To: Tuesday
Hi there, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles, and Happy New Year! I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is To: Tuesday, where we continue the ongoing letter series we started last month with Mark P Xu Neyer, or apxhard.
If you’d like to catch up, here’s the first post in the series by yours truly:
And here’s Mark’s reply:
Looking back, I wish I’d been as forward thinking as Mark to inline things a bit, but c’est la vie.
Response to Mark
I had the impression that intense competition among members of a species was a big driver of natural selection.
So re: competition among members of a species- this is the big split in evolutionary biology about multilevel selection and hierarchical selection. Check out the wiki on group selection.
Basically, the argument is that selection and competition are always active among individuals, but once those individuals organize into groups that compete with one another, the fitness function changes. “Fitness” is basically just a way of evaluating how adaptive a trait is by measuring how much more likely it makes you to reproduce.
Multi level selection theory states that in the long run, it’s the top level of selection that determines the fitness of a trait. A common example they use is hens- who can decrease the eggs of others around them by pecking them. So an aggressive hen might obtain a reproductive advantage by pecking all of the other hens it sees, and then the next generation would have more aggressive hens - this is a process that compounds over the generations until you only have a bunch of aggressive hens pecking each other because the non-aggressive hens have been outcompeted moloch-style.
Now let’s say there’s another group of hens in the next valley where the aggressive gene never came into being. Those hens spend the same number of generations cooperating. At the end of the same span of time, the aggressive hens may be much more individually fit, but there will be a lot more of the cooperating hens. This means ultimately the cooperation gene is more fit/adaptive than the aggressive gene because it was more successful in reproduction.
So this is one of the big examples of how a trait can be individually adaptive but cooperatively maladaptive.
The individual traits you shared from your coach are adaptive for you, the individual- which is why you share them with your family. But if we zoom out, do they over time increase your family’s likelihood of success and propagation?
I think the Catholic Church is a great example of this- On an individual level it’s maladaptive to be a holier-than-thou dogmatic moralist. But when enough of them got together it became an adaptive trait for the group, which became Europe’s moral conscious for several hundred years. Those maladaptive traits survived and thrived not because priests were just more fit in the medieval environment, but because their group was.
Can you say more about why you think organizations aren't intelligent?
I don’t believe organizations are intelligent because I think human intelligence was just a bizarre fluke of the brain as a hyper-correlative logical engine. Increasing reasoning, abstraction, and self awareness were all adaptive traits for both individuals and groups. There’s a great book, “Blindsight” that deals with the idea that maybe self awareness is actually a maladaptive trait.
Sure, organizations might borrow intellectual compute time from their humans, but ultimately they are a network of individual actors attempting to achieve common goals. More like an ant hive than a human mind.
Would you consider something like 'a family' as being a kind of informational life?
Families are definitely social/informational organisms, yeah. Any grouping of individuals represents a step up in hierarchy, and should thus be looked at as separate life.
Which group has to be helped for a trait to work? Could there be traits that help me do better at work, and help my company perform better, but are bad for, say, America? I think I'll need to better understand what a 'solidarity group' is in your language.
When it comes to figuring out which level is determining fitness currently, it’s a hard question to ask- you have two sliding factors you want to use to ask the question: duration and scope. Because we’re in the sauce, so to speak, we don’t get the privilege of looking into the future or looking down at things from a god’s eye view. This is why I like biological analogy.
Let’s go back to cancer- if we zoom down to the level of cells and set our timespan to test fitness to a few years, then becoming cancerous is definitely an adaptive trait. At the end of those two years, cancerous cells have reproduced vastly more than non cancerous cells, and seem be the most fit in the cellular environment. As we know, this is a local maxima- in another few years the progress of the cancer cells will have killed all cells in the body, and we see that what was a competitive trait was actually tragically maladaptive when we zoom out a level or increase our timescale.
Hence the hierarchies approach, the highest level of selection is the place to focus on: what do individual family values matter if the community can’t come together to source water, food, and goods to keep itself alive.
From what I can tell, the biggest human superorganisms have always depended, at some level, on their ability to successfully deploy violence. I suspect that the advent of bitcoin changes the game completely for human superorganisms, because coercion is no longer workable as a mechanism for keeping a superorganism "fed".
With your note that superorganisms must eat, drink, etc., We get into the idea of homeostasis. One of the chief functions of each level is to maintain the requisite living environment for the level below it. Humans need food to convert into chemical energy for cells, families need food to feed their humans, communities need food to feed their families, nations need food to feed their communities. In order for communities to source food within nations they need networks of commerce and transportation infrastructure, which the nation maintains. In order for families to source food in communities they need safe spaces to conduct commerce and thus communities negotiate policing to protect them.
So we can look at how things are doing on the international level and see that the values you are sharing with your family aren’t adaptive if Russia decides to start a nuclear war tomorrow. The level of selection for adaptive traits in an individual is way past anything a single human on their own can influence.
This is the issue with moloch: the values held at the lower levels aren’t impactful to the fitness of the highest levels, and aren’t requisite for homeostasis, and so thus can be cut with impunity. Once evolution has moved up a level it begins to slowly lose the positive adaptations that were fit for the previous levels, initiating a race to the bottom to sacrifice values in exchange for competitiveness.
I hope that clears things up a bit!
Until next time…
Oh man, this is getting good! I’m remember how exciting it was to find someone interested in talking about similar topics! Please subscribe to Mark’s Substack to see the next entry, where we dive more deeply into how our views diverge, and we get closer to introducing his concept of adaptive/essential “goodness,” which I really wish he’d write more about because it’s cool!
And if you’ve stumbled here through some odd door on the web, please don’t hesitate to sign the guest book: