Chapter 6
US AND THEM
1. Book XXII, line 262.2. Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1981).3. Andrew H. Knoll, “The Early Evolution of Eukaryotes: A Geological Perspective,” Science 256 (1992), pp. 622–627.4. Margulis, op. cit.5. L. L. Woodruff, “Eleven Thousand Generations of Paramecium,” Quarterly Review of Biology 1 (1926), pp. 436–438.6. Z. Y. Kuo, “The Genesis of the Cat’s Response to the Rat,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 11 (1930), pp. 1–30.7. Benjamin L. Hart, “Behavioral Adaptations to Pathogens and Parasites: Five Strategies,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 14 (1990), pp. 273–294.8. George C. Williams and Randolph M. Nesse, “The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine,” Quarterly Review of Biology 66 (1991), pp. 1–22.9. Harry J. Jerison, “The Evolution of Biological Intelligence,” Chapter 12 of Robert J. Sternberg, editor, Handbook of Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Figure 12–11, p. 774.10. A view championed in recent times by the neurophysiologist Paul D. MacLean and described in Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977). MacLean sets forth a comprehensive summary of his views in The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1990).11. This approach is made most accessible to the general reader in Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). In a vivid passage (pp. 19–20), he describes the genes as swarming “in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence … [W]e are their survival machines.”12. A related and even more heated controversy—on whether the mother bird has any notion of what she’s doing or is merely some carbon-based automaton—is addressed later in this book. Reciprocal altruism, an exchange of present for future favors, is also admitted by those who deny group selection per se.13. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson,
Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 88, 89.14. W. D. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964), pp. 1–51; John Maynard Smith, “Kin Selection and Group Selection,” Nature 201 (1964), pp. 1145–1147.15. Imagine that the huddled group (of, say, insects) is in the shape of a sphere. The heat generated by the group is proportional to its volume (to the cube of its size), but the heat radiatively lost by the group is proportional to its area (to the square of its size). Thus the bigger the group is, the more heat it retains. In a large group, only a small proportion of members are on the surface of the sphere, where an individual is exposed to the cold; the remainder are satisfyingly surrounded by warm bodies on all sides. The smaller the group is, the greater the proportion of individuals on the chilly periphery.16. Up to some limit, when the individuals doing the mobbing get in each other’s way.17. Dawkins, op. cit., p. 171, citing the work of Amotz Zahavi.18. Ibid., Preface to 1989 edition. For an opposing, now minority, point of view, see V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Evolution Through Group Selection (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986): “The view, widely held, that group selection can be dismissed as an effective evolutionary force is based on assumptions, not on evidence … It is an argument uncritically derived from human experience, of cheaters, criminals and oppressors who live at other people’s expense; and it ignores the fact that all viable kinds of exploiters in the animal world must be able when necessary to limit their own numbers” (p. 313).It seems strange that, in the real world as well as in contrived optical illusions, two completely different interpretations can give equivalent results. But this is a commonplace in physics—in quantum mechanics, say, or in the study of elementary particles—where two approaches with different starting assumptions and different mathematical apparatus turn out to give identical quantitative answers, and are therefore understood to be equivalent formulations of the solution to the problem.19. K. Aoki and K. Nozawa, “Average Coefficient of Relationship Within Troops of the Japanese Monkey and Other Primate Species with Reference to the Possibility of Group Selection,” Primates 25 (1984), pp. 171–184; J. F. Crow and Kenichi Aoki, “Group Selection for a Polygenic Behavioral Trait: Estimating the Degree of Population Subdivision,” Proceedings, National Academy of Sciences 81 (1984), pp. 6073–6077.20. Aoki and Nozawa, op. cit.21. Jules H. Masserman, S. Wechkin, and W. Terris, “ ‘Altruistic’ Behavior in Rhesus Monkeys,” American Journal of Psychiatry 121 (1964), pp. 584, 585; Stanley Wechkin, J. H. Masserman, and W. Terris, “Shock to a Conspecific as an Aversive Stimulus,” Psychonomic Science 1 (1964), pp. 47, 48.22. Especially when there is an authority figure urging us to administer the electric shocks, we humans seem disturbingly willing to cause pain—and for a reward much more paltry than food is for a starving macaque (cf. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View [New York: Harper & Row, 1974]).23. Translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), Book XXI, lines 463–466, p. 430.