It does happen to be a bit frightening to see an economics PHD doubt evolution. I think it would be good if someone like Scott Alexander writes a basic “here’s why evolution is true”-post.
The goal hasn’t to be to address every bad objection. Addressing objections strong enough to convince an economics PhD and at the same time providing the positive reasons that make us believe in evolution would be valuable.
Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth is pretty comprehensive. The shorter the work as compared to that, the more you risk missing widely held misconceptions people have.
It does happen to be a bit frightening to see an economics PHD doubt evolution.
I wouldn’t expect economics PhD to give people better insights into biology. (Only indirectly, as PhD in economics is a signal of high IQ.) A biology PhD would be more scary.
As an econ PhD, I’m theoretically amazed that multicellular organisms could overcome all of the prisoners’ dilemma type situations they must face. You don’t get large corporations without some kind of state, so why does decentralized evolution allow for people-states? I’ve also wondered, given how much faster bacteria and viruses evolve compared to multicellular organisms, why are not the viruses and bacteria winning by taking all of the free energy in people? Yes, I understand some are in a symbiotic relationship with us, but shouldn’t competition among microorganisms cause us to get nothing? If one type of firm innovated much faster than another type, the second type would be outcompeteted in the marketplace.(I do believe in evolution, of course, in the same way I accept relativity is correct even though I don’t understand the theory behind relativity.)
You don’t get large corporations without some kind of state, so why does decentralized evolution allow for people-states?
In the absence of any state holding the monopoly of power a large corporation automatically grows into a defacto state as the British East India company did in India. Big mafia organisations spring up even when the state doesn’t want them to exist. The same is true for various terrorist groups.
From here I could argue that the economics establishment seems to fail at their job when they fail to understand how coorperation can infact arise but I think there good work on cooperation such as Sveriges Riksbank Prize winner Elinor Ostrom.
If I understand her right than the important thing for solving issues of tragedy of the commons isn’t centralized decision making but good local decision making by people on-the-ground.
The British East India company and the mafia were/are able to use the threat of force to protect their property rights. Tragedy of the commons problems get much harder to solve the more people there are who can defect. I have a limited understanding of mathematical models of evolution, but it feels like the ways that people escape Moloch would not work for billions of competing microorganisms. I can see why studying economics would cause someone to be skeptical of evolution.
Microorganisms can make collective decisions via quorum sensing. Shared DNA works as a committment device.
I can see why studying economics would cause someone to be skeptical of evolution.
Interesting. Given that your field seems to be about understanding game theory and exactly how to escape Moloch, have you thought about looking deeper into the subject to see whether the microorganisms due something that useful in a more wider scale and could move on the economist’s understanding of cooperation?
have you thought about looking deeper into the subject to see whether the microorganisms due something that useful in a more wider scale and could move on the economist’s understanding of cooperation?
I have thought about studying in more depth the math of evolutionary biology.
In the absence of any state holding the monopoly of power a large corporation automatically grows into a defacto state as the British East India company did in India.
The British East India Company was a state-supported group, so it doesn’t count. But you’re right that in most cases there is a winner-take-all dynamic to coercive power, so we’re going to find a monopoly of force and a de-facto state. This is not inevitable though; for instance, forager tribes in general manage to do without, as did some historical stateless societies, e.g. in medieval Iceland. Loose federation of well-defended city states is an intermediate possibility that’s quite well attested historically.
But you’re right that in most cases there is a winner-take-all dynamic to coercive power, so we’re going to find a monopoly of force and a de-facto state.
That wasn’t the argument I was making. The argument I was making that in the absence of a state that holds the monopoly of force any organisation that grows really big is going to use coercive power and become states-like.
The argument is about explaining why we don’t see corporation in the absence of states. It’s not about explaining that there are societies that have no corporations. It’s not about explaining that there are societies that have no states.
Large companies can definitely coexist with small states, though. For instance, medieval Italy was largely dominated by small, independent city-states (Germany was rather similar), but it also saw the emergence of large banking companies (though these were not actual corporations) such as the Lombards, Bardi and Perruzzi. Those companies were definitely powerful enough to finance actual governments, e.g. in England, and yet the small city states endured for many centuries; they finally declined as a result of aggression from large foreign monarchies.
I’m theoretically amazed that multicellular organisms could overcome all of the prisoners’ dilemma type situations they must face.
You mean competition between cells in a multi-cellular organism? They don’t compete, they come from the same DNA and they “win” by perpetuating that DNA, not their own self. Your cells are not subject to evolution—you are, as a whole.
shouldn’t competition among microorganisms cause us to get nothing?
In the long term, no, because a symbiotic system (as a whole) outcompetes greedy microorganisms and it’s surviving that matters, not short-term gains. If you depend on your host and you kill your host, you die yourself.
You mean competition between cells in a multi-cellular organism? They don’t compete, they come from the same DNA and they “win” by perpetuating that DNA, not their own self. Your cells are not subject to evolution—you are, as a whole.
Doesn’t this line of reasoning prove the non-existence of cancer?
It seems to me that the better argument is more along the lines of “bodies put a lot of effort into policing competition among their constituent parts” and “bodies put a lot of effort into repelling invaders.” It is actually amazing that multicellular organisms overcome the prisoners’ dilemma type situations, and there are lots of mechanisms that work on that problem, and amazing that pathogens don’t kill more of us than they already do.
And when those mechanisms fail, the problems are just as dire as one would expect. Consider something like Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease, a communicable cancer which killed roughly half of all Tasmanian devils (and, more importantly, would kill every devil in a high-density environment). Consider that about 4% of all humans were killed by influenza in 1918-1920. So it’s no surprise that the surviving life we see around us today is life that puts a bunch of effort into preventing runaway cell growth and runaway pathogen growth.
What will cells of my body win by defecting and how can they defect?
Consider something like Aubrey de Grey’s “survival of the slowest” theory of mitochondrial mutation. The “point” of mitochondria is to do work involving ATP that slowly degrades them, they eventually die, and are replaced by new mitochondria. But it’s possible for several different mutations to make a mitochondrion much slower at doing its job—which is bad news for the cell, since it has access to less energy, but good news for that individual mitochondrion, because less pollution builds up and it survives longer.
But because it survives longer, it’s proportionally more likely to split to replace any other mitochrondion that works itself to death. And so eventually every mitochondrion in the cell becomes a descendant of the mutant malfunctioning mitochondrion and the cell becomes less functional.
(I believe, if things are working correctly the cell realizes that it is now a literal communist cell, and self-destructs, and is replaced by another cell with functional mitochondria. If you didn’t have this process, many more cells would be non-functional. But I’m not a biologist and I’m not certain about this bit.)
but good news for that individual mitochondrion, because less pollution builds up and it survives longer.
Recall that we are talking about evolution. Taking the Selfish Gene approach, it’s all about genes making copies of themselves. Only the germ-line cells matter, the rest of the cells in your body are irrelevant to evolution except for their assistance to sperm and eggs. The somatic cells never survive past the current generation, they do not replicate across generations.
Your mitochondrion might well live longer, but it still won’t make it to the next generation. The only way for it to propagate itself is to propagate its DNA and that involves being as helpful to the host as possible, even at the cost of “personal sacrifice”. Greedy mitochondrions, just as greedy somatic cells, will just be washed out by evolution. They do not win.
I’m well aware. If you don’t think that evolution describes the changes in the population of mitochondria in a cell, then I think you’re taking an overly narrow view of evolution!
Your mitochondrion might well live longer, but it still won’t make it to the next generation.
I happen to be male; none of my mitochondria will make it to the next human generation anyway. (You… did know that mitochondrial lines have different DNA than their human hosts, right?)
But for the relevant population—mitochondria within a single cell—these mutants do actually win and take over the population of the cell, because they’re reproductively favored over the previous strain. And if we go up a level to cells, if that cell divides, both of its descendants will have those new mitochondria along for the ride. (At this level, those cells are reproductively disfavored, and thus we wouldn’t expect this to spread.)
That is, evolution on the lower level does work against evolution on the upper level, because the incentives of the two systems are misaligned. Since the lower level has much faster generations, you’ll get many more cycles of evolution on the lower level, and thus we would naively expect the lower level to dominate. If a bacterial infection can go through a thousand generations, why can’t it evolve past the defenses of a host going through a single generation? If the cell population of a tumor can go through a thousand generations, why can’t it evolve past the defenses of a host going through a single generation?
The answer is twofold: 1) it can, and when it does that typically leads to the death of the host, and 2) because it can, the host puts in a lot of effort to make that not happen. (You can use evolution on the upper level to explain why these mechanisms exist, but not how they operate. That is, you can make statements like “I expect there to be an immune system” and some broad properties of it but may have difficulty predicting how those properties are achieved.)
(That is, the lower level gets both the forces leading to ‘disorder’ from the perspective of the upper system, and corrective forces leading to order. This can lead to spectacular booms and busts in ways that you don’t see with normal selective gradients.)
If you don’t think that evolution describes the changes in the population of mitochondria in a cell, then I think you’re taking an overly narrow view of evolution!
That may well be so, but still in the context of this discussion I don’t think that it’s useful to describe the changes in the population of mitochondria in an evolutionary framework (your lower level, that is).
happen to be male; none of my mitochondria will make it to the next human generation anyway.
Unless you have a sister :-) Yes, I know that mDNA is special.
The answer is twofold:
There is also the third option: symbiosis. If you managed to get your hooks into a nice and juicy host, it might be wise to set up house instead of doing the slash-and-burn.
Since this started connected to economics, there are probably parallels with roving bandits and stationary bandits.
In the long term, no, because a symbiotic system (as a whole) outcompetes greedy microorganisms and it’s surviving that matters, not short-term gains.
OK, but I have lots of different types of bacteria in me. If one type of bacteria doubled the amount of energy it consumed, and this slightly reduced my reproductive fitness, then this type of bacteria would be better off. If all types of bacteria in me do this, however, I die. It’s analogous to how no one company would pollute so much so as to poison the atmosphere and kill everyone, but absent regulation the combined effect of all companies would be to do (or almost do) this.
If one type of bacteria doubled the amount of energy it consumed, and this slightly reduced my reproductive fitness, then this type of bacteria would be better off.
It’s not obvious to me that it will better off. There is a clear trade-off here, the microorganisms want to “steal” some energy from the host to live, but not too much or the host will die and so will they. I am sure evolution fine-tunes this trade-off in order to maximize survival, as usual.
The process, of course, is noisy. Bacteria mutate and occasionally develop high virulence which can kill large parts of host population (see e.g. the Black Plague). But those high-virulence strains do not survive for long, precisely because they are so “greedy”.
“Your statement is technically true but I disagree with the connotations if you’re suggesting that …”, I guess. I’m hampered by not being sure whether you’re objecting connotationally to (1) the idea that having an economics PhD is a guarantee of understanding the fundamentals of economics, or (2) the analogy between markets / command economies and unguided evolution / intelligent design, or (3) something else.
″… that economics is why evolution wins in the actual world”?
Even if ‘markets with decentralized decision making often beat intelligent design’, that doesn’t mean decentralised decision making dominates centralised planning (what I assume he means by intelligent design)
But ChristianKI is neither claiming nor implying that (so far as I can see); his point is that Eric is arguing “look at these amazing things; they’re far too amazing to have been done without a guiding intelligence” but his experience in economics should show him that actually often (and “often” is all that’s needed here) distributed systems of fairly stupid agents can do better than centralized guiding intelligences.
(I don’t find that convincing, but for what I think are different reasons from yours. Eric’s hypothetical centralized guiding intelligence is much, much smarter than (e.g.) the Soviet central planners.)
An economics PhD who works in academia will meet colleagues from biology department. They have plenty of opportunities to clarify their misconceptions if they are curious and actually want to learn something.
It does happen to be a bit frightening to see an economics PHD doubt evolution. I think it would be good if someone like Scott Alexander writes a basic “here’s why evolution is true”-post.
I don’t think such a thing is possible. There’s too many bad objections to evolution floating around in the environment.
The goal hasn’t to be to address every bad objection. Addressing objections strong enough to convince an economics PhD and at the same time providing the positive reasons that make us believe in evolution would be valuable.
Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth is pretty comprehensive. The shorter the work as compared to that, the more you risk missing widely held misconceptions people have.
I wouldn’t expect economics PhD to give people better insights into biology. (Only indirectly, as PhD in economics is a signal of high IQ.) A biology PhD would be more scary.
An economics PhD should understand that markets with decentralized decision making often beat intelligent design.
As an econ PhD, I’m theoretically amazed that multicellular organisms could overcome all of the prisoners’ dilemma type situations they must face. You don’t get large corporations without some kind of state, so why does decentralized evolution allow for people-states? I’ve also wondered, given how much faster bacteria and viruses evolve compared to multicellular organisms, why are not the viruses and bacteria winning by taking all of the free energy in people? Yes, I understand some are in a symbiotic relationship with us, but shouldn’t competition among microorganisms cause us to get nothing? If one type of firm innovated much faster than another type, the second type would be outcompeteted in the marketplace.(I do believe in evolution, of course, in the same way I accept relativity is correct even though I don’t understand the theory behind relativity.)
In the absence of any state holding the monopoly of power a large corporation automatically grows into a defacto state as the British East India company did in India. Big mafia organisations spring up even when the state doesn’t want them to exist. The same is true for various terrorist groups.
From here I could argue that the economics establishment seems to fail at their job when they fail to understand how coorperation can infact arise but I think there good work on cooperation such as Sveriges Riksbank Prize winner Elinor Ostrom.
If I understand her right than the important thing for solving issues of tragedy of the commons isn’t centralized decision making but good local decision making by people on-the-ground.
The British East India company and the mafia were/are able to use the threat of force to protect their property rights. Tragedy of the commons problems get much harder to solve the more people there are who can defect. I have a limited understanding of mathematical models of evolution, but it feels like the ways that people escape Moloch would not work for billions of competing microorganisms. I can see why studying economics would cause someone to be skeptical of evolution.
Microorganisms can make collective decisions via quorum sensing. Shared DNA works as a committment device.
Interesting. Given that your field seems to be about understanding game theory and exactly how to escape Moloch, have you thought about looking deeper into the subject to see whether the microorganisms due something that useful in a more wider scale and could move on the economist’s understanding of cooperation?
Beliefs have to pay rent ;)
I have thought about studying in more depth the math of evolutionary biology.
The British East India Company was a state-supported group, so it doesn’t count. But you’re right that in most cases there is a winner-take-all dynamic to coercive power, so we’re going to find a monopoly of force and a de-facto state. This is not inevitable though; for instance, forager tribes in general manage to do without, as did some historical stateless societies, e.g. in medieval Iceland. Loose federation of well-defended city states is an intermediate possibility that’s quite well attested historically.
That wasn’t the argument I was making. The argument I was making that in the absence of a state that holds the monopoly of force any organisation that grows really big is going to use coercive power and become states-like.
Sure, but that’s just what a winner-takes-all dynamic looks like in this case.
The argument is about explaining why we don’t see corporation in the absence of states. It’s not about explaining that there are societies that have no corporations. It’s not about explaining that there are societies that have no states.
Large companies can definitely coexist with small states, though. For instance, medieval Italy was largely dominated by small, independent city-states (Germany was rather similar), but it also saw the emergence of large banking companies (though these were not actual corporations) such as the Lombards, Bardi and Perruzzi. Those companies were definitely powerful enough to finance actual governments, e.g. in England, and yet the small city states endured for many centuries; they finally declined as a result of aggression from large foreign monarchies.
You mean competition between cells in a multi-cellular organism? They don’t compete, they come from the same DNA and they “win” by perpetuating that DNA, not their own self. Your cells are not subject to evolution—you are, as a whole.
In the long term, no, because a symbiotic system (as a whole) outcompetes greedy microorganisms and it’s surviving that matters, not short-term gains. If you depend on your host and you kill your host, you die yourself.
Doesn’t this line of reasoning prove the non-existence of cancer?
No, I don’t think so. Cancerous cells don’t win at evolution. In fact, is they manage to kill the host, they explicitly lose.
Survival of the fittest doesn’t prove the non-existence of broken bones, either.
It seems to me that the better argument is more along the lines of “bodies put a lot of effort into policing competition among their constituent parts” and “bodies put a lot of effort into repelling invaders.” It is actually amazing that multicellular organisms overcome the prisoners’ dilemma type situations, and there are lots of mechanisms that work on that problem, and amazing that pathogens don’t kill more of us than they already do.
And when those mechanisms fail, the problems are just as dire as one would expect. Consider something like Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease, a communicable cancer which killed roughly half of all Tasmanian devils (and, more importantly, would kill every devil in a high-density environment). Consider that about 4% of all humans were killed by influenza in 1918-1920. So it’s no surprise that the surviving life we see around us today is life that puts a bunch of effort into preventing runaway cell growth and runaway pathogen growth.
I just don’t see those “prisoners’ dilemma type situations”. Can you illustrate? What will cells of my body win by defecting and how can they defect?
Cancer is not successful competition, it’s breakage.
That’s anthropics for you :-)
Consider something like Aubrey de Grey’s “survival of the slowest” theory of mitochondrial mutation. The “point” of mitochondria is to do work involving ATP that slowly degrades them, they eventually die, and are replaced by new mitochondria. But it’s possible for several different mutations to make a mitochondrion much slower at doing its job—which is bad news for the cell, since it has access to less energy, but good news for that individual mitochondrion, because less pollution builds up and it survives longer.
But because it survives longer, it’s proportionally more likely to split to replace any other mitochrondion that works itself to death. And so eventually every mitochondrion in the cell becomes a descendant of the mutant malfunctioning mitochondrion and the cell becomes less functional.
(I believe, if things are working correctly the cell realizes that it is now a literal communist cell, and self-destructs, and is replaced by another cell with functional mitochondria. If you didn’t have this process, many more cells would be non-functional. But I’m not a biologist and I’m not certain about this bit.)
Recall that we are talking about evolution. Taking the Selfish Gene approach, it’s all about genes making copies of themselves. Only the germ-line cells matter, the rest of the cells in your body are irrelevant to evolution except for their assistance to sperm and eggs. The somatic cells never survive past the current generation, they do not replicate across generations.
Your mitochondrion might well live longer, but it still won’t make it to the next generation. The only way for it to propagate itself is to propagate its DNA and that involves being as helpful to the host as possible, even at the cost of “personal sacrifice”. Greedy mitochondrions, just as greedy somatic cells, will just be washed out by evolution. They do not win.
I’m well aware. If you don’t think that evolution describes the changes in the population of mitochondria in a cell, then I think you’re taking an overly narrow view of evolution!
I happen to be male; none of my mitochondria will make it to the next human generation anyway. (You… did know that mitochondrial lines have different DNA than their human hosts, right?)
But for the relevant population—mitochondria within a single cell—these mutants do actually win and take over the population of the cell, because they’re reproductively favored over the previous strain. And if we go up a level to cells, if that cell divides, both of its descendants will have those new mitochondria along for the ride. (At this level, those cells are reproductively disfavored, and thus we wouldn’t expect this to spread.)
That is, evolution on the lower level does work against evolution on the upper level, because the incentives of the two systems are misaligned. Since the lower level has much faster generations, you’ll get many more cycles of evolution on the lower level, and thus we would naively expect the lower level to dominate. If a bacterial infection can go through a thousand generations, why can’t it evolve past the defenses of a host going through a single generation? If the cell population of a tumor can go through a thousand generations, why can’t it evolve past the defenses of a host going through a single generation?
The answer is twofold: 1) it can, and when it does that typically leads to the death of the host, and 2) because it can, the host puts in a lot of effort to make that not happen. (You can use evolution on the upper level to explain why these mechanisms exist, but not how they operate. That is, you can make statements like “I expect there to be an immune system” and some broad properties of it but may have difficulty predicting how those properties are achieved.)
(That is, the lower level gets both the forces leading to ‘disorder’ from the perspective of the upper system, and corrective forces leading to order. This can lead to spectacular booms and busts in ways that you don’t see with normal selective gradients.)
That may well be so, but still in the context of this discussion I don’t think that it’s useful to describe the changes in the population of mitochondria in an evolutionary framework (your lower level, that is).
Unless you have a sister :-) Yes, I know that mDNA is special.
There is also the third option: symbiosis. If you managed to get your hooks into a nice and juicy host, it might be wise to set up house instead of doing the slash-and-burn.
Since this started connected to economics, there are probably parallels with roving bandits and stationary bandits.
In the long-term cancer sells die with the organism that hosts them. Viruses also do kill people regularly and die with their hosts.
Sure. The impression one gets from this is that an answer to James_Miller’s question is that they frequently fail to solve that problem, and then die.
Individual people die but the species doesn’t die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction
OK, but I have lots of different types of bacteria in me. If one type of bacteria doubled the amount of energy it consumed, and this slightly reduced my reproductive fitness, then this type of bacteria would be better off. If all types of bacteria in me do this, however, I die. It’s analogous to how no one company would pollute so much so as to poison the atmosphere and kill everyone, but absent regulation the combined effect of all companies would be to do (or almost do) this.
It’s not obvious to me that it will better off. There is a clear trade-off here, the microorganisms want to “steal” some energy from the host to live, but not too much or the host will die and so will they. I am sure evolution fine-tunes this trade-off in order to maximize survival, as usual.
The process, of course, is noisy. Bacteria mutate and occasionally develop high virulence which can kill large parts of host population (see e.g. the Black Plague). But those high-virulence strains do not survive for long, precisely because they are so “greedy”.
YSITTBIDWTCIYSTEIWEWITTAW is a little long for an acronym, but ADBOC for “Agree Denotationally But Object Connotationally’
“Your statement is technically true but I disagree with the connotations if you’re suggesting that …”, I guess. I’m hampered by not being sure whether you’re objecting connotationally to (1) the idea that having an economics PhD is a guarantee of understanding the fundamentals of economics, or (2) the analogy between markets / command economies and unguided evolution / intelligent design, or (3) something else.
″… that economics is why evolution wins in the actual world”?
Even if ‘markets with decentralized decision making often beat intelligent design’, that doesn’t mean decentralised decision making dominates centralised planning (what I assume he means by intelligent design)
But ChristianKI is neither claiming nor implying that (so far as I can see); his point is that Eric is arguing “look at these amazing things; they’re far too amazing to have been done without a guiding intelligence” but his experience in economics should show him that actually often (and “often” is all that’s needed here) distributed systems of fairly stupid agents can do better than centralized guiding intelligences.
(I don’t find that convincing, but for what I think are different reasons from yours. Eric’s hypothetical centralized guiding intelligence is much, much smarter than (e.g.) the Soviet central planners.)
An economics PhD who works in academia will meet colleagues from biology department. They have plenty of opportunities to clarify their misconceptions if they are curious and actually want to learn something.
Falkenstein does not work in academia.
My understanding is that most biologists don’t work on evolution and know little about the mathematical theories of evolution.