Darwinian Explanation Research Articles

Why Do People Become Modern? A Darwinian Explanation

A procession of cultural changes, often referred to as “modernization,” is initiated as a society undergoes economic development. But cultural change continues to be rapid in societies that industrialized several generations ago. Much of the change in both developed and developing societies is a progressive abandonment of the norms, values, and beliefs that encourage behavior consistent with the pursuit of genetic fitness. The kin influence hypothesis suggests that these changes are part of a cultural evolutionary process initiated by the replacement of largely kin‐based communities with social groups consisting largely of non‐kin. Kin have an interest in encouraging one another to behave in ways consistent with the pursuit of reproductive success, and a high level of social exchange between kin will tend to maintain norms that prescribe such behaviors. When social exchange between kin is reduced, these norms begin to relax. Cross‐national comparisons of measures that reflect attitudes and behavior support the hypothesis by showing that cultural differences between countries can be substantially explained by their position on a cultural continuum that begins with social networks widening so that they become less kin‐based.

Consequence etiology and biological teleology in Aristotle and Darwin

Aristotle’s biological teleology is rooted in an epigenetic account of reproduction. As such, it is best interpreted by consequence etiology. I support this claim by citing the capacity of consequence etiology’s key distinctions to explain Aristotle’s opposition to Empedocles. There are implications for the relation between ancient and modern biology. The analysis reveals that in an important respect Darwin’s account of adaptation is closer to Aristotle’s than to Empedocles’s. They both rely on consequence etiological considerations to evade attributing the purposiveness of organisms to chance. Two implications follow: (l) Darwinian explanations of adaptation are as teleological as Aristotle’s, albeit differently; and (2) these differences show how deeply resistant Aristotle’s version of biological teleology is to descent from a common ancestor.

A Matter of Distrust: Explaining the Persistence of Dysfunctional Beliefs in Regional Clusters

ABSTRACT Much theoretical writing on regional clusters is based on a functionalist and normative view of trust‐based social exchange underlying innovativeness and competitiveness. Empirical research, however, reports many cases of clusters that are best characterized as loosely connected agglomerations of firms, driven by intense distrust and rivalry, rather than trust and cooperation, and with outcomes that may or may not be advantageous. The aim of this paper is to offer a microlevel Darwinian explanation for the persistence of distrust in clusters. From the “meme's eye view,” a cluster may be understood as a cultural phenomenon that is created and reproduced by human agents as they selectively perceive and enact the ideas that draw their attention. The outcome is not necessarily a distribution of ideas that benefits the individual members of the cluster or enhances the performance of the cluster as a whole. This paper outlines the general evolutionary principles involved in this process and applies them in a discussion of some of the conditions under which ideas related to distrust may be selected and reproduced.

Evolution: Reducible Complexity — The Case for Bacterial Flagella

A recent paper, which will surely figure centrally in the debate between evolutionists and Intelligent Design creationists, proposes a (perhaps too simple) scheme for the evolution of bacterial flagella.

Children's Liking of Landscape Paintings as a Function of Their Perceptions of Prospect, Refuge, and Hazard

Prospect-refuge theorywas used to study children's aesthetic responses to landscape paintings. Sixty-seven children between the ages of 8 and 15 years reported their liking for 28 landscape paintings and their perceptions of the degree of prospect, refuge, and hazard in those paintings. Consistent with expectations, children were able to express systematic preferences and judgments of degrees of prospect, refuge, and hazard. Liking was significantly related to perceptions of prospect, to interactions between prospect and refuge, and to interactions between prospect and hazard. Contrary to expectations, age did not moderate the effects of prospect, refuge, and hazard perceptions on liking and boys, but not girls, actually preferred pictures that they perceived to be more hazardous than other pictures. Results are discussed in terms of consistency with previous results and with Darwinian explanations for aesthetic feelings.

Firm transformation: advancing a Darwinian perspective

PurposeThe paper advocates a Darwinian explanation of the process of firm transformation. Existing but generally opposing views related to the selection‐adaptation debates are united to consider the dialogic nature of both approaches. It is argued that a Darwinian approach, as opposed to a neo‐Darwinian or Lamarckian approach, provides the means to scale the sides of a debate that has for too long divided scholars interested in firm and industry transformation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper addresses three specific issues to develop its Darwinian argument. First, the various works of Geoff Hodgson that have for many years advanced Darwin's evolutionary ideas are used to argue the nature and application of Darwinism in the socio‐economic domain. Second, the nature of what constitutes the elements of firm‐environment interaction is considered to establish basic areas of focus through which the process of firm transformation is more understandable. Finally, the construct absorptive capacity is likened to a mechanism of transmission through which the learning processes associated with the acquisition of favoured variations can be reconciled with the generic evolutionary processes of variation, selection, and retention.FindingsTo understand the process of firm learning, the role of habits and routines must be outlined in specific detail. They cannot be assumed to perform interacting and replicating roles simultaneously. To do so undermines the fundamental qualities of an evolutionary theory.Originality/valueThe preliminary framework advanced takes us beyond the Darwinian‐Lamarckian debate and provides elements of focus from which a greater understanding of the process of firm/industry transformation is possible.

A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge (review)

Reviewed by: A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge Peter Conrad David Armstrong . A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2002. x + 213 pp. £47.50 (0-333-96892-1). David Armstrong, who is both a physician and a sociologist, provides an interpretive history of the last 150 years of medical perception and conceptual organization. This is a narrative history heavily influenced by Foucault, emphasizing the primacy of the text rather than authorship. In a manner, this is a history without actors or agency, social structure or social forces. The essence of the analysis arises from what Armstrong makes of how medical (and other) texts reflect the changes in what the medical eye sees, interprets, and acts upon. This is a small but ambitious book. First, it is an attempt to present a sociology of medical knowledge; second, it is an original rendering of medical history; and finally, it endeavors to offer a creation story for Man (sic) based on medical texts in place of the Darwinian explanation. How successful Armstrong is at the first two tasks depends a great deal on how much validity the reader grants to Foucauldian analyses of history. The third goal of the book, the medical-textual creation-of-Man story, seems to me to be misguided and a distraction in an otherwise provocative book. Basing his research on British and American medical (and to a lesser degree, sociological and ancillary) texts, Armstrong conducts what Foucault calls an [End Page 922] archaeology of medical perception: "What sort of body did the doctor see? How was it to be interrogated? What was the nature of the patient who lurked behind the corporal presence?" (p. 3). His examination provides a new look at old issues such as Sanitary Science and anatomy, as well as the more recent closing of hospitals and the rise of primary care. Armstrong's focus is on how medicine "sees" the body and the patient: what are its boundaries, how does it move, what are spaces between bodies, when does the patient speak, and what is the role of "lifestyle"? He uses these textual data as evidence to argue how our perception of disease, the body, and patients has evolved over time. It is at times a very engaging argument. There are some real gems in the book. For example, I found Armstrong's analysis of the development of the concept of the infant mortality rate fascinating. At stake is what constitutes a live birth, when life begins, what "causes" infant deaths, how to designate premature and "still" births, what renders something as congenital, and so forth. Armstrong discusses how the medical eye shifted from looking at internal factors to external ones (e.g., social class), from a sanitary science to a social science of infant mortality, beginning in the early twentieth century: "The old axes of climate and urban living that reduced a population to a collection of separate bodies gave way to social dimensions as the corporal space of infancy was finally wrenched fully free from nature" (pp. 34-35). Other gems are Armstrong's rendition of the emergence of "the normal," and the rise of Surveillance medicine. While Armstrong's sociological and medical-historical interpretations are incisive, this is by intention a schematic and selected history, moving quickly from one era to the next, distilling whatever perceptual structural essence he finds in his analysis. At the end of most of the first ten chapters, and again in one later chapter, he attempts to connect his analysis to an alternative to the Darwinian story of Man's (sic) origins. I found this to be intrusive, tangential, and unconvincing. For example, at the end of the section on infant mortality, Armstrong relates these beginnings to Darwin's evolutionary treatises, ending with: "The birth of the infant had become the origin of Man" (p. 35); this seemed to me added on, rather than essential to his medical perceptual analysis. This book is at times brilliant, challenging, and perplexing. Armstrong is one of the best practitioners in the Foucauldian tradition working in social science; he has written an important book, worthy of the attention...

Schizophrenia as one extreme of a sexually selected fitness indicator

The current state of scientific and philosophicalorientation for most biomedical theory and practice isnot adequate to even ask, much less answer, deepquestions of phylogenetic etiology (Wilson, 1993).Much biomedical science lacks a coherence to beadduced from its mongering of study design, outcomecurves and other enthusiasms of the currently reign-ing, largely inductive science. While it is perhapsbetter to make a minor inductive advance than risk acrashing deductive error, theoretical inference, whenrobust, can reframe quantitative data or, at least,identify crisp qualitative incongruencies (Herrick,1915, 1936) with insights, both counterintuitive andnon-obvious, that would never be appreciated by mereexperiment, no matter how clever.These problems are only magnified in psychiatricresearch by its lack of both a foundational theory andcogently integrated intellectual aims. In certainrespects,psychiatryhasbecomeapasticheofaridfacts,abstruse ideological claims and grand speculationsamid a surfeit of plausible but contradictory explana-tions that lack an encompassing framework. It isparticularly difficult to sort out historical questions(such as the past function of phenotypes and theselection of their genes in the environment of theirevolution) since experimental observation is con-strained, largely,tomodern environmentalcircumstan-ces. Of course, empirico-experimental research iswelcome, but quite daunting given the scale of issuesand ethics involved. Meanwhile, psychopathologistshavelonghadavailableonesuchframeworkbeginningwith Darwin’s elegantly reasoned theory of evolution.However, no application has yielded a clear, nec-essary and complete Darwinian explanation for thefact that genes linked to psychopathology, includingthe schizophrenia-spectrum phenotypies, appear be-yond what probable mutation rates and neutral selec-tion might maintain. It is therefore not merelyspeculative to consider schizophrenia may be associ-ated with evolutionarily adaptive features—past orpresent—but an actual imperative from the point ofview of population genetics. Among the many salientapplications of evolutionary science, it is essential to afull understanding of epigenetic conditions, especiallythose with broad and/or high genomic frequency. Thatnotably includes schizophrenia for which classical(pre-genomic/recombinant) epidemiology long agoestablished it as clearly epigenetic (McGuffin et al.,1995; Kendler and Diehl, 1993; Kety et al., 1994;Tienari et al., 1994), familial (Gottesman, 1972;Kendler and Diehl, 1993), and rather highly heritable(Matthysse and Kidd, 1981; McKusick, 1990; Tsuanget al., 1999).Thus, Shaner et al. (in press) present extant data ina newly synthesized manner with some plausibility asto evolutionary heuristics of schizophrenia. As such,this is a laudable effort that should be of interest toreaders of Schizophrenia Research and, indeed,broader audience insofar as it formulates a useful—

The Sad Truth: Optimism, Pessimism, and Pragmatism

Pragmatists (such as William James) recommend optimism as a successful strategy, and recent psychological research has confirmed its value. But optimism comes at a price: optimists are less accurate in their assessments and expectations than are pessimists. Thus optimism ‘proves itself to be good in the way of belief’, and by pragmatic standards should count as true; but that makes the accuracy costs of optimism invisible (the problem is only exacerbated by Rorty's recommendation that pragmatists stop speaking of truth altogether). The problem prevents pragmatists from offering a Darwinian explanation of why pessimism survives, and also blocks any pragmatist account of the well‐documented and highly successful exploratory behavior of many animal species.

A case reopened: teleology and its consequences for the units of selection discussion.

Darwinian explanations for teleology are often imprecise, and justify the occurrence of teleological features by referring to natural selection in a vague and unspecified sense. In this paper, the Darwinian account for teleology is further analyzed. It is argued that in theory only a specific form of teleology--teleology that is caused by and directed towards the preservation of the genetic program--can be explained in a naturalistic way by employing Darwin's theory of natural selection. This observation links teleology with the units of selection discussion, as for both discussions the end-direction of teleological processes and behavior is of elementary importance. According to Dawkins' analysis, the unit of selection is an active germ-like replicator with a sufficient degree of longevity-fecundity-copying fidelity. From the teleological point of view, the unit of selection should additionally incorporate the genetic program in order to naturalize teleology. It is shown that within sexually reproducing species these two requirements cannot be met. Dawkins' concept of genic selectionism cannot be maintained without violating the naturalistic claims on teleology, and none of the other frequently proposed unit of selection candidates can adequately meet the demands as developed by Dawkins and those developed in the light of teleology.

Creationism, Evolutionism and Anthropology

Focuses on the ambiguous status of evolutionary explanations in anthropology. Difference between evolutionism in the generic sense and Darwinism; Assumptions concerning the age of the earth that anthropologists challenge; Darwinian explanations for social and cultural changes; Disagreements among scientists on rate of evolution; Problems in assessing the plausibility of evolutionary arguments.

A Grand Old Synthesizer's Overview

What Evolution Is . Ernst Mayr. Basic Books, New York, 2001. 336 pp. $26, C$39.50. ISBN 0-465-04425-5. Written for a broad, popular audience, Mayr's overview of topics that have interested him during his long, productive, and very influential career provides a primer on evolution and a spirited defense of Darwinian explanations in biology.

Cognitive abilities — the result of selective pressures on food acquisition?

Locating and capturing food are suggested as significant selection pressures for the evolution of various cognitive abilities in mammals and birds. The hypothesis is proposed that aspects of food procuring behaviour should be strongly indicative of particular cognitive abilities. Experimental data concerning higher mental abilities in mammals and birds are reviewed. These data deal with self-recognition studies, rule-learning experiments, number concept, deceptive abilities, tool-use and observational learning. A Darwinian approach reveals: (1) the adaptiveness of particular abilities for particular niches, (2) that in complex foraging environments, increases in foraging efficiencies in animals should result from the evolution of particular cognitive abilities, (3) that phenomena such as convergent mental evolution should be expected to have taken place across taxonomic groups for species exploiting similar niches, (4) that divergence in mental ability should also have taken place where related species have exploited dissimilar niches. Experimental data of higher mental abilities in animals concur with a Darwinian explanation for the distribution of these cognitive abilities and no anomalies have been found. There are, as a consequence, significant implications for the welfare of animals subject to training when training methodology gives little or no consideration to the various mental abilities of species.

Have Biologists Wrapped up Philosophy?

An examination of the currently fashionable thesis that scientists, and especially biologists in the wake of the Darwinian Revolution, can now solve the problems that traditional philosophers have only talked about. Past philosophers, for example during the Enlightenment, have themselves made use of contemporary, scientific techniques and theories. The present claim may only be another such move, to be welcomed by philosophers who would distinguish themselves from rhetoricians. Others may prefer to stake out the merely human or subjective world as their field, identifying 'truth' with 'what it's better to believe'. Both moderns and postmoderns must abandon the rational realism that actually sustained Enlightenment endeavours, and Darwinian explanation, on its own, must erode traditional ethical values and the meta-ethical assumptions that sustain them. Universal humanism is only one possible project among many - and Darwinian reasonings suggest that it is hypocritical. In this crisis there may after all be a rôle for traditional, Platonizing philosophers, believing that there is a truth, and that we can find it out. Such a theory is actually better able to explain our scientific successes, and our evolutionary past.

Why do people love their pets?

The evidence that people form strong attachments with their pets is briefly reviewed before identifying the characteristics of such relationships, which include pets being a source of security as well as the objects of caregiving. In evolutionary terms, pet ownership poses a problem, since attachment and devoting resources to another species are, in theory, fitness-reducing. Three attempts to account for pet keeping are discussed, as are the problems with these views. Pet keeping is placed into the context of other forms of interspecific associations. From this, an alternative Darwinian explanation is proposed: pets are viewed as manipulating human responses that had evolved to facilitate human relationships, primarily (but not exclusively) those between parent and child. The precise mechanisms that enable pets to elicit caregiving from humans are elaborated. They involve features that provide the initial attraction, such as neotenous characteristics, and those that enable the human owner to derive continuing satisfaction from interacting with the pet, such as the attribution of mental processes to human-like organisms. These mechanisms can, in some circumstances, cause pet owners to derive more satisfaction from their pet relationship than those with humans, because they supply a type of unconditional relationship that is usually absent from those with other human beings.

The Croonian Lecture, 1991. Genostasis and the limits to evolution

The Darwinian explanation for evolution is that it is the outcome of the interaction between genetic variation and natural selection. There is now good evidence for both the existence of genetic variation and the occurrence of natural selection, the latter potentially at high intensities. The outcome should be rapid evolutionary change; yet in practice very little change is found. Most species are very stable, and in situations where evolution is observed in one species often none is found in others despite equivalent opportunity. Evolutionary failure is commonplace. Despite the occurrence of high levels of protein polymorphism, there is good evidence that the supply of variation making a major contribution to fitness is very limited. As a result it is argued that lack of evolution in most species may be due more to lack of appropriate variability than to other causes: a condition for which the term 'genostasis' is proposed. In those situations where appropriate genetic variation is available for one reason or another, evolution is found to be very rapid. There are good theoretical and practical reasons for more attention being paid to the mechanisms of supply of new variation and to those situations where evolution appears not be taking place.

Genetic specialists, kin recognition and nepotism in honey-bee colonies

INSECT societies have long served as useful models in the study of two often intertwined issues in evolutionary biology: the levels at which natural selection operates1, and the phenomena of competition and cooperation in animal societies2. Hamilton3–5 provided a darwinian explanation for the evolution of cooperation by invoking natural selection for increased inclusive fitness, whereas Trivers and Hare6 showed how asymmetrical genetic relationships among members of hymenopteran societies result in differential fitness among queens and workers and can lead to conflict over the production of males. Here we provide evidence for competition among workers of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, in the production of female reproductives, a consequence of the genetic structure of colonies resulting from polyandry7, genotypic biases in components of cooperative behaviour associated with division of labour8–10, and kin recognition11–13. We also propose that nepotistic behaviour by honey bees is influenced by both kin- and colony-level selection.

Natural selection without survival of the fittest

Susan Mills and John Beatty proposed a propensity interpretation of fitness (1979) to show that Darwinian explanations are not circular, but they did not address the critics' chief complaint that the principle of the survival of the fittest is either tautological or untestable. I show that the propensity interpretation cannot rescue the principle from the critics' charges. The critics, however, incorrectly assume that there is nothing more to Darwin's theory than the survival of the fittest. While Darwinians all scoff at this assumption, they do not agree about what role, if any, this principle plays in Darwin's theory of natural selection. I argue that the principle has no place in Darwin's theory. His theory does include the idea that some organisms are fitter than others. But greater reproductive success is simply inferred from higher fitness. There is no reason to embody this inference in the form of a special principle of the survival of the fittest.

Sociobiology — A Caricature of Darwinism

Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection is an extremely powerful explanatory device. For its rigorous application to any phenomenon it requires only that some form of variation in the manifestation of the phenomenon exists, that the variations can persist in time, and that the properties of the variants cause them to have different average persistence times. So, for example, one could make a Darwinian explanation of the frequency of different sorts of rocks. There is variation in the hardness of rocks, they persist in time and indeed are being formed anew, and the harder rocks are more “adapted” to survive the weathering and erosion of wind and water. A similar story can be told about political parties, rumors, jokes, stars and discarded soft drink containers.

Pole-Seeking Brownian Motion and Bird Navigation

Summary This paper is not concerned with identifying the mechanism of bird navigation, but rather with assessing the degree of success possible using very bad navigational aids of whatever sort. Flight-paths are simulated using virtually no hypotheses, and all numerical parameters are determined ornithologically. The results are compared with the performance of actual birds, and also with a brownian model which is analytically convenient. It turns out that some formulae for the brownian theory can be used to graduate the results obtained from actual or simulated observations, and this is its sole ornithological relevance. The data imply a surprising numerical coincidence which allows of a Darwinian explanation. It seems likely that under suitable asymptotic hypotheses, the ornithological model will converge weakly towards the brownian one, but that question is deliberately not investigated here. Indeed it is ornithologically of little interest because (i) we are certainly not at the limit and (ii) weak convergence theorems do not normally have anything useful to say about the rate of convergence. This suggests that there may be a general need for a shift of emphasis in our thinking, away from weak convergence theorems towards weak convergence approximations (validated by simulation).