Group Selection leads to a top-down human origin story

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Jay

If you just glance at Oppenheimer’s graph of encephalization and innovation that seems so, but if you take a second to notice his non-linear scales on both axes then you need some fiddling to overlap it with the linear scales of my two-step interpretation. A year ago I made the table below. I scaled the terminals of his trend lines for various homo species, estimating by eye. Then I took their mid values as framed in red:

AND

@Jay

Admittedly, there’s opportunity for me to have nudged those data points closer to the line, which I tried not do. But contrary to your claim, there’s a lot of overlap between ChatGPT’s data and Oppenheimer’s.

I am very skeptical - It’s not that you might be nudging things, it’s just a weird thing to do. You are essentially trying to average across species - drawing a line between midpoints is presuming some sort of hybrid species existed continuously between those midpoints. It’s like averaging the weight of apples and oranges; you always get a number, but apple-oranges do not exist. At best this average has no meaning, and at worst is just wrong. Note that Oppenheimer draws one line for each species, not between species.

@Jay

I’m have been naive in imagining that if I bring little dollops of facts and arguments to Peaceful Science, the peaceful scientists are going to do something different than indifferent stonewalling. It’s frustrating

There is no question among scientists that brain capacity greatly increased, but I don’t see how that adds to a discussion about natural selection and encephalization. Scientists aren’t ignoring the sudden change; there are multiple hypotheses (some you mentioned) about the ways that great brain capacity allowed an explosion of new ways to improve relative fitness. Some are more controversial (and less testable) than others.

Part of the problem you face is that others before you have tried to use AI to support really bad arguments here. Relying heavily on AI is not a strength of your argument, but a potential weakness. That is a sort of prejudice, but a well grounded one.

You are making a vague claim that natural selection is inadequate to account for rapid increase in brains size. There is nothing here to support that - HOW brain size was able to influence selection is the open question. Arguing for a sort of top-down selection has it’s place, but no one thinks any species was actively planning to evolve. It’s more like a change in the basic unit of selection, but that selection is still operating bottom-up.

PS: The math you are doing to make your plot is problematic - it would be better just to show Oppenheimer’s plot.