Affordance Competition Hypothesis

Do you mean like this?
Also - cheating has been a thing right from the beginning.

Thanks for the interesting articule, @Bitking
That is a good example of pre-neural adaptive behavioral inheritance in single-cell organisms. Just imagine how our much more complex organisms, which are themselves the result of massively orchestrated collections a collaborating cell’s, are also able to exploit the same group dynamics to cultivate higher forms of common experience and understanding, which no isolated individual would be capable of achieving.

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And some of this social evolution ends up in the hard wired parts of our brains. There is an older concept regarding the social evolution leading to the emergence of our human minds, which is called Second Nature. It basically opens this field into a new paradigm of intelligence in humans. While a single adult individual does have enough intellectual autarchy to act and understand the world alone, this paradigm claims that the only evolutionary path towards the emergence of this level of intelligence requires a social process. So we (individuals) contain a first nature within our organisms which then enables the development of a second group based nature. A higher form of intelligence is a product of this second nature.

I do think of how evolution tunes every aspect of an organism. I see people attempt to make “an evolutionary method” and it is woefully short compared to real evolution.
Making a few modules and mixing them up or tweaking a few parameters only scratches the most shallow of surfaces.

Real DNA tweaking can change every part of the critter, from the molecular mechanisms to the microstructure to the gross structure to the mechanisms that build all those structures. The built in programming (drives and instincts) are fair game; social structures and behaviors (to the degree that they are influenced by some biological factor, however slight) are all on the table for consideration. Nature tweaks them all at once and lets competition sort things out.

In a game when you get to a tricky bit you do a save so you can keep trying until you win. Nature does it in parallel - makes lots of copies and let all the versions try to make it at the same time. Losers get eaten to make room for the winners. Old version die to make room for newer/better versions without having to compete for resources against itself. In evolution, death is a feature and not a bug.

The only fitness functions is survival to reproduction. And group selection if you believe in that sort of thing.

Point to any critter that you want. Any one. I can tell you a truth about it: In every single situation where it mattered, every time that critters ancestors had to jump the right way or run or stand still, trust or not, eat or pass, kill or cooperate, every single one did the right thing every time! All the way back through time.

Once we have external stores of information (customs, mores, rituals, music, dance, language, story telling, & lately - books & movies) we radically enhance the possibilities for flexible behavior. Memes have many of the properties of Genes but are not limited to the same restrictions as genetic transfer of material.

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You are indeed very right about the complexity that evolution takes, when we include all the numerous competing factors that play a role in the paths it takes. And evolution’s role in our (or any other critters`) nature is undisputable. I actually think science should focus more on studying evolution as a process and studying the divergence of phenomena that arise from evolutionalry processes in different contexts. There is still a lot to be learned about how evolution works, and which categories of evolution can be identified. Evolution always requires a population of subjects which can either reproduce with recombinatorial inheritence, or mutate or both. And it also requires an environment which is inhabited by the population. If we vary the types of populations and environments across a lot of different categories of each, we would probably be able to learn a lot about the very nature of evolutionary processes and classify evolutionary mechanisms, perhaps in some kind of periodic table on types of evolutionary processes. At some abstract mathematical level, there are some studies on this subject already, but I feel this is still very uncharted territory. :wink:

Today, I was very surprised to get home (in Germany where I live) and find a brand new issue of Scientific American featuring an article in Neuroscience, called: “The Brain’s Social Road Maps”. What is the chance that this topic would be wating in my mailbox today? So I want to share it here for it fits right into our conversation.

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Which as we know all sensible people do not :stuck_out_tongue:

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Your comments on this?

Grandmother Hypothesis, Grandmother Effect, and Residence Patterns

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2162

I have only skimmed it, also not sure if this is directed at me. Certainly interesting, but i’m not sure how this could be tied to group selection theory?

There is no reason that standard maternal / late age behaviours couldn’t arise from standard adaptation.

Yes, it is directed at you.
Once you open the door to strategies that protect your genetic material in other bodies you can envision other relationships that offer incremental DNA survival strategies.

If your genes are well distributed in your local group then defense of that group vs other tribes could enhance the number of bodies carrying your genetic material. I am not sure at what point the advantages of diversity win over forming the largest pool carrying your genetic material. The winning strategy is to pair your genetic material with as many variations as possible to find the best combination to adapt to whatever ecological niche is available. Or to sample as many ecological niches as possible.

I can’t say if it is universally true but I have noticed that when you get to know someone well enough to discuss their families dirty laundry you inevitably find out that that the urge to reproduce seems to be stronger than social mores would seem to allow. All sorts of illicit liaisons seem to be the norm. Evolution pushes hard to spread the genetic material as far and wide as possible.

I can see how the “Grandmother Hypothesis” may add some foundation to the thread above on group selection (or at least the last section of this thread). But I see the effects of group selection on evolution at a much more fundamental level. These effects of group selection, in my opinion, actually shape the very nature of all survivors. In other words, if our interaction, also at a mental and cognitive level, with other group members turns out to be a strong factor in the groups survivability, then those very mental features become the essence of all survivors. After all, if the group does not survive, all individuals in it also persish. So survival is directly dependent on those features that involve social interaction. What features could these be? I think there is a large spectrum of brain activity which goes far beyond just observable behaviour. I would start with emotional dependency. All individuals in the group have a strong level of emotional interdepency. So this interdependency probably increased the survivability of the group. Then we have a natural sense of fairness. We also tend to punish outliers in the group who disregard or act against this sense of fairness. This must have also increased the overall survivability and sustainability of the group. But I think these group shared features probably go much further back, well into the very basis of our psyche. Our management of “attention” also follows group rules. These rules of attention management also govern our prioritization, not only of values, but even semantic processing methods. Survival in evolution has always required focussed attention for higher efficiency in a given enironment. This must also apply here. Our brains created semantic and mental frameworks which focus on protecting group members, while relying on group members as well. Detection of social distance is a built-in feature of our brains. Our goal-setting and prioritized actions are interconnected with our perception of social distance and group values. Our management of memory is equally affected by group interaction and constant feedback loops become essential patterns in our goal building and prioritization. This probably expains the intricate architecture interconnecting the thalamus (with attention control) to our cerebral cortex and also the hypocampus controlling memory storage in the neocortex. These older regions regulate the resource use and allocation of the newer regions, because social (group survivability) considerations govern our evolutionary strategy. Group thought comes first, even though we experience the illusion of autonomy. In the past 14,000 years of evolution, after the advent of agriculture and urbanization, we have started to form larger societies with much higher levels of labor specialization which has started to shift more resources toward individualism. Our current degree of individualism, especially in western societies, would not have been viable prior to agriculture with large settlements. But our brains are still fundamentally wired to work with models that can only be understood at group level. That is the essence of our nature and the foundation of human intelligence. Our models for machine intelligence must not only be biologically inspired, they must also take into account a sociological foundation which extends beyond the boundaries of a single individual body. For the system is always more than just the sum of its parts.

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And just for those who are very skeptical about group dynamics and the essential importance of group interdependency, don’t forget that our very own lives are directly dependent on many other forms of symbiosis. Just one prominent example is the fact that if we did not carry billions of bacteria in our digestive tract (the intestinal flora) we would not stay alive for more than a few days. Extreme individualism is a very dangerous illusion for those who have it. But evolution tends to take care of that problem on its own.

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