Beyond Selfishness and Altruism: Evolution, Empathy, and Systemic Sustainability

Ben Goertzel on good and evil: 

"It's a complicated and somewhat silly distinction. Human beings under evolution have been shaped by two objective functions: Individual selection and group selection. The tension between selfishness and altruism. A lot of what we view as evil is selfishness -Individual interest. A lot of what we view as good is altruism -acting in the interests of the collective. We are a mix.

But culture has a lot of flexibility in what it teaches as the default position between the two. And we have a lot of room to move to more altruism."
[end quote] 

Expanding on Ben Goertzel's delineation between good and evil through the prism of individual and group selection, there's an additional evolutionary dimension worth considering: the long-term viability of groups in relation to their external environment and other groups. This involves another kind of selection - one based on a group's ability to extend its empathic boundaries and sustain harmonious coexistence with out-groups and the environment.

This "meta-selection" isn't just about immediate survival or dominance but encompasses a group's adaptive strategies for long-term sustainability and coexistence. It's about how a group defines its circle of empathy and the consequent impact on its cooperative and competitive strategies. Groups that practice wider empathy are not just being altruistic; they're investing in a robust strategy for long-term survival. They contribute to a social and ecological equilibrium, enhancing not just their own resilience, but the resilience of a larger interconnected system. 

This perspective also casts a new light on the concepts of good and evil. Actions and policies that foster broad cooperation and empathy, even beyond immediate in-group interests, contribute to the collective good—not just of one's own group, but of the larger ecosystem of groups and the environment.

Conversely, short-sighted strategies, those prioritizing immediate in-group benefits at the severe expense of others and the environment, can be viewed as contributing to a collective evil. They may offer immediate gains but compromise the long-term resilience and sustainability of the broader system. 

It's crucial to note that in this evolutionary framework, the ultimate "victory" scenario isn't one group out-competing all others to the point of their extinction, then living in isolation, sustainably, with the non-human environment. Such a scenario would actually be detrimental to survival in the long run due to decreased systemic robustness resulting from reduced diversity. 

True optimal success in this framework is a rich tapestry of diverse groups, all practicing extended empathy, cooperating where possible, and coexisting sustainably with each other and the environment. This diversity isn't just a moral ideal; it's a strategic one, vital for the long-term resilience and adaptability of life on Earth.

(uses some help from an artificial friend)

octobrains

Did the 100s of smelling, tasting, feeling suckers on the 8 legs of an octopus do a similar thing for the octopus brain as the evolution of hands did to ours  ?... and did the decentralised architecture of the octopus brain reduce the impact the 8 arm rich information stream had on evolving a complex central brain?

Or was it that without the single repeated architecture of the mammalian neocortex as general intelligence engine, gains made in complexity in those sensory streams were not as reusable toward the evolution of a more general intelligence ??

gene and race

So there was this discussion on non-racialism at this book launch last night ...

and a member of the audience asked that typical question about the obvious genetic basis to race.

I was working up to try and answer there, but found it a bit hard to get my thoughts together in time. So below is working toward how I'd like to answer that in future. I'll correct/refine it with time, hopefully, and corrections and comments from you, the anonymous or not anonymous public, are as welcome as always.

 Attempt One:

Once our very early, singular human population separated geographically (after what appears to be a series of survival bottlenecks), they evolved separate and particular traits according to the now well understood processes of natural selection and genetic drift. 

Even while populations were largely separated, there was still sufficient movement and interaction to allow for genetic information to pass between populations. This, most importantly, would have included the successful spread of immune response adaptations and anti-parasite counter-measures vital to early population survival. [which is why all so called races have within their populations a spread of proteomic pathways for immune function that are common between races] 

As populations interacted and genetic information spread, there are a few mechanisms by which certain traits persisted within local populations, despite the relatively thorough statistical mixing of other genetic traits. The  mechanisms that ‘preserved’ local ‘race type traits’ include environment specific adaptations (like skin colour) that were continuously selected for within separated populations by survival pressure, and culture-specific sexual selection criteria - that proceeded along with cultural evolution. There are more mechanisms i think, but these two come to mind for now.

Via these mechanisms, an aggregation of certain traits (the sexual selection model accounts for why these are most often just externally visible) would accumulate within populations, while allowing the fortunate mixing of other vital genetic survival strategies without which local populations would most likely have fallen from parasite/pathogen load/stress.

This explains why, with the exception of this small percentage of ‘race type traits’, when looking at particular sequences, we often see more genetic diversity within races than between them — for example, there will be a particular immune system function that is expressed in different ways by several different protein pathways (lets call them A,B,C,D) and each race will have individuals carrying sequences for A,B,C,D. For the larger pathways, two individuals from different ‘races’ carrying the sequences necessary for A will often have more in common genetically with each other than with members of the same race carrying sequences for B, say.

[Immune function has been a big driver for evolution throughout the entire animal line, and so its not for nothing that it gets emphasised when discussing genetic variation.]

Even as our populations experienced civilisational shifts that allowed for more interaction between populations and more and more geographical displacement, patterns of mechanisms like the culture-specific sexual selection mentioned above - now intimately coupled with power, violence, etc. - still worked to keep certain traits prominent within local populations. 

Anyway, I think that's the type of traits the dude from yesterday mentioned. That small percentage of genetic traits, often highly visible, that we based the myth of race on.

 added later:

Of course, the other reason that immune system is so important when discussing us, is that in the very brief evolutionary time since we split up, nothing much else changed.

Sure some of us lightened our skins and straightened our hair, but these were almost insignificant changes when seen against our vast evolutionary history.

The most significant changes to humankind since our ‘forking’ is that the big brains that we evolved before we split led to us being super successful wherever we went - and that success was met in turn by a multitude of parasites rushing in to live off a newly found ecosystem - us.

So, most of our real evolution as humans, neglecting the very very minor surface tweaks, have been in complex immune system responses to those parasites since we became successful. That is why we are closer to members of other races that share our immune pathways than those of our race that don’t - immune system complexity makes up most of our evolution since we got here.

so called modern democracy

Part of the problem with current democracies is inherited. As all systems adapt and evolve they are often left burdened with artifacts left over from the systems they replace, long after these artifacts become unnecessary or irrelevant. Human systems are not immune. We  see this looking back through history and there is no reason to believe that we’ve somehow broken free from this effect today.

The public’s relation to our modern leaders, and the space that we create and allow for leadership, seems to me to be a good example of this. In these terms, so called modern democracies aren’t too removed from the royal courts that they evolved from.

We now have groups selected not by their birthright (so much), but by one or another system of voting, to make important decisions on behalf of the public. Yet apart from the method of selection, the new formation carries forward much from the older system.

Modern democratic representatives/leaders still have esteem, power and privilege heaped on them, as well as plenty of material benefit - similar to all that the lords and ladies of royal courts enjoyed. They still treated with what must be palpable deference, still honoured, pampered and fawned over - pretty much still treated like royalty - ripe fodder for all manner of narcissistic disorder.

Then, as I imagine in those royal courts that precede them, they are surrounded by others with similar status in spaces where maneuverings and machinations are encouraged and rewarded, and given closed doors behind which to negotiate and trade for favour and power.

And despite all this we expect them once installed to such office, to behave differently - better and more responsible than their 'ancestors'. They are installed in surroundings of virtual royalty; surrounded by the pageantry and intrigue of royal courts, and we are all still terribly surprised when they behave, sooner or later, with the same self interest and careless disregard for the public as the lords and kings of old.

last one turn the lights out

my mother's mother's mother's ....185 millionth mother was a fish.

A good watch if you're trying to understand why there never was a first human. or chicken. or egg...

 

Speaking evolution is an old post about where saying mother's mother's mother for a 1000 years will get you.


Here's some comments from this post on facebook that I think are worth logging:

bumping an old post

Partly because even though it's 8 years old, its worthy of a revisit, but also .. just because.

http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2006/10/natural-selection-of-universes.html

speaking evolution

I still really like the idea that ..

if I say out loud, my mother's mother's mother's mother's.... and keep going non-stop for about a 1000 years - I'll eventually be speaking about amoebae

----------------------

at 3 mother's per second

--------------------------

it's a 1000 years to amoebae, and a 100 000 years to bacteria

--------------------------

Btw, if you too are doubting the scale of that 1000 year estimate, its not just an exaggeration. I'm using a conservative estimate of 10^11 (100000000000) generations between me and my amoebae ancestors - based on very small times between generations for the first 400 million years of animal life. A number so mind-bending in size, that it will take 1000 years to count to at 3 times a second

natural selection at the largest scale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Smolin#Fecund_universes

Evolution / Natural Selection at the largest scale we could possibly ever know about - and the idea might of course be forever non-testable.

There's an earlier post on this here - http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2006/10/natural-selection-of-universes.html

explaining epigenetics .. adding more nurture to the nature-nurture mix

A log-worthy RadioLab episode - Inheritance - Which includes a lovely explanation of epigenetics, explained through some beautifully told stories, as usual.
Listen, to find out how, for instance, mom's licking turns on a behaviour, via protein, via turned-on-gene ..

From the site: http://www.radiolab.org/2012/nov/19/:

"Once a kid is born, their genetic fate is pretty much sealed. Or is it? This hour, we put nature and nurture on a collision course and discover how outside forces can find a way inside us, shaping not just our hearts and minds, but the basic biological blueprint that we pass on to future generations."

the file is here ...

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio4.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab111912.mp3

and streamed here
http://www.radiolab.org/audio/m3u/251876/

Another brilliant RadioLab's episode. Check out their podcast - it's some of the best produced radio, ever! .. methinks

the long road to a cell

Check out this truly amazing representation of the molecular machinery at work within each of our cells.

..
One thing that helps understanding these processes is to remember that at these scales, molecules are knocking around at much more than a million times per second - so it isn't that the right molecules miraculously find and fix themselves exactly where they belong in order to perform these very complex tasks (as these depictions sort of suggest), but rather that they are perpetually colliding at incredible speeds, and that it is only the (relatively) rare collision that is successful enough to allow the process to move forward.

All these random accidents accumulate, with the basic rule that what can persist, does, and on larger timescales seemingly miraculous complexity emerges.

Still, judging by the glimpse we get from this video, it's no wonder that evolution (a process that works with that same basic rule from above) took longer with these inner workings of a cell (2.8 billion years) than all the further developments on the tree of life combined (1 billion years)

.. give or take.

parasites

hourlong RadioLab audio episode on parasites. excellent

audio here : http://audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast603parasites.mp3

also recently added to my delicious mediachannel

synthetic genomics

Good video (another of the worthwhile from the tedtalks series) with plenty to think about in microbiology, genetics, the upcoming synthetic genomics, and its potential..


heres an audio npr interview with Venter with some additional info.

the struggle is also for culture - one meme at a time

hacking your body's bacteria

from this article:
" 'The microbes that live in the human body are quite ancient,' says a pioneer in gut microbe research. 'They've been selected (through evolution) because they help us.'

And it now appears that our daily antibacterial regimens are disrupting a balance that once protected humans from health problems, especially allergies and malfunctioning immune responses." (Vindication!)

"Microbial exposures early in life, scientists believe, cause mild inflammation that calibrates the body's responses to other pathogens and contaminants later in life. Without exposure as infants, researchers say, people can end up with unbalanced immune systems."

also from the article: "To hack the gut bacteria more precisely, Blaser calls for a Gut Genome Project, modeled after the Human Genome Project. It's a daunting task: The human genome, mapped to great fanfare but still dimly understood, contains a tenth of the genes believed to be in our gut bacteria."

oh yes, and they mention that: "Consumer probiotics don't always contain medically recognized bacterial strains, he said, and often the bacteria they contain are dead."

The Ape That Got Lucky

bbc Radio4-Comedy- The Ape That Got Lucky: "Chris Addison - the thinking idiot's pretend anthropologist - takes us on a journey through the vast and rich subject of human evolution in four comic lectures"

damn funny

natural selection of universes !

Why is the universe the way it is - why are the fundamental properties of elementary particles and forces just such that complexity can arise? Shift the values of these fundamental properties around just a bit and things dont work out so well.. a universe with even slightly varying properties either doesnt survive very long or ends up very empty with no ability for complexity of any sort to arise.

The answer i've most liked so far is that we just happen to be in one universe (of an infinite set within a theoretical multiverse) that does allow for complexity, and that the other sorts of universes that form without the right properties dont exist for long and wont have anybody within them to ask any of these questions anyway..

but Lee Smolin's "natural selection of universes" idea is simply more beautiful and 'complete'. He starts of with the general postulate that some self organising cosmic scale phenomenon could underly the selection of fundamental quantum
properties, but where it gets really beautiful i think is his suggestion that that phenomenon is evolutionary - that universes have evolved fundamental properties that make their reproduction more likely.

As Martin Rees comments: "He's saying that in some sense the universes that allow complexity and evolution reproduce themselves more efficiently than other universes. The ensemble itself is thus evolving in some complicated way. Smolin speculates - as others, like Alan Guth, have also done - that inside a black hole it's possible for a small region to, as it were, sprout into a new universe. We don't see it, but it inflates into some new dimension"

To continue the metaphor he uses - universes as animals, fundamental physical properties as genes, and black-holes as reproduction events.

Read the Whole article here - it is a bit old and (in places) dated, but the underlying idea of natural selection for universes, seems to me -at least tonight- to be very exciting.

One question i do have with the article (and some of the comments) concerns the assumption he uses to conclude that the idea is testable - that any tweaking of fundamental properties should produce less or equal number of blackholes, but NOT more. According to Smolin, this should be the case because universes would have evolved to optimize their properties so as to have the maximum chances for reproduction.

But does our understanding of evolution bear this out? Evolution doesnt necessarily achieve perfection - it doesnt even strive for it - its just a self organizing phenomenon that allows things that can persist to persist. What i mean is that there is no guarantee that our current universes 'gene-set' is necessarily the most optimized..

If i'm right, this means that the testability of his theory is open to question - that if anyone finds a shift in fundamental values that allows for more blackholes, the whole theory is not necessarily proven wrong. Thats more sad than it sounds, because without testability, its just another beautiful idea.

(UPDATE: in the comments to this blog, someone pointed out that Smolin addresses this in his book, 'The Life of the Cosmos')

...
Something else that might be worth considering is the possibility of other 'reproduction events' that werent thought of when he wrote this - like maybe the "Brane collisions" that possibly create universes in some of the newer forms of the superstring/m-theory/membrane theories

"if you removed all vertebrates from the Earth (including humans), the ecosystems would continue to work flawlessly.

Remove insects or even just a few of their important groups and life on Earth would collapse."

Gene Pool

very funky - i've been fantasizing about a SimLife type game like this for the longest time.

From the page: "Gene Pool is an artificial life simulation in which populations of physics-based organisms evolve swimming capabilities over time. These organisms are called "swimbots". You can set mate preference criteria and thus influence what the swimbots consider as attractive qualities in potential mates. The most attractive swimbots get chosen most often and so their genetic building blocks propogate to future generations. Eventually, swimbots get better at pursuing each other, competing for food, and becoming babes to other swimbots. Local gene pools emerge which compete for sex and food (for energy to have more sex). Eventually a dominant sub-population takes over.

And sometimes, everyone just dies (but you can help keep them alive, by moving food bits and swimbots around, and constraining the migration of competing populations by using the "Great Wall")

Gene Pool is best appreciated as a virtual Darwinian aquarium in which you initiate a primordial soup, and then occasionally check up on what Virtual Mother Nature is up to - about every fifteen minutes (or every few days, if you are interested in long-term evolutionary experiments!)

The strange and unexpected strategies for swimming (and being sexually attractive) that emerge can sometimes be amusing, and a bit reminiscent of that brand of creativity known as Darwinian Evolution."


[tagged with evolution]

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind

BBC - Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind: "Vilayanur S. Ramachandran" - Brilliant audio lectures from the forefront of evolutionary neuropsychology

Lecture 4 covering synesthesia and the evolution of language was particularly funky. you just need realplayer (downloadable from the bbc site) to listen.