Ruminations on an esoteric subject I'm not qualified to speak on!

Now that I'm on school break and no longer going into Sheep Pasture anymore, I decided to sleep in today and lo and behold 1/3rd of my audience  has already checked in and gone. Hope the two of them stop back later.

Fanny Holt Ames stayed in San Francisco for several days so we'll leave her tour and get back to her later in the week. I've found it amazing how much of her visit there could actually be recreated today. It's also amazing you can buy 60 year old restaurant menus on ebay.

An interesting article in the Globe Sunday about Edmund O. Wilson and group selection theory. Wilson you may remember is the entomologist who caused such a stir in the 1970's with the suggestion that there is a biological basis for human behavior and societies. In the 1980s he became an advocate for kin selection theory as a way of explaining altruistic behavior. This is a big deal to evolutionary biologists because if it's all about "survival of the fittest," the animal world should be completely full of competing individuals trying to pass on their genes alone. Think of the bar at the Stone Forge when the college crowd is in as an example. Yet examples of co-operation abound in nature-a squirrel gives off a warning cry when a predator approaches increasing the chance it might get eaten, but saving others. Kin selection suggests that since your brother shares about half your genes helping him pass along his genes is better than not passing on any of your genes at all. Since nearby squirrels are more closely related to each other than far away ones, it makes genetic sense that the squirrel should warn his kin.

Or so the theory goes. After three decades of supporting this idea, Wilson is now suggesting that the mathematical model the theory is based on doesn't work.

Stick with me here, folks, the inevitable Easton connection is coming!

Wilson has proposed a new theory that has come to be called group selection theory. He believes he has the math to show that any group of animals-take our squirrels for example- that accidentally develop a co-operative behavior will tend to have it reinforced because cooperative groups can often out compete individuals working non-cooperatively (ask any classroom teacher about that!). Kin selection only appears to be true because many groups are made up of related individuals, but Wilson claims to have evidence that genetically dissimilar animal groups also cooperate. This has all been met by hoots of derision from dozens of biologists who have come to accept kin selection as gospel and built their careers on it. We'll pass over those biologists as proof of Wilson's theory-banding together to protect themselves from a possible predator, and look at one implication of Wilson's theory-here comes the Easton part.

If natural selection blindly favors group cooperation, how might that work in human society? Do society's that promote cooperation have a better long term chance of survival? Can this be measured in any but the most facile way? Sociologists have created measures of social progress and have mathematical theories that predict things like societal violence and revolutions. Since Easton as a civic society seems to alternate between eras of cooperation and intense internal competition, can analysis show whether we fall behind in measures of social progress during periods of competition and surge ahead in times of cooperation? Sure would like to know since we seem to be moving away from an era of cooperation into an era of every squirrel for himself.