[pwncat]

I disagree with this argument. I think another one's more salient. For a pack animal such as primal humans probably were, a certain type of moderate depression is a survival mechanism for dealing with low social status. Your appetite and libido decrease, you become inassertive, you accept mistreatment from others. Subjectively, this process and experience sucks, but lacking desire to mate with the alpha female keeps the omega male alive. Much more importantly (since nature doesn't care much about unsuccessful individuals) it's a survival mechanism for the pack; the depressive response ensures that, in extreme scarcity, the less successful individuals slink away and accept starvation, rather than challenging and potentially causing harm to the more important ones.

In modern society, this reaction is completely useless and utterly maladaptive. It also has a tendency to fire in people at all levels of social status, because modern society (with its dynamic, subtle, and multileveled play of social status) is confusing to the primal mind. So a depressive response can be rightly considered an illness.

Civilization expects everyone to assume the role most closely analogous to high beta/low alpha. People who have omega traits tend to be depressives; people who have too many alpha traits are sociopaths.

[pfedor]

Much more importantly (since nature doesn't care much about unsuccessful individuals) it's a survival mechanism for the pack

I am not a biologist, but according to (what I understood of) "The Selfish Gene" and the like, the natural selection takes place on the level of genes. Since the successful reproduction of a gene is usually (barring some exceptional situations mentioned in the book) tightly coupled with the fate of the individual carrying the gene, reasoning about natural selection that operates on individuals typically leads to correct conclusions. Reasoning about natural selection on packs is on the other hand typically incorrect, if it leads to conclusions different from the individuals-based selection.

In your example, if you imagine two genes, one that tells the low status carrier to accept starvation, and the other that tells its carrier to fight for dear life no matter what its social status, the second gene will win and the first one will go extinct, even if from the point of view of the whole pack the first gene could be better.

This is not to say that your hypothesis is invalid, as I'm sure it can be rephrased in terms of genes/individuals without losing the core message.

[jballanc]

Ok, well... I am a biologist and one of the first things you need to understand about "The Selfish Gene" is that much of what Dawkins presents as fact is very much under dispute in the biological research community. Be very cautious about accepting anything he presents as "the one true way" of understanding evolution. It is anything but!

One term you can Google for more information is "multi-level selection". I find the pack animal explanation actually rather interesting. It meshes well with some of the research that I'm doing on evolution as targeted at resource utilization efficiency. I think the real question is to what extent primitive man was a "pack" animal as opposed to a "group" or "tribe" animal. That is, I think there are many open ended questions regarding the social structure of early man (for one thing, if early man was a pack animal you'd have to explain the origin of monogamy, or at least limited polygamy, in place of the harem structure of most pack animals).

[mdemare]

Evolution is essentially an algorithm. That's why we can use logic to predict that genes that regulate behavior for "less successful individuals to slink away and accept starvation" are unlikely to arise, since not a single one of the ancestors of that individual were less successful and slunk away to accept starvation.

[jballanc]

There's a mister Hardy and a mister Weinberg that would like to have a word with you about that logic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy-Weinberg

The other thing to keep in mind is that evolution works as a movement through nucleotide space over a fitness landscape. The fundamental flaw in much of Dawkins work is his reliance on a biologically unrealistic definition of a "gene". Sure, if you go with his definition of genes then logic can tell you all sorts of things about evolution that aren't necessarily true.

[Retric]

I think depression helps people "keep their head down" in oppressive situations. An aggressive alpha male can kill you so slink away and stay alive. If your younger than the alpha you can just wait him out. This might explain why it's so much more prevalent in teenagers where staying alive might gives you time to become the alpha.

Slavery is a more recent example of this, if you are aggressive you will be killed, but keep your head down at the chance exists to reproduce. And most people alive today have some slaves/peasants ancestors.

Today we end up with some suicides, but that's rare enough it might not outweigh the benefit when that feedback loop stays on track so you avoid jail etc.

[kingkongrevenge]

Any mention of "alpha male" costs you your entrance ticket to the discussion. There is no such thing in humans.

> An aggressive alpha male can kill you

What advantage does an "agressive alpha" have over you? Any human can kill any other human very easily. Rock to the head, game over. We're not talking about walruses.

Social power structures of any complexity are a post-agricultural development, and therefore of limited importance to human genes. The social structure in a hunter-gather band of 20 is simple and flat.

[jballanc]

As trite and cliche as mentions of "alpha male" have become, there is good reason to believe that early human social structure might have involved just such a character. Namely, some of our closest relatives in the great ape family have this sort of "alpha-male-with-harem" approach.

Now, there is also good reason to believe that the evolutionary adaptation that pole-vaulted early humans ahead of the other apes was a change in their social structure. However, even if that is true, you also have to remember that humans have spent a much larger portion of their evolutionary lineage as great apes than as modern (or nearly-modern) humans. That is, even if early humans had distinct social structures from their ape cousins, we are bound to have many remnants of the ape social structure left in our genomes.

In other words, depression doesn't necessarily have to have been an adaptation of early humans, it could just as easily have been an adaptation of early primates that humans just haven't had time to get rid of yet!

[kingkongrevenge]

If you accept the popular premise that man is a pleistocene animal designed to live in hunter-gatherer bands then you don't really have to wonder much about the innate social tendencies of humans. We have dozens of detailed ethnographies of hunter-gatherer bands. They are socially flat. Some people are highly esteemed, but nobody has any sort of disproportionate power.

> the ape social structure left in our genomes

The apes and the gibbons vary dramatically so it seems a bit silly to expect useful common denominator social behaviors applicable to humans. Bonobos and gorillas and orangutans are all very different. And none of the apes are at all comparable to humans in how they make their living. None of them are primarily team hunters.

[TheSOB88]

Considering the biologist in this thread disagrees with you, you may want to tone down your arrogance.

Also, I do not think you could kill me with a rock, unless I were sleeping and you were dropping it from excessive height.

[kingkongrevenge]

I see no disagreement.

I could kill you with a coffee mug or a bic pen if you were unarmed. In the unlikely event you're unusually strong and alert I'd get my brother to help. Power in a band of humans has way more to do with how many relatives you happen to have than any silly conception of "alpha".

[berntb]

Most criticism I've seen has been from marxist biologists? (Like intelligence being largely inherited, it seems to contradict some dogma in Marxism.)

This sums up the old debate: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html

(As a non-biologist, even I know the stature of Maynard Smith, Mayr etc.)

Is there some new development with support for e.g. species-selection, etc?

[awkward]

Characterizations of Gould as a Marxist biologist are roughly as ad hominem as that article accuses Gould of being.

As another non biologist, I understand that Gould's main contribution was punctuated equilibrium. he thought that the primary driver in evolutionary change was rare and relatively quick changes across a population - the external environment would change, or a new advantageous trait would develop which would transmit rapidly. It also clashes with attempts to determine more gradual models of genetic propagation throughout populations.

[tokenadult]

Characterizations of Gould as a Marxist biologist are roughly as ad hominem as that article accuses Gould of being.

As I have asked people to do before,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

I'd love to hear from people who disagree with [insert name of controversial figure here] just why they disagree with that person, not just their party label for that person. It is perfectly possible for a person who has wrong ideas to have other, correct ideas.

[berntb]

>>It is perfectly possible for a person who has wrong ideas to have other, correct ideas.

Agreed. But here we have an author that researchers in two fields argue are intellectually dishonest in his public writing.

Only experts in the field (or maybe amateurs which read the discussion carefully) can have an opinion.

So do you really want to use your time by reading books about subject X which you know might be have 5-50 percent slanted content to agree with e.g. the Mormon church?

It is not just that you get real information, it is that some of the information you get will be twisted...

Edit: And since it is relevant to your comment, note that someone voted me down but lacked counter arguments... :-)

[berntb]

Well, I already mentioned that you should check who the critics were. Maynard Smith, Wilson and Mayr. AFAIK, they each have more than double the cred in the field as Gould and Dawkins have -- together.

Marxist... Lewontin, Steven Rose Kamin et al can hardly be described as liberal or right wing... :-)

Can you mention three non-leftwing well known biologists in that camp? One?

The fun part about Gould is the criticism from intelligence researchers. They more or less accuse Gould of misrepresenting the contents of their field -- very similar to how Gould is described by evolutionary biologists...

Edit: I might also add that there were lots of discussion about how new "punctuated equilibrium" really where.

Edit II: First post by a user 460 days old? I am honored! :-)

[awkward]

Not to completely throw up a smokescreen to hide the fact that I think you're better read on this debate than I am, but your challenge is pretty reminiscent of what bugs me about this debate: It's often framed as a debate between politically motivated hacks vs their more sensible, less biased opponents, when there was real scientific disagreement at stake, and a disagreement that has at least some practical political implication. Admittedly, this defense works better when talking about controversy between Gould and Dawkins (who is not at all apolitical himself) than between Gould and Wilson.

That, and I thought that the best place I could find on the internet to defend Gould would be in the middle of a thread full of amateur evolutionary psychologists making up stories about why depression came into being. :-)

re your edit II: There was some stuff about this on Pharyngula recently that put it on my mind, and plus the combination of screeching flamewar and biological debate in this makes it pretty interesting reading.

[jibiki]

Yep. Here's a really good example from EY:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kw/the_tragedy_of_group_selectionism...

"The mathematical conditions for group selection overcoming individual selection were too extreme to be found in Nature. Why not create them artificially, in the laboratory? Michael J. Wade proceeded to do just that, repeatedly selecting populations of insects for low numbers of adults per subpopulation. And what was the result? Did the insects restrain their breeding and live in quiet peace with enough food for all?

No; the adults adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae."

(Here's the actual paper:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/73/12/4604.pdf

)

[danteembermage]

IANAB either, but pack survival could have a role in gene transmission, it would just be more indirect. Suppose pack A is full of extreme non-depressives and B is depressive. Highlander style, only one male in A will survive while B can maintain a back-up stock in case accident befalls the alpha.

That said I don't see why the gene expression couldn't be:

if (alpha) { act like alpha } else { act depressed }

individually beneficial and pack beneficial simultaneously.

[lionhearted]

> Civilization expects everyone to assume the role most closely analogous to high beta/low alpha. People who have omega traits tend to be depressives; people who have too many alpha traits are sociopaths.

This is, far and away, one of the most intelligent and insightful comments I've read on Hacker News and explains a hell of a lot to me. I might quote you on this one later in an article I've got in the que to write: Is there any particular way you'd care for me to source you? I've got the permanent link and your screenname and can use that, but if you'd like it attributed differently I'd be happy to.

Thanks very much for the insight, and welcome to HN. I hope you stick around, this really got the gears turning in my head.

[psranga]

Remember that modern civilization ENABLES many people to attain high positions. So I would not consider this expectation to be totally unrealistic. There are SO many ways in which to excel and influence society in the modern world that there is room for many many many (maybe all of us) to be near the top of something or other.

One example from the work world: all decent companies have a technical and management ladder so that people who are not completely aggressive can still influence strategy (e.g., Anders Hejlsberg?).

And with food/clothing/shelter becoming less and and scarce as time passes, being at the "top" is going to matter less and less.

[aswanson]

Sounds reasonable, leading to the prime exception I take with this whole line of inquiry known as "evolutionary psychology": the lack of falsifiability of any plausible hypothesis. You can handwave pretty much any narrative that somewhat fits the data and publish.

[ShardPhoenix]

Not only is this particular hypothesis falsifiable, it has been more or less falsified (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection).

Also, it seems to me that in these kinds of discussions, a lot of these evolutionary-psychology stories are not meant to say "this is exactly why this thing evolved", but to demonstrate that there are reasons that such a thing could evolve. A lot of this kind of thinking is probably derived from arguing with anti-evolutionists who claim that such-and-such could never have evolved because it's apparently mal-adaptive.

[aswanson]

Not only is this particular hypothesis falsifiable, it has been more or less falsified (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection).

That wikipedia link has absolutely nothing to do with the falsification of the narrative he proposed.

Also, it seems to me that in these kinds of discussions, a lot of these evolutionary-psychology stories are not meant to say "this is exactly why this thing evolved", but to demonstrate that there are reasons that such a thing could evolve.

I have no problems with narratives and possible explanations but if you scour the literature you will not find, on average, the qualifiers of uncertainty. I _do_ have a problem with people who take a casual glance at said literature and present their arguments with no degree of uncertainty. Just-so stories strike me as the epitome of intellectual laziness.

A lot of this kind of thinking is probably derived from arguing with anti-evolutionists who claim that such-and-such could never have evolved because it's apparently mal-adaptive.

I have no idea how this type of thinking came about and have no problem admitting it.

[ShardPhoenix]

Group selection has been proven not to work so you'd have to demonstrate a benefit for the depressed individual to justify it evolutionarily.

[arketyp]

Arguing by group selection is far fetched as it is almost inherently wrong in concept, and demands further explanation in gene mechanics.

Even if accepting the group selection idea for the sake of argument, there are inconsistencies to what behavior one would expect to find. As the article elaborates on, depression is, crudely put, mental pain, and it comes with symptoms such as general lack of motivation. How does that fit with the over all good of the pack? Wouldn't the expected behavior be acceptance of the omega situation and great motivation to sacrifice itself for the pack (as in wolf packs where there is kinship involved)? How is an individual being gloomy and doing nothing - mental pain being inflicted - beneficial to the pack?

[MaysonL]

The thing is, clinical [endogenous] depression strikes the successful and the unsuccessful alike - it's a biochemical imbalance, not a psychological reaction.

[tokenadult]

it's a biochemical imbalance, not a psychological reaction

To call depression a "chemical imbalance" is what physicians, compassionately, tell their patients to encourage them to take their medicines. But the doses of lithium, the best evidenced drug for depression, that are in the therapeutic range are many times higher than the natural level of lithium that occurs in any healthy untreated human being, and perilously close to the toxic dose.

The current view is that depression strikes people who have a genetic vulnerability (that much would be either biochemical or structural, perhaps a different vulnerability in different patients) who also experience certain kinds of environmental stress (perhaps not always the same kinds of stress for all patients with the same underlying vulnerability). That medicines relieve depression--as some plainly do for many patients--doesn't prove that what the patients had beforehand was a lack of those medicines, or even exactly an imbalance of the brain chemicals most influenced by those medicines. The most effective treatment for depression generally appears to be a both-and of prescribed medications and evidence-based cognitive therapy.

[bored]

> alpha female keeps the omega male alive.

Sounds like group selection, common fallacy.

[kingkongrevenge]

> social status

Why does every arm chair discussion of evolutionary psychology veer to social hierarchy? The evidence is quite convincing that pre-agricultural humans were not so much hierarchical. Humans are not gorillas. It seems like various insecure nerds are very eager to project popularity issues.

I think depression is more about simple calorie preservation. People in situations where they feel they have no control get depressed. Imagine a famine. The cheerful go-getter says "By gum, there's food out there somewhere and I'm going to find it!" He tramps out of camp on a hunt, and drops dead of starvation two days later. Our depressive fellow says "We're fucked. I'm going to lie down and wait to die." He stays still and doesn't even think much, saving calories. Then by chance a deer wanders into camp eight days later and he's saved.

In this age of plentiful energy and food people seem to forget how central metabolism and energy scarcity is to evolution. The human body is mostly a machine set up to cope with highly variable energy intake. Energy efficiency and conservation should typically be the starting point when considering these issues.

As recently as 100 years ago huge numbers of people in northern climes would spend most of four months of the year lying in bed in a semi-depressive state to save energy.

[tokenadult]

Why does every arm chair discussion of evolutionary psychology veer to social hierarchy? The evidence is quite convincing that pre-agricultural humans were not so much hierarchical.

Yes, and also human beings were not as constrained geographically, but could leave one hunting band to wander off to an area previously unoccupied by human beings for most of human evolutionary history.

[aswanson]

Why does every arm chair discussion of evolutionary psychology veer to social hierarchy?

Amen. What I have been trying to articulate in so many words but somehow fell short. Think that's my main gripe -- these explanations always veer into territory ripe with any number of convenient social stories.