Month: January 2008

Natural philosophers in the eighteenth century communicated with each other ideas and observations to form a republic of letters that advanced knowledge of the world. An influential, late-eighteenth-century leader of the Scottish Enlightenment wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.[1]

Somewhat later in the same work, he also wrote of the industrialist:

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.[2]

While these quotes are fairly well known, their concern with communication (address, talk, affection, words) tends to be under-appreciated. Underlying these quotes seems to be anxiety that too intense interest in claiming to serve the public good doesn’t do so. Perhaps that was an issue, not just for butchers and bakers, but also for natural philosophers participating in the eighteenth-century republic of letters.

Altruism at different levels of analysis has created heated contention among sociobiologists since the 1960s. Groups of sociobiologists opposing group selection have vigorously competed with groups promoting various forms of group selection. Groups opposing group selection have generally been more symbolically fecund and have gained higher scholarly value than groups promoting group selection. Hence, over time, group selection has faded as an issue among sociobiologists.

Attention to different loci of heritable differentiation helps to explain this outcome. Sociobiologists have been invested in research focused on genes as the locus of heritable differentiation. Shared symbolic and physical capital plays a larger role in group competition. Sociologists and economists are better positioned to analyze these assets. Hence, given disciplinary competition for resources, interests in sociobiology favored the demise of group selection within sociobiology.

An important aspect of the demise of group selection was changes in the way of discussing the issue. One approach was to assert a new multilevel selection theory purportedly having little relation to the old, devalued theory. Another approach was to avoid the topic of group selection.[3] Discussing selection of kin, who share genes, can serve in either of these approaches. Two leading sociobiologists observed:

We could cite dozens of theoretical and empirical articles from the current literature that describe selection within and among groups without mentioning the term “group selection” or anything else about the group selection controversy.[4]

One might wish that the scholarly world functioned more ideally than this. Appealing to new sociobiological research, these two sociobiologists urge a “back to basics” approach in which “[m]multilevel selection theory (including group selection) provides an elegant theoretical foundation for sociobiology in the future.”[5]

Scientists, like Adam Smith, should take multilevel selection theory more seriously. Competition among sociobiologists depends on network-embedded symbolic and physical assets: published scholarly papers in sociobiology journals, departmental positions at research institutions, and physical assets for research (laboratories, field stations, graduate students) within networks of disciplined scientific alliances. Advocating group selection theory probably isn’t in sociobiologists’ individual interests, or in the interests of sociobiology in competition with other academic disciplines. Multilevel selection theory is most likely to prosper with more sophisticated ways of discussing the issue, or with the emergence of different competing scholarly groups.

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Read more:

• Henrich on cultural success, silence on cultural failure
• Petrus Alfonsi on love and sharing knowledge
• sexual selection theory has weaknesses relative to field reports

Notes:

[1] Smith (1776), I.2.2

[2] Id. IV.2.9

[3] Wilson and Wilson (2007) p. 344.

[4] Id.

[5] Id. p. 327

References:

Wilson, David Sloan and Eward O. Wilson (2007), “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology,” The Quarterly Review of Biology v. 82 no. 4 (Dec.) pp. 327-348.

Smith, Adam (1776), The Wealth of Nations, 5’th ed., edited by ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1904).