[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.

[Retric]

Evolution has a long history and vestigial adaptations don't instantly disappear if they are part of complex systems. Rat brains also use dopamine and there seems to be a link between dopamine and depression so it's roots might be vary ancient.

Looking modern males at the average American high school, biker gang, or hunting party and you will notice social stratification. Humans don't do the Alpha with harem, but young men often fight for levels of dominance. In scripted environments they might fight over academic prowess but simple fist fighting is not that uncommon. And when males fight you get into some basic game theory as to how much energy to expend and damage to risk.

If the systems that cause depression where useful thought human history then removing the possibility of depression may have had serious costs.

PS: Just because the human brain works extremely well does not mean it's elegant.

Edit: Modern hunter gathers have just as much history as we do. Extrapolating how humans lived 500,000 years ago from what we have seen modern bands do is a mistake.

[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".

[TheSOB88]

So, maybe the 'alpha' is automatically the person with the most allies in a time of conflict.

[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.

[berntb]

Evolutionary biology interests me and to have a clue, I had to understand the controversy. Time wasted, which I want back. :-(

As I wrote, the easiest way to understand is to note that the heavy people of both evolutionary biology and intelligence research agree on Gould's intellectual dishonesty.

(Almost all positive reviews on Gould's book on intelligence came from the extreme left or from non-psychologists.)

The top levels of the intelligence researchers and the evolutionary biologists were incompetent idiots and/or in a conspiracy? (More or less what the creationists argue about evolutionary biologists, by the way!)

It is just not believable.

> when there was real scientific disagreement at stake

It was mainly Gould's public writing that was criticized, not the research.

Note that my previous comments were downvoted by someone that obviously disagrees, but lacks arguments... True believers are sad.

[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.