There are a variety of postulated mechanisms, most (all?) of which are little more than just-so stories—from group selection to game theory.
Kin selection and reciprocity are “just so stories”? Hmm. Have fun with that step back into the scientific dark ages. Scientists know a lot about why humans cooperate and behave in a moral manner.
If it turned out tomorrow that aliens fell from the sky and gave us morality as an experiment then that would would be surprising based on the prior probability, but it wouldn’t contradict anything in the scientific literature.
Right—but the “aliens did it” explanation is a lot like the “god did it” one. Tremendously unlikely—but not completely disprovable. Most scientists don’t require such a high degree of certainty.
Kin selection and reciprocity are “just so stories”? Hmm. Have fun with that step back into the scientific dark ages.
Obviously, kin selection can be a genuine phenomenon in the right circumstances. So can group selection, although it’s obviously much rarer. (I’m afraid I don’t know as much about reciprocity, but I assume the same is true for that.) But while just-so stories like “populations that help each other will last longer” or “you are more likely to encounter relatives, so helping everyone you meet is a net win” may sound reasonable, to humans, but evolution is not swayed by such arguments.
Scientists know a lot about why humans cooperate and behave in a moral manner.
Source?
Right—but the “aliens did it” explanation is a lot like the “god did it” one. Tremendously unlikely—but not completely disprovable. Most scientists don’t require such a high degree of certainty.
If we already knew and understood reasons why morality would evolve, and we learned that it was actually aliens, then that would mean that we were mistaken about said reasons (unless the aliens just simulated our future evolution, if you’re fighting the counterfactual.)
Kin selection and reciprocity are “just so stories”? Hmm. Have fun with that step back into the scientific dark ages.
Obviously, kin selection can be a genuine phenomenon in the right circumstances. So can group selection, although it’s obviously much rarer.
The modern scientific consensus is that kin selection and group selection are equivalent, explain the same set of phenomena and make the same predictions. For details of this see here. This has cleared up many of the issues relating to group selection—though there are still disagreements regarding what terminology and methodology it is best to use—and things like whether we really need two frameworks.
Scientists know a lot about why humans cooperate and behave in a moral manner.
Source?
Well, this is from my reading of the literature. Darwinism and Human Affairs laid out the basics in 1979. Some things have changed since then, but not the basics. We know more about the role of culture and reputations these days. Whitfield’s “reputations” book has a good summary of the literature there.
A nice summary article about modern views of cooperation is here. Human cooperation is similar, but with culture and reputations playing a larger role.
Of course there are still disagreements in the field. However, if you look at recent books on the topic, there is also considerable consensus:
I’m not clear about why the “aliens did it” hypothesis is worth continued discussion. Scientists don’t think that aliens gave us our moral sense. The idea reminds me more of medieval theology than science. All manner of bizarre discoveries could refute modern scientific knowledge in a wide range of fields. But in most cases, the chances of that happening look very slender. In which case: so what?
The modern scientific consensus is that kin selection and group selection are equivalent, explain the same set of phenomena and make the same predictions.
This seems suspiciously similar to saying “kin selection exists and group selection basically doesn’t” but with less convenient redefinition of “group selection”.
They can’t be equivalent if group selection doesn’t exist—since kin selection is well established orthodoxy.
Both the kin selection and group selection concepts evolved after being invented. This is normal for scientific concepts: our ideas about gravity and light evolved in a similar manner.
The modern scientific consensus is that kin selection and group selection are equivalent, explain the same set of phenomena and make the same predictions. For details of this see here. This has cleared up many of the issues relating to group selection—though there are still disagreements regarding what terminology and methodology it is best to use—and things like whether we really need two frameworks.
I believe I already characterized such work as just-so stories and/or speculation in the absence of sufficient evidence. And showing that there are a wide variety of different hypotheses only proves my point: we do not know what caused morality. We now a few things that might have caused morality, but are currently beyond our ability to evaluate. We also know a wide variety of theories that are demonstrably false, but sound persuasive to a cursory examination and thus survive in various forms.
I’m not clear about why the “aliens did it” hypothesis is worth continued discussion. Scientists don’t think that aliens gave us our moral sense. The idea reminds me more of medieval theology than science.
I’m not saying alien actually did give us our “moral sense”, as you put it. In any case, who cares what it reminds you of? It’s a perfectly lawful and coherent hypothesis.
All manner of bizarre discoveries could refute modern scientific knowledge in a wide range of fields. But in most cases, the chances of that happening look very slender. In which case: so what?
The whole point is that this one would not, in fact, refute modern scientific knowledge. How hard is this to understand? If aliens showed up and claimed to have given us hunger, or a sex drive, or blood, then we would laugh in their faces; even many subtle psychological heuristics and biases have well-understood evolutionary underpinnings. Morality does not. Presumably it has poorly-understood evolutionary underpinnings, but we do not know what they are.
You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
And showing that there are a wide variety of different hypotheses only proves my point: we do not know what caused morality.
Not really. It is often true that if there are multiple explanations on the table, only one is right—or one is heavily dominant. Cooperation isn’t really like that. There really are many different reasons why advanced organisms cooperate and are nice to each other under different circumstances. You could group most of them together by saying that niceness often pays, either directly or to kin—but that explanation is vague and kind-of obvious: we know a lot of details beyond that.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
I disagree. It seems to me that your position is the joke, and that page is both accurate and informative. You are claiming, with a straight face, (unless you’re a particularly subtle troll, I suppose,) that group selection occurs in nature, and is not a trivially-wrong explanation for human morality.
Not really. It is often true that if there are multiple explanations on the table, only one is right—or one is heavily dominant. Cooperation isn’t really like that. There really are many different reasons why advanced organisms cooperate and are nice to each other under different circumstances. You could group most of them together by saying that niceness often pays, either directly or to kin—but that explanation is vague and kind-of obvious: we know a lot of details beyond that.
“Niceness” pays under certain, highly-specific circumstances. Under almost all circumstances, it does not. The fact that their are people trying to claim that humans fall into many sepaerate categories that result in “niceness” being selected for could, indeed, be due to to us falling into all these categories. More likely, however, is that this is caused by people simply making up reasons why morality should evolve—starting with the bottom line and filling the page with justifications.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
The fact that something happened is evidence that there is some explanation why it happened, a fact that I have repeatedly acknowledged. It is not necessarily sufficient evidence for a specific reason why it happened. This is so basic that I’m kind of shocked you’re actually making this argument; I have updated my estimation that you are a troll based on it. Of course, it’s possible that I have misinterpreted the argument you were trying to make, but assuming I haven’t: there are many thing that we know evolved, that we do not understand how. The amount of these has gone down over time, as our understanding of evolution and raw data about biology has increased. But there are still open problems in evolutionary biology, and human morality is one of them. This should not be a surprise; we know relatively little about human evolution considering how intensively our biology has been studied, thinking about the “source of morality” is particularly vulnerable to certain biases,and most people tend to construct “just-so stories” when attempting to reason about evolutionary biology.
That page is an example of reversed stupidity. timtyler’s early statement that “kin selection and group selection are equivalent” should have tipped you off to him not making that particular mistake.
You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
I disagree. It seems to me that your position is the joke, and that page is both accurate and informative.
No, it’s uninformed, out of date and incorrect. It’s one of the more embarassing pages on the wiki.
You are claiming, with a straight face, (unless you’re a particularly subtle troll, I suppose,) that group selection occurs in nature, and is not a trivially-wrong explanation for human morality.
So, that is what the modern scientific consensus on group selection says. It has kin selection and group selection making the same predctions. It’s been known since the 1970s that there was massive overlap between the concepts. In the last decade, most of the scientists in these fields have publicly recognised that the quest to find which is a superset of the other has petered out—and now we have:
I think most evolutionists now agree that kin and group selection are the same thing.
Peter Richerson, 2012
There is widespread agreement that group selection and kin selection — the post-1960s orthodoxy that identifies shared interests with shared genes — are formally equivalent.
Marek Kohn, 2008
It is remarkable that kin selection has been widely accepted and group selection widely disparaged when, for simple genetic models, they are actually equivalent mathematically.
Michael Wade
Inclusive fitness theory, summarised in Hamilton’s rule, is a dominant explanation for the evolution of social behaviour. A parallel thread of evolutionary theory holds that selection between groups is also a candidate explanation for social evolution. The mathematical equivalence of these two approaches has long been known.
James Marshall
Kin selection explains phenomena such as human lactation. Group selection explains it too (it makes the same predictions). Kin selection largely explains parental care and nepotism—which have a moral dimension. QED.
“Niceness” pays under certain, highly-specific circumstances. Under almost all circumstances, it does not.
That’s a straw-man characterisation of the idea. It pays in enough cases for it to evolve genetically. Not all cooperation is due to DNA genes (some is due to culture), but cooperation is a widespread phenomenon, and most scientists agree that humans have niceness in their DNA genes—more than their nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) do.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
The fact that something happened is evidence that there is some explanation why it happened, a fact that I have repeatedly acknowledged. It is not necessarily sufficient evidence for a specific reason why it happened. This is so basic that I’m kind of shocked you’re actually making this argument; I have updated my estimation that you are a troll based on it. Of course, it’s possible that I have misinterpreted the argument you were trying to make, but assuming I haven’t: there are many thing that we know evolved, that we do not understand how.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick there. To recap, you wrote:
I believe I already characterized such work as just-so stories and/or speculation in the absence of sufficient evidence.
I claimed that we do have enough evidence to go on. I stand by that. Without performing any more experiments, we have enough information to figure out the evolutionary basis of human morality, in considerable detail. Basically, we have an enormous mass of highly pertinent information. It’s more than enough to go on, I reckon.
Kin selection and reciprocity are “just so stories”? Hmm. Have fun with that step back into the scientific dark ages. Scientists know a lot about why humans cooperate and behave in a moral manner.
Right—but the “aliens did it” explanation is a lot like the “god did it” one. Tremendously unlikely—but not completely disprovable. Most scientists don’t require such a high degree of certainty.
Obviously, kin selection can be a genuine phenomenon in the right circumstances. So can group selection, although it’s obviously much rarer. (I’m afraid I don’t know as much about reciprocity, but I assume the same is true for that.) But while just-so stories like “populations that help each other will last longer” or “you are more likely to encounter relatives, so helping everyone you meet is a net win” may sound reasonable, to humans, but evolution is not swayed by such arguments.
Source?
If we already knew and understood reasons why morality would evolve, and we learned that it was actually aliens, then that would mean that we were mistaken about said reasons (unless the aliens just simulated our future evolution, if you’re fighting the counterfactual.)
The modern scientific consensus is that kin selection and group selection are equivalent, explain the same set of phenomena and make the same predictions. For details of this see here. This has cleared up many of the issues relating to group selection—though there are still disagreements regarding what terminology and methodology it is best to use—and things like whether we really need two frameworks.
Well, this is from my reading of the literature. Darwinism and Human Affairs laid out the basics in 1979. Some things have changed since then, but not the basics. We know more about the role of culture and reputations these days. Whitfield’s “reputations” book has a good summary of the literature there.
A nice summary article about modern views of cooperation is here. Human cooperation is similar, but with culture and reputations playing a larger role.
Of course there are still disagreements in the field. However, if you look at recent books on the topic, there is also considerable consensus:
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution;
SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed;
The Calculus of Selfishness;
Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame;
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution;
Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind;
People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation;
I’m not clear about why the “aliens did it” hypothesis is worth continued discussion. Scientists don’t think that aliens gave us our moral sense. The idea reminds me more of medieval theology than science. All manner of bizarre discoveries could refute modern scientific knowledge in a wide range of fields. But in most cases, the chances of that happening look very slender. In which case: so what?
This seems suspiciously similar to saying “kin selection exists and group selection basically doesn’t” but with less convenient redefinition of “group selection”.
They can’t be equivalent if group selection doesn’t exist—since kin selection is well established orthodoxy.
Both the kin selection and group selection concepts evolved after being invented. This is normal for scientific concepts: our ideas about gravity and light evolved in a similar manner.
...
Group selection.
I believe I already characterized such work as just-so stories and/or speculation in the absence of sufficient evidence. And showing that there are a wide variety of different hypotheses only proves my point: we do not know what caused morality. We now a few things that might have caused morality, but are currently beyond our ability to evaluate. We also know a wide variety of theories that are demonstrably false, but sound persuasive to a cursory examination and thus survive in various forms.
I’m not saying alien actually did give us our “moral sense”, as you put it. In any case, who cares what it reminds you of? It’s a perfectly lawful and coherent hypothesis.
The whole point is that this one would not, in fact, refute modern scientific knowledge. How hard is this to understand? If aliens showed up and claimed to have given us hunger, or a sex drive, or blood, then we would laugh in their faces; even many subtle psychological heuristics and biases have well-understood evolutionary underpinnings. Morality does not. Presumably it has poorly-understood evolutionary underpinnings, but we do not know what they are.
You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
Not really. It is often true that if there are multiple explanations on the table, only one is right—or one is heavily dominant. Cooperation isn’t really like that. There really are many different reasons why advanced organisms cooperate and are nice to each other under different circumstances. You could group most of them together by saying that niceness often pays, either directly or to kin—but that explanation is vague and kind-of obvious: we know a lot of details beyond that.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
I disagree. It seems to me that your position is the joke, and that page is both accurate and informative. You are claiming, with a straight face, (unless you’re a particularly subtle troll, I suppose,) that group selection occurs in nature, and is not a trivially-wrong explanation for human morality.
“Niceness” pays under certain, highly-specific circumstances. Under almost all circumstances, it does not. The fact that their are people trying to claim that humans fall into many sepaerate categories that result in “niceness” being selected for could, indeed, be due to to us falling into all these categories. More likely, however, is that this is caused by people simply making up reasons why morality should evolve—starting with the bottom line and filling the page with justifications.
The fact that something happened is evidence that there is some explanation why it happened, a fact that I have repeatedly acknowledged. It is not necessarily sufficient evidence for a specific reason why it happened. This is so basic that I’m kind of shocked you’re actually making this argument; I have updated my estimation that you are a troll based on it. Of course, it’s possible that I have misinterpreted the argument you were trying to make, but assuming I haven’t: there are many thing that we know evolved, that we do not understand how. The amount of these has gone down over time, as our understanding of evolution and raw data about biology has increased. But there are still open problems in evolutionary biology, and human morality is one of them. This should not be a surprise; we know relatively little about human evolution considering how intensively our biology has been studied, thinking about the “source of morality” is particularly vulnerable to certain biases,and most people tend to construct “just-so stories” when attempting to reason about evolutionary biology.
That page is an example of reversed stupidity. timtyler’s early statement that “kin selection and group selection are equivalent” should have tipped you off to him not making that particular mistake.
No, it’s uninformed, out of date and incorrect. It’s one of the more embarassing pages on the wiki.
So, that is what the modern scientific consensus on group selection says. It has kin selection and group selection making the same predctions. It’s been known since the 1970s that there was massive overlap between the concepts. In the last decade, most of the scientists in these fields have publicly recognised that the quest to find which is a superset of the other has petered out—and now we have:
Peter Richerson, 2012
Marek Kohn, 2008
Michael Wade
James Marshall
Kin selection explains phenomena such as human lactation. Group selection explains it too (it makes the same predictions). Kin selection largely explains parental care and nepotism—which have a moral dimension. QED.
That’s a straw-man characterisation of the idea. It pays in enough cases for it to evolve genetically. Not all cooperation is due to DNA genes (some is due to culture), but cooperation is a widespread phenomenon, and most scientists agree that humans have niceness in their DNA genes—more than their nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) do.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick there. To recap, you wrote:
I claimed that we do have enough evidence to go on. I stand by that. Without performing any more experiments, we have enough information to figure out the evolutionary basis of human morality, in considerable detail. Basically, we have an enormous mass of highly pertinent information. It’s more than enough to go on, I reckon.