Preamble:
My recent experience with Peaceful Science has been that my posts evoke no response. No acceptance, no rejection, just silence. I put that down to an old acquaintance having trashed my reputation, based on earlier dealings on Richard Dawkins.net (or was it .com?) and on Ratskep. Well, no problem. I enjoy writing essays on a little-read Substack series called African Genesis II. There I developed a working relation with AI where I would use it for information and fact checking, while ignoring its suggestions to write the essay itself. Then I give the AI a copy of a post once it has been published. Often the AI response has been interesting enough to be posted as an appendix. In the case of the post below, I rewrote a few paragraphs. The edited text won’t be read much, as my few readers usually pick up the post in a day or so from email or Linkedin or Facebook. But I thought of also dropping the edited post in here, just on the chance PS actually picks it up.
African Genesis II as a top-down human origin story
Are we owners or owned?work in here,
1. Introduction
When I asked ChatGPT to review “The hard-to-kill ape and a theory of living boundaries” it told me that I had been rediscovering an existing scientific view that humans can meaningfully be analysed as superorganisms under some conditions. The AI cited E.O. Wilson’s 2012 book “The Social Conquest of Earth”. Wilson was an eminent (Harvard) entomologist who argued that humans are organised more like termites and ants than like most mammals. He pointed out that important terms “soldier, worker, queen, war” are used only with humans and such eusocial insects. And eusocial populations now dominate the Earth’s terrestrial animal biomass as “superorganisms”.
It’s true that much of what I have been arguing in African Genesis II was better said by Wilson more than a decade ago. Some of what he argued I hadn’t known, some I had forgotten and some I hadn’t understood in the first place.
Wilson’s 2012 book was based on a 2010 article in Nature “The evolution of Eusociality” by Martin A Nowak , Corina E Tarnita, Edward O Wilson. It is now available here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279739/
2. Mapping African Genesis II onto Wilson’s theory of group evolution of superorganisms.
Wilson et al suggested that “the full theory of eusocial evolution consists of a series of stages”, which they then listed five. The arguments in African Genesis II map onto these stages, centred on figure 1, which ChatGPT called “the elephant in the room: the abrupt onset and long persistence of encephalization signals a regime shift in selective pressures, not a gradual tweak to an ape-like niche”
Figure 1: Two-trend graph of hominin brain growth.
These five stages in the evolution of eusocial behaviour are given below, with my commentary mapping African Genesis II onto it.
1.** Wilson et al: “1. The formation of groups.”**
A plausible model for the behaviour of Australopiths and their ancestors, are baboons, who have often been found associated with their fossils. Baboons forage by day in groups. At night they select group nesting sites that are as safe as possible from predators, particularly tree-agile leopards.
2.** Wilson et al: “The occurrence of a minimum and necessary combination of preadaptive traits, causing the groups to be tightly formed. In animals at least, the combination includes a valuable and defensible nest”.**
According to the hard-to-kill ape theory, australopiths used hand weapons to keep predators at a distance during the day. At night they slept within defensible nests such as thorn barricades, or barricaded cave entrances. If the boundary was defended by relatively effective young males then they would be at highest risk. If one were killed, that might change the male hierarchy without a cost to the group’s ability to breed. But if the boundary were breached, the valuable female breeding stock and infants would be threatened. Infants, females and elderly would be better protected in a group with a defended boundary.
3.** Wilson et al: “The appearance of mutations that prescribe the persistence of the group, most likely by the silencing of dispersal behavior. Evidently, a durable nest remains a key element in maintaining the prevalence. Primitive eusociality may emerge immediately due to springloaded preadaptations”.**
The labour involved in building a barricade without sharp tools would encourage using the same nesting site for a long time. A barricade would need maintenance to repair deteriorated material and to strengthen revealed weaknesses.
Figure 1 shows the Taung Child near the abrupt start of a 2-million-year period of 20 times more rapid and continuous brain growth, for which australopiths were preadapted in having (1) short-muzzle skulls not subject to biting stresses, (2) infants well protected from predation, enabling the long-helplessness associated with plastic brain maturing after birth.
Figure 1 also implies murkier earlier preadaptions for the separation of bipedal, short-canine, less tree-adapted hominins, from their ape cousins. Arboreal chimps were preadapted to become hand weapon users by being large relative to their predators, having strong hand grips, and being familiar with wood. Plausible triggers for rapid adaptation into becoming effective users of effective wooden weapons would be climate change that made it attractive to forage on the savanna beyond immediate refuge in trees, or the appearance of dispersed fruiting trees. Wood-living creatures came with their familiar wood onto the savanna, but used in novel ways.
4.** Wilson et al*: “Emergent traits caused by the interaction of group members are shaped through natural selection by environmental forces”.***
ChatGPT explained that Wilson was referring here to Natural Selection acting on differences in fitness between whole colonies (superorganisms), not just between individuals or genes. For example, different efficiencies in hive thermoregulation in different competing bee hives lead to individual bees in fitter hives doing a better job of fanning the hive. The emergent trait affects group fitness. Superorganisms act as “Darwinian individuals”.
That human language is a group-level trait is demonstrated obliquely by the observation that, especially in regions with long-persisting national boundaries, those are also language boundaries ––people in France speak French.
ChatGPT told me of several theories about how language could have evolved, citing Robin Dunbar (language evolved from social grooming) and Michael Tomasello (humans evolved a unique capacity for shared intentionality). But an overarching point is simply that language has turned out to be immensely adaptive, in a species whose biomass, with our livestock, now makes up 96% of the global mammalian biomass. Consider how non-competitive a non-speaking hominin group would be today, supposing some virus were to attack the speech-centres of their brains.
Group selection provides a simple explanation of why, considering how adaptive language has turned out to be, only humans can talk. Only humans formed bounded groups that competed with each other.
5.** Wilson et al: Multilevel selection drives changes in the colony life cycle and social structures, often to elaborate extremes.**
ChatGPT explained that by “elaborate extremes” Wilson meant that “Once selection shifts decisively to the group level, natural selection is willing to sacrifice almost everything about the individual organism”. For example, ant and termite superorganisms independently evolved kamikaze-like workers that explode in a crisis (autothysis).
Humans can also be groomed to sacrifice themselves for a greater end, but using a language-borne ideology rather than genetic variation between workers and soldiers, etc. Language can then be seen as partly an alternative route for optimising superorganism fitness by structuring behaviour- martyr, worker, soldier, leader. From that perspective, human societies appear to be riddled with important organic ideologies that are difficult for the individual to escape and which can be attractive to serve.
3. The role of ideology in the reception of group selection.
ChatGPT categorised the reception of Wilson’s group selection theory like this:
1. Among evolutionary biologists: hostile, sometimes ferocious
2. Among biologists outside the narrow theory wars: mixed to respectful
3. Among philosophers and social theorists: surprisingly positive
4. Among the general public: very well received
According to Wikipedia, "the Nature article was controversial, with many experts arguing against its conclusions, including an “outraged response” later in the same journal by 137 authors. Richard Dawkins wrote a harshly critical review for Prospect…"
ChatGPT provided these criticisms by Dawkins:
“Group selection is a sort of benevolent-looking theoretical refuge for people who don’t understand natural selection.”
— Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (1982)
And another, from The Selfish Gene (2nd ed., 1989), explicitly dismissive in tone:
“The kind of group selection which assumes that individuals will restrain themselves for the good of the group is almost certainly wrong.”
These reactions point to a threatened establishment insistence that evolution must be seen as driven at the most atomic level of the anthropomorphised gene, or the gene’s effects on its environment as its extended phenotype. The polar opposite to this position would be that evolution is driven at the higher ecological level as Wilson heretically suggested. The arguments in African Genesis II are that “top-down” models have been left unexplored precisely because they are top-down.
A top-down origin story isn’t necessarily as benevolent as Dawkins suggests. It implies that human individuals are somewhat owned, at least by their language and society. That can be difficult for heirs of the Western Enlightenment to accept. And one can easily find examples of bad things done by people who have followed different ideologies, such as the Nazi Fuhrer Principle. But these are inescapable moral dilemmas posed by the real-world human condition.
Mea Culpa.
Dan_Eastwood
