You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
And showing that there are a wide variety of different hypotheses only proves my point: we do not know what caused morality.
Not really. It is often true that if there are multiple explanations on the table, only one is right—or one is heavily dominant. Cooperation isn’t really like that. There really are many different reasons why advanced organisms cooperate and are nice to each other under different circumstances. You could group most of them together by saying that niceness often pays, either directly or to kin—but that explanation is vague and kind-of obvious: we know a lot of details beyond that.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
I disagree. It seems to me that your position is the joke, and that page is both accurate and informative. You are claiming, with a straight face, (unless you’re a particularly subtle troll, I suppose,) that group selection occurs in nature, and is not a trivially-wrong explanation for human morality.
Not really. It is often true that if there are multiple explanations on the table, only one is right—or one is heavily dominant. Cooperation isn’t really like that. There really are many different reasons why advanced organisms cooperate and are nice to each other under different circumstances. You could group most of them together by saying that niceness often pays, either directly or to kin—but that explanation is vague and kind-of obvious: we know a lot of details beyond that.
“Niceness” pays under certain, highly-specific circumstances. Under almost all circumstances, it does not. The fact that their are people trying to claim that humans fall into many sepaerate categories that result in “niceness” being selected for could, indeed, be due to to us falling into all these categories. More likely, however, is that this is caused by people simply making up reasons why morality should evolve—starting with the bottom line and filling the page with justifications.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
The fact that something happened is evidence that there is some explanation why it happened, a fact that I have repeatedly acknowledged. It is not necessarily sufficient evidence for a specific reason why it happened. This is so basic that I’m kind of shocked you’re actually making this argument; I have updated my estimation that you are a troll based on it. Of course, it’s possible that I have misinterpreted the argument you were trying to make, but assuming I haven’t: there are many thing that we know evolved, that we do not understand how. The amount of these has gone down over time, as our understanding of evolution and raw data about biology has increased. But there are still open problems in evolutionary biology, and human morality is one of them. This should not be a surprise; we know relatively little about human evolution considering how intensively our biology has been studied, thinking about the “source of morality” is particularly vulnerable to certain biases,and most people tend to construct “just-so stories” when attempting to reason about evolutionary biology.
That page is an example of reversed stupidity. timtyler’s early statement that “kin selection and group selection are equivalent” should have tipped you off to him not making that particular mistake.
You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
I disagree. It seems to me that your position is the joke, and that page is both accurate and informative.
No, it’s uninformed, out of date and incorrect. It’s one of the more embarassing pages on the wiki.
You are claiming, with a straight face, (unless you’re a particularly subtle troll, I suppose,) that group selection occurs in nature, and is not a trivially-wrong explanation for human morality.
So, that is what the modern scientific consensus on group selection says. It has kin selection and group selection making the same predctions. It’s been known since the 1970s that there was massive overlap between the concepts. In the last decade, most of the scientists in these fields have publicly recognised that the quest to find which is a superset of the other has petered out—and now we have:
I think most evolutionists now agree that kin and group selection are the same thing.
Peter Richerson, 2012
There is widespread agreement that group selection and kin selection — the post-1960s orthodoxy that identifies shared interests with shared genes — are formally equivalent.
Marek Kohn, 2008
It is remarkable that kin selection has been widely accepted and group selection widely disparaged when, for simple genetic models, they are actually equivalent mathematically.
Michael Wade
Inclusive fitness theory, summarised in Hamilton’s rule, is a dominant explanation for the evolution of social behaviour. A parallel thread of evolutionary theory holds that selection between groups is also a candidate explanation for social evolution. The mathematical equivalence of these two approaches has long been known.
James Marshall
Kin selection explains phenomena such as human lactation. Group selection explains it too (it makes the same predictions). Kin selection largely explains parental care and nepotism—which have a moral dimension. QED.
“Niceness” pays under certain, highly-specific circumstances. Under almost all circumstances, it does not.
That’s a straw-man characterisation of the idea. It pays in enough cases for it to evolve genetically. Not all cooperation is due to DNA genes (some is due to culture), but cooperation is a widespread phenomenon, and most scientists agree that humans have niceness in their DNA genes—more than their nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) do.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
The fact that something happened is evidence that there is some explanation why it happened, a fact that I have repeatedly acknowledged. It is not necessarily sufficient evidence for a specific reason why it happened. This is so basic that I’m kind of shocked you’re actually making this argument; I have updated my estimation that you are a troll based on it. Of course, it’s possible that I have misinterpreted the argument you were trying to make, but assuming I haven’t: there are many thing that we know evolved, that we do not understand how.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick there. To recap, you wrote:
I believe I already characterized such work as just-so stories and/or speculation in the absence of sufficient evidence.
I claimed that we do have enough evidence to go on. I stand by that. Without performing any more experiments, we have enough information to figure out the evolutionary basis of human morality, in considerable detail. Basically, we have an enormous mass of highly pertinent information. It’s more than enough to go on, I reckon.
You’re kidding, right? That page is a joke—and not in a good way.
Not really. It is often true that if there are multiple explanations on the table, only one is right—or one is heavily dominant. Cooperation isn’t really like that. There really are many different reasons why advanced organisms cooperate and are nice to each other under different circumstances. You could group most of them together by saying that niceness often pays, either directly or to kin—but that explanation is vague and kind-of obvious: we know a lot of details beyond that.
We surely have “sufficient evidence”. We have all of recorded history. This isn’t like the quest for an elusive high-energy particle—much of the relevant evidence is staring us in the face every day.
I disagree. It seems to me that your position is the joke, and that page is both accurate and informative. You are claiming, with a straight face, (unless you’re a particularly subtle troll, I suppose,) that group selection occurs in nature, and is not a trivially-wrong explanation for human morality.
“Niceness” pays under certain, highly-specific circumstances. Under almost all circumstances, it does not. The fact that their are people trying to claim that humans fall into many sepaerate categories that result in “niceness” being selected for could, indeed, be due to to us falling into all these categories. More likely, however, is that this is caused by people simply making up reasons why morality should evolve—starting with the bottom line and filling the page with justifications.
The fact that something happened is evidence that there is some explanation why it happened, a fact that I have repeatedly acknowledged. It is not necessarily sufficient evidence for a specific reason why it happened. This is so basic that I’m kind of shocked you’re actually making this argument; I have updated my estimation that you are a troll based on it. Of course, it’s possible that I have misinterpreted the argument you were trying to make, but assuming I haven’t: there are many thing that we know evolved, that we do not understand how. The amount of these has gone down over time, as our understanding of evolution and raw data about biology has increased. But there are still open problems in evolutionary biology, and human morality is one of them. This should not be a surprise; we know relatively little about human evolution considering how intensively our biology has been studied, thinking about the “source of morality” is particularly vulnerable to certain biases,and most people tend to construct “just-so stories” when attempting to reason about evolutionary biology.
That page is an example of reversed stupidity. timtyler’s early statement that “kin selection and group selection are equivalent” should have tipped you off to him not making that particular mistake.
No, it’s uninformed, out of date and incorrect. It’s one of the more embarassing pages on the wiki.
So, that is what the modern scientific consensus on group selection says. It has kin selection and group selection making the same predctions. It’s been known since the 1970s that there was massive overlap between the concepts. In the last decade, most of the scientists in these fields have publicly recognised that the quest to find which is a superset of the other has petered out—and now we have:
Peter Richerson, 2012
Marek Kohn, 2008
Michael Wade
James Marshall
Kin selection explains phenomena such as human lactation. Group selection explains it too (it makes the same predictions). Kin selection largely explains parental care and nepotism—which have a moral dimension. QED.
That’s a straw-man characterisation of the idea. It pays in enough cases for it to evolve genetically. Not all cooperation is due to DNA genes (some is due to culture), but cooperation is a widespread phenomenon, and most scientists agree that humans have niceness in their DNA genes—more than their nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) do.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick there. To recap, you wrote:
I claimed that we do have enough evidence to go on. I stand by that. Without performing any more experiments, we have enough information to figure out the evolutionary basis of human morality, in considerable detail. Basically, we have an enormous mass of highly pertinent information. It’s more than enough to go on, I reckon.