Where New Adaptations Come From

 I posted a video in which I explain where new evolutionary adaptations, and cultural innovations, come from. I filmed the video in Strasbourg, which has many old villages crammed together, such as Hoenheim (where I live) and Bischeim and even one called Souffelweyersheim.

Here is how I learned the process of natural selection. A new mutation appears, then if it is a good one, natural selection favors it. It starts off very rare—only one individual carries it—and ends up common, maybe even going to fixation (completely replacing the other versions of the gene). This is the way I taught it, and the way I wrote about it in my Encyclopedia of Evolution.

But the reality is more complicated, as is usually the case in science. If the mutation appears in a large population, say, a million organisms, then it is extremely rare—one in a million. No matter how good it is, it can get lost by random events before it has a chance to get selected. It has virtually no chance.

But suppose the large population, a million individuals, consists of small interconnected populations, maybe a hundred each. If the mutation occurs in one of them, it has a chance of becoming common, maybe even going to fixation. One chance in a hundred. Then if it spreads to another population, it has another one chance in a hundred to go to fixation. If this happens a hundred times, the new mutation now has ten thousand chances out of a million to be successful.

This is the shifting balances theory of Sewall Wright, who was one of the most important figures in the modern theory of evolution. He was publishing books right up until his death almost at age 100. New adaptations get started in small populations. That is the only way they have a ghost of a chance of succeeding. This is how natural selection must work.

Cultural evolution works the same way, but with ideas instead of genes. Suppose somebody got a great new idea in Hoenheim (or even Souffelweyersheim!). In a small village, the idea might have a chance to spread. If it becomes common in Hoenheim, it might become common in Strasbourg as well. And from there it might have a chance of success in Paris. (This may be unlikely, since Parisians consider themselves the cultural center of the universe, and Strasbourg, to them, is unspeakably provincial.) And from Paris, maybe the world. But the new idea popping up in Paris would get swamped out by all the other ideas in Paris.

This is not the whole story because, of course, Paris consists of lots of small populations, local neighborhoods and arrondissements. A big new idea in the 49^th arrondissement might spread to the 5^th.

One of the major examples of a cultural innovation starting in a place considered provincial is the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg perhaps had to start in an out of the way place—in fact, it was Strasbourg, where I now live. He did not start in Paris or Vienna.

 

Population Thinking and Why It Matters

According to the foremost philosopher of biology, the late Ernst Mayr, one of the most important advances in biological science has been population thinking. That is, we now understand that all the members of a population (or any other set of individuals) have individual variability. They are not all the same. Without this understanding, nobody could grasp the concept of natural selection. How could some individuals in a population (of bacteria, trees, or humans) have more offspring than others (aside from sheer luck) if they were all the same?

Here is one simple example. In this photo, I hold in my hand acorns from two post oak trees. The acorns from one tree are larger than those from another tree. I show that this difference in size is greater between trees than it is among the acorns from a single tree. The two on the left are from one tree, the two on the right from another, of the same species.

Darwin based his theory of natural selection on the work of Thomas Robert Malthus, the economist who said that there were always more people than resources, at least most of the time. Suffering and privation were, therefore, inevitable. Darwin did not simply apply this idea to plants and animals, as some people think. Darwin had to make the transition to population thinking. Even Malthus did not have population thinking; to him, all members of a human population were the same: they all worked, ate, had babies, and died, pretty much the same way.

The lack of population thinking is also why early experiments did not have replication. Bacon used only two chickens in his freezing experiment, and Redi had only two flasks for his spontaneous generation experiment. If all chickens, and all flasks with meat in them, were the same, then replication is not necessary.

Common sense, they say, is neither common nor sense. Many people, when they see an example of something, assume that it represents the entire picture. If some Republicans commit an act of domestic terrorism, as happened this last January 6, then all of them will, if given the opportunity. This is not true (I think). Because of individual differences, you need a sample. When I studied how much garbage was left along Oklahoma roadsides, I counted the garbage from many different stretches of roadside, and not just the ones that looked trashy. If I simply looked at the trashiest roadside, and assumed it was typical, I would have reached the incorrect conclusion that Oklahoma highways have over 300 pieces of garbage per mile. (Actually, it is “only” 100.)

How do we know that we have looked at enough samples of people, things, or places to draw a legitimate conclusion about them? That, my friend, is what the science of statistics is all about. And that is another story, though not one you will probably read in this blog.

Listen to the Scientists! A Look Back at Harrison Brown

 

Harrison Brown was a twentieth-century nuclear chemist who developed some of the most important processes that went into making the bombs that fell on Japan at the end of World War II. His role in ushering in the age of nuclear war bothered him, however, and he became an activist not only to work against nuclear proliferation but one of the leading scientists of his time to analyze the prospects for the human future.

 

One of the earliest books that faced the ecological challenges of human survival was his 1954 book, The Challenge of Man’s Future. Remember that this was more than a decade before the environmental movement began. Starting about 1968, dozens of books, some reasonable, some alarmist, came out claiming that human civilization and industry was going to destroy the world. One of these books, by Gene Marine, was called America the Raped, and the cover picture showed a bulldozer destroying the entire natural world. But Harrison Brown’s book predated the alarmism. On the cover, H. J. Muller, Albert Einstein, and (of course) Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas praised Brown’s book.

Brown took into consideration all the data he could find to make projections about the future. First, about human population. He took a close look at human demography: female survival and childbirth rates, for example. His book was one of the earliest to have population pyramids which are now standard in every text. He considered that birth rates might decrease if contraception was made widely available. But he also shared the view of the Malthusians, among whom was a physicist of whom I had never heard (Sir Charles Galton Darwin, who wrote a book in 1953; guess whom he was descended from), that people will have as many kids as they can unless restrained by law.

Then he considered food production. How much food can we produce? Although neither he nor anyone else actually foresaw the Green Revolution, he did consider technological advances in food production, including the possibility, then new, of large-scale hydroponics. He even considered the possibility that humans could get most of their calories from Chlorella, a single-celled alga that does not need farmland to grow. He said the Earth could support 100 billion people if everyone ate Chlorella, but he knew this would never happen.

He also considered the availability of energy and raw materials for transportation, industry, etc. Nobody knew how much, or how little, coal and oil there was. He said that there was a lot of coal and oil, as well as mineral ores, but that we were rapidly depleting the easily available materials. He made his estimates of mineral availability, even such rare minerals as vanadium, based on the assumption that we will not recycle them. Many modern “conservative” economists also do not believe that recycling is worthwhile. Brown said there is a lot of oil, if you are willing to spend a lot of money to extract it. No more gushers. He could not foresee fracking, but this is what happened: fracking is not cheap. Brown considered biofuels. For example, he said that 10 tons of sugarcane have as much energy as 6 tons of coal, but once again it is hard work to use biofuels. Natural petroleum, he concluded, will be a memory of the distant past.

Considering all the data, Brown made predictions of what the human population of the Earth would be in the future. His predictions were pretty good for 1954, but he underestimated human population growth. He predicted 6.0 billion people by 2025, and 6.7 billion by 2050. But we are, in 2020, rapidly approaching the 8 billion mark.

Overshadowing everything, in 1954, was the real risk of nuclear annihilation, something about which he knew a lot. He considered war to be inevitable. It was “...likely that industrial civilization is doomed to extinction.” The elimination of war, as impossible as it was and is, he considered to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the persistence of civilization. War could, Brown said, destroy civilization, and whatever might emerge in the aftermath would be something very different from civilization as we know it. For example, much of our technical knowledge would be valueless if society collapsed, and would then be forgotten.

Brown said that the United States had a special role to play in the future of the world. “...the destiny of humanity depends upon our decisions and upon our actions. We still possess freedom, our resources, and our knowledge, to stimulate the evolution of a world communtiy within which people are well fed and within which they can lead free, abundant, creative lives. Or we can refuse to take constructive action, in which case man will almost certainly start down the steep incline... Never before in history has so much responsibility been inherited by a group of human beings.” America needed to be a peacemaker. This fantasy is becoming less likely every year.

My conclusion is this. Listen to the scientists! Not to the talking heads paid by corporations, nor to environmental extremists. Listen to the people who analyze and try to understand the data! Listen to the International Panel on Climate Change. And realize that, if the past is any guide, the scientific predictions will be underestimates of the perils we will face, just as Brown’s underestimated our current population by two billion people.

The Decline and Fall of Garrett Hardin

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Garrett Hardin was a big name in popular science. His fame began with the publication of “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Science in 1968, in which he explained how human society, like any animal society, will evolve towards the over-exploitation of any resources that are not privately held. This article was and remains a direct attack on the role of altruism (about which I have often written in this blog). With altruism, members of a population agree with one another to, among other things, share common resources fairly for the benefit of everyone. It is an unstable condition, but has such great benefits that, in numerous human societies, it has worked, even if imperfectly. But to read what Hardin wrote, you would get the impression that it can never work at all.

Today, few scientists agree with Hardin’s approach. Many ecologists and environmental scientists use his Science article for discussion. Chances are that you already know that much of Hardin’s work is now ignored. In what follows, I just want to give you an example of why his views have fallen into disrepute.

In his book Nature and Man’s Fate, Hardin stated his beliefs very clearly. He said that, since mankind is part of nature, then the only way we can hope to solve any of the world’s problems is to let natural selection take care of it. For example, what do we do about diseases? In particular reference to genetic diseases, Hardin explained why eugenics could not work. The reason is that nobody is smart enough to choose which people are superior and should be chosen to breed (positive eugenics) or which people are inferior and should be prevented from breeding (negative eugenics). Today, most people (including most scientists) believe eugenics is an unethical idea; but to Hardin, it was merely impractical.

Even though no human is smart enough to guide the process of eugenics, Hardin said, nature is smart enough. Look at all the amazing adaptations natural selection has produced! Surely the problems of the human species, at least the genetic ones, can be solved by natural selection. But to do so, Hardin said, we have to let natural selection have its way with our species. He praised competition, over and over, and said that natural selection would weed out inferior people.

Let nature take its course: this was Hardin’s fundamental belief. He had no tolerance for the tender hearts of liberals who wanted to interfere with natural selection’s work of clearing away inferior people.

Nearly every scientist rejects this view today. We spend a lot of money trying to save the lives of people with genetic abnormalities whom Hardin apparently believed should die. Indeed, natural selection would solve our problems, but only after the deaths of millions of people and the passage of hundreds of years.

Or not. During the hundreds of thousands of years before modern medicine, natural selection was all we had to solve our genetic problems. And it didn’t. If natural selection is going to save us, when the hell is it going to start doing so?

Hardin went further. He said that we should not interfere with any society that might start performing deeds that we consider morally dangerous. He said that, due to genetic diversity, there are many, many possible “constellations of moral principles” that could assemble themselves in human societies. Some of them we would call good, and some of them we would call evil. But there are far more evil and partly-evil constellations than there are good ones. And we should let the evil ones have their way, do whatever the hell they want to do, and let natural selection choose the winner.

He added one provision: no society should be allowed to threaten the existence of any other society.

One example of what he meant is that if a country has too high of a birth rate, then other countries should just let it starve to death.

Though Hardin did not use this example, his view requires that Nazi Germany needed to be stopped, but only because it started taking over other countries. If the Nazis had just stayed home and killed their own Jews and Gypsies and Slavs and gays, then that would have been, according to Hardin, just fine.

Have I misinterpreted him? Read it for yourself, from page 278 of the Mentor paperback reprint of his book: “The good constellations…are only a tiny fraction of all that are possible, but this fraction is surely a large number. It may be hard to resist trying to punish a society whose moral practices are repugnant to us, but only a policy of live-and-let-live will permit the development of the variety of communities that is needed to insure man’s continued existence…Put bluntly, every community must be free to go to hell in its own way, so long as its action does not endanger the continued existence of other communities. A community must, for instance, enjoy the freedom to breed itself into a state of starvation, if it so wishes, without a finger being lifted elsewhere to interfere with its stupidity. To interfere, to save it from the consequences of its own immorality is but to postpone and aggravate the problem, and to spread the moral infection.”

With regard to what was at the time the book was written called “the population explosion,” Hardin has been proved wrong over and over and over. Developed countries did NOT leave the less developed countries alone to die in their own misery of starvation and disease. Developed countries sent food, medicine, and education to those countries, the very things that Hardin considered to be wrong. By Hardin’s hypothesis, the fertility rates of these miserable countries should have skyrocketed, or at least not declined. But what actually happened was that in nearly every country, nearly every decade, especially the “poor” countries, fertility rates have declined precipitously. About 1953, Guatemala had a fertility rate of 7.0 (that is, the typical family had 7 kids); today the rate is 2.7. In Bangladesh, fertility went down from 6.7 to 2.1; the exact same figures for Mexico. In South Africa, it declined from 6.5 to 2.4. This occurred in hundreds of countries over many decades. This represents a couple of thousand tests of the Hardin hypothesis, and in nearly all cases, the hypothesis failed. By the time of his death by suicide in 2003, he must have already realized this, for the decline in fertility rates had been ongoing for decades by that time.

One problem with letting “a society” choose its own fate is that societies do not choose their fates; individuals do. Natural selection, which Hardin claimed to have known everything about, works on individuals, not societies. Notice the quote above. “A community must…enjoy the freedom to breed itself into a state of starvation, if it so wishes.” Communities do not breed; people do. And as soon as individual people in “poor” countries got the opportunity to be healthy and well fed, they chose to have fewer kids. Hardin not only chose a brutal application of natural selection, but an incorrect one.

Hardly anyone today says, “Let those poor dark countries breed themselves to hell.” We now all know Hardin was wrong. But it is now high time for us to relegate Garrett Hardin’s views to the dustbin of cruel and failed biological theories, alongside the Trofim Lysenko he so vigorously (and correctly) criticized. Good riddance!

In passing, Hardin added something that we all know is usually wrong: that people who have inherited wealth “almost universally” feel an obligation to do good. Let people who have inherited their wealth keep all of it, because they will use it to help society. What a crock. Many do—a perfect example of the indirect reciprocity form of altruism about which Hardin knew nothing—but there are just as many counter-examples. For every Rockefeller there is a Trump.

When I was in graduate school, a fellow student expressed amazement that I had not taken Hardin’s human ecology class when I was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara. But today, as I look back on it, I am glad I did not.

Hardin tried to steal some glamor from Darwin to polish his views. I have italicized the passages in which Hardin compared his cruel and incorrect view of the world to Darwin’s correct view of how non-human species evolve. This is how he ended his book (page 297 of the paperback): “Out of luxuriant waste, winnowed by selection, come designs more beautiful and in greater variety than ever man could plan. This is the lesson of Nature that Darwin has spelled out for us. Man, now that he makes himself, cannot do better than to emulate Nature’s example in allowing for waste and encouraging novelty. There is grandeur in this view of life as a complex of cybernetic systems that produce adaptedness without foresight, design without planning, and progress without dictation. From the simplest means, man, now master of his own fate, may evolve societies of a variety and novelty—yes, and even of a beauty—that no man living can now foresee.”

The Evolution of Individuality

Last fall, when the leaves were turning, the cottonwood trees were patchworks of yellow and green. Each branch seemed to be on its own schedule for leaf fall, even though all of the branches were on the same tree, had the same genes, and experienced the same environmental conditions. I am not sure why this pattern occurred. But it got me to thinking about the evolution of individuality.

One of the common themes in science fiction over the decades has been the rise of the clones. Maybe some mad scientist somewhere is creating clones of humanoids. Or hordes of machine-like, identical outer space monsters attack Earth. We fear the power of genetically-identical hordes, whether of insects or humans. When a group all looks alike to us, we assume every member of the group is identical, even when they are not. To prejudiced European eyes in the past, large populations of Mongols or Chinese or Japanese looked alike, even though this is not true. In the history of the eighteenth-century American frontier, all Cherokees looked alike to the whites, and the Cherokees could not tell the difference between Englishmen and Americans. Individualistic Americans looked with fear on the superficial sameness of communists. To human eyes, all bees look alike. We fear their uniformity, because it looks to us as if they are merely parts of a gigantic monster network, no single individual of which may be dangerous. But we fear the mindless devotion of each individual to a collective superorganism. In fact, most biologists think of swarms of bees, ants, or wasps as organisms whose components are the individuals.

But much of this fear is based on a misunderstanding of evolution. Even in conditions of near or complete genetic uniformity, social evolution favors individuality. As identical twins grow up, they usually diverge in their personalities, each wanting to carve out his or her own niche in the little world in which they spend their childhood. In evolving populations, even the slightest genetic differences can become the basis for sympatric speciation, a divergence into different species even when the organisms are located in the same place.

Robots of any given make really are all alike, all programmed to respond the same way to circumstances. This is never the case with biological organisms. But even with robots, if the robot creators should incorporate a genetic algorithm into their control systems, robots can diverge into different, as it were, personalities. Evolution, whether biological or social (or, in the case of genetic algorithms, computational), always produces diversity. Of course, stabilizing selection can then eliminate some of this diversity. But new diversity always comes along.

While I do not understand why cottonwood trees in autumn are patchworks of yellow and green, they remind me of the never-ending evolution of diversity.

Future Depopulation

Two of the basic facts about natural selection, a process in which even creationists believe, are that populations grow exponentially and that resources are limited. An inescapable inference from this, according to Ernst Mayr’s outline of natural selection, is the struggle for existence.

All of us hope that the human population will level off, without any catastrophic crashes. And most projections of world population show a leveling off, perhaps at nine billion people. This is because, although our population continues to grow, the rate of growth is decreasing. We have passed the inflection point (where the second derivative = 0, for you math types) and we hope to eventually reach a stable maximum (where the first derivative = 0).

Unfortunately, I fear that this is not going to happen. I fear that the world will experience massive, catastrophic depopulation. Here’s why.

More and more jobs are being done by robots and computers. Robots can build cars mighty well. Someday computers may replace all physicians except specialists. I recently talked with a student who had just given up the idea of being a radiologist, because X-rays will soon be something a computer can do with minimal supervision by a lower-level staff member. Of course, only large corporations can afford the computers and robots, but there is an increasing trend for large corporations to drive small companies out of business. Indeed, it seems that many people are beginning to work like robots. They go through the motions of work without thinking about what they are doing. That’s why there are so many basic mistakes and malfunctions in the products we buy.

Eventually, I suspect, job opportunities will greatly decline even while population continues to grow. We are facing a massive unemployment problem. There are only three things that can prevent this.

The first is continued economic growth. If an ever larger proportion of jobs are being filled by robots, the economy has to grow even faster so that people can find the jobs that robots cannot do. But this cannot happen indefinitely. Remember the basic fact that resources are limited. As economist Kenneth Boulding said, anyone who believes that exponential growth can occur forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. Of course, government can create jobs, but the tax and debt burden is becoming unsustainable, and government job opportunities are decreasing.

The second is for consumers to insist on patronizing only small businesses. But we already find this difficult to do. It is more expensive and less convenient—not much, but enough so that not enough people will do this to make a difference in the long run.

The third is for most people to become desperately poor and willing to work for almost nothing. Right now, robots are cheaper (once the corporation has made the initial investment). That is because employees have rights, such as minimum wage and now including health care. But as the number of unemployed people grows, aid becomes scarce. For example, House Republicans insisted on vastly cutting food stamps, and also insisted on creating an artificial crisis in order to destroy health care, both in September 2013. Most people will embrace even the lowest-paying jobs. They can work 19 hours and 58 minutes a week for less than minimum wage, have no health care, and have no recourse for getting safe working conditions (should unions all perish), if the alternative is starvation. They would even embrace indentured servitude, a form of slavery, if it meant that they would survive. I know I would. “Live free or die” sounds like a stirring motto but how many of us would do it? Indentured servitude would be good for business, and anyone who opposes it would be labeled as a big-government interventionist. As the mass of people get poorer while the top one percent get richer (a trend that is occurring rapidly right now), people will either have fewer kids or more of the kids will die, thus “reducing the surplus population,” as Scrooge said.

But this creates a circle that feeds on itself. This is because as more and more desperate people accept really bad jobs or even indentured servitude, more and more corporations will reduce their employee costs accordingly. And any generous corporations will find themselves losing money. It is a struggle for existence among the poor and among the corporations.

And then add the food shortages caused by global climate change on top of that.

How can we prevent this from happening? In the next entry, I will share an idea that comes from a most unexpected source.

Of course I hope I’m wrong. Let me know what you think.