Gene / Evolutionary Theory - War / Friendship ??

[gruntingslime]

Anyone know any sources or theories of genetic evolution on war and friendship in human behavior? Anyone have any theories of their own in a similar vein?

[OrphanPip]

Sociobiology on war is a pretty sketchy subject. Friendship has been written of extensively, the dominant explanations are reciprocal altruism, or it's a side effect of kin selection, or it's a bit of both.

Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is getting a bit dated but covers the topic.

Steven Pinker has recently written a book on violence and war, but I haven't read it. Pinker can be controversial though, and I find he often overstates the case for cognitivist and evolutionary explanations of behavior.

[gruntingslime]

Do you know if the idea of friends growing apart or friends "changing" is addressed at all? Although I do vaguely see what would follow, something along the lines of the developing environment altering the reciprocal benefits to each party perhaps?

I'm reading The Selfish Gene and it definitely has some good ideas, but it is probably leading me to more questions than answers, which is okay since I picked it up without any real questions on the subject in the first place.

I'll check out your recommendation and see what it's all about. Thanks for your response.

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[OrphanPip]

That book by Pinker sounds like one of those books whose hypotheses are so moronic that you are tempted to read them under the motivation that "come on, he didn't really mean that, did he?"

How can Pinker argue that we are any different, from an evolutionary and genetic standpoint, from our 19th and early 20th century ancestors? I know he knows better, yet here we are.

I was recently tricked into reading Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness, one of the most heinous pieces of pseudo-science ever published. A commenter on another site taunted me, "How can you criticize it if you haven't read it?" So I fell into the trap, and guess what? The book was as bad as the title promised it would be.

People will do anything to make money and establish notoriety. We shouldn't assist them.

I gather from Peter Singer's review of the book that Pinker rejects the hypothesis that the short term change is caused by genetic change over the period. However, Pinker comes from the school of thought that tends to always consider cultural changes through the lens of how they act in accordance with a biologically determined framework. In other words, just because our behavior has changed over the period doesn't mean genetics plays no role in our behavior, but that the role it plays just isn't simple.

Pinker is controversial and a strong believer in genetic determinism and adaptationist explanations of a lot of human behaviors, but he's usually an astute defender of his opinions.

[gruntingslime]

When you're saying our behavior has changed, which aspects of behavior are you referring to exactly, though I could surely think of a few. I am just thinking that if we have a gene for learning and our learning would create new possibilities for action and interaction with our environment, our behavior would be changed and influenced by the situation of our environment. Also our knowledge would increase our abilities to interact with the environment and thus our behavior.

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[cyberbob]

I haven't read Pinker's new book either but I doubt he means that we're less violent now because we've evolved past violence or because we have less violent genes.

Just because he's associated with the neo-Darwinians doesn't mean everything he says has to be based on selfish genes.

[Rores28]

Sociobiology on war is a pretty sketchy subject. Friendship has been written of extensively, the dominant explanations are reciprocal altruism, or it's a side effect of kin selection, or it's a bit of both.

Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is getting a bit dated but covers the topic.

Steven Pinker has recently written a book on violence and war, but I haven't read it. Pinker can be controversial though, and I find he often overstates the case for cognitivist and evolutionary explanations of behavior.

What would be your more modern evolution book suggestion? That is not specifically related to war etc... but just evolution in general.

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[OrphanPip]

What would be your more modern evolution book suggestion? That is not specifically related to war etc... but just evolution in general.

Probably the best would be an introductory text book. But a bit more exciting, and quite good, is Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, which is one of his most recent books that avoids the anti-religious polemics. The book gives a very good account of current ideas in evolutionary theory, while also providing a lot of concrete examples on the evolution of specific species.

Dawkins and Pinker are the most prominent proponents of sociobiology I can think of that publish popular works. Edward Wilson started it all in the 70s when he extrapolated his evolutionary approach to ant societies (he's an entomologist) to thinking about how evolution acts to produce human society. The idea is sound, the problem is the evidence and how confident we can be about what is truly evolutionary in origin and what is mostly cultural. Stephen Jay Gould was probably the most prominent voice in opposition to sociobiology from within the Neo-Darwinian framework. Although, it's important not to confuse Gould's opposition to mean that he doubts human behavior is affected by evolution, he just objected to the methodology and conclusions of sociobiologist.

Since the 70s, the shift academically has been more on evolutionary psychology. Thinking about how evolution has affected the way our brain works, rather than thinking directly about how social structures are acted on by evolution. The EP approach, which is dominant these days, would be that we have "stone age" brains that are shaped by modern conditions just as much as modern conditions are shaped by our biology. Most of the people involved in sociobiology in the 70s (Wilson, Dawkins) are also engaged in the EP approach. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology aren't mutually exclusive, and they're so closely related that it's hard not to consider them together.

Also, these academic movements, though they have been named recently, are actually quite old. People have been applying evolutionary theory to understanding human behavior since Darwin (The Descent of Man, and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals). It's just that now there is an established literature in the scientific journals on this subject, and there are evolutionary psychology courses out there. There are also some biologist out there who object to the exceptionalism of "evolutionary psychology" and consider it just a component of evolutionary ecology and behavioralism. When I took evolutionary ecology in uni, EP was taught as a component of the course alongside polar bear mating structures and the social organization of prairie dog colonies.