close to qualified to judge the quality of the paper or its implications for evolutionary theory.