Updating the Software of Social Evolution to Patch the Kin-Recognition Bug

In this episode, my brother Jon and I discuss my work on the evolution of kin recognition. Jon is a software engineer and likes to put my arguments in terms of debugging software. For many years, the mere finding of kin recognition in nature was taken as prima facie evidence of W. D. Hamilton's theory of "inclusive fitness." A large paradigm was built on the teleological assumption that kin recognition is evidence of the final cause of "inclusive fitness maximization."  A major anomaly to this paradigm called "Crozier's paradox," analogous to a software bug, suggested that kin recognition could not evolve for directing altruism to kin.  When I finally resolved Crozier's paradox almost 30 years after it first appeared, the implications were extremely disruptive. As Jon would put it, much of the "software" of social evolution came to depend on the assumptions that led to Crozier's paradox. By questioning these assumptions, my theory implied that social evolutionists had misunderstood the adaptive basis of kin recognition, incorrectly tested Hamilton's rule, and misinterpreted Darwinism. Particularly, social evolutionists had misinterpreted Darwin's theory as teleological and tried to justify this teleology with generalized mathematical equations, like inclusive fitness or generalized versions of Hamilton's rule. Jon and I discuss how that theorists rejected my work because it did not conform to their prior expectations about what "general theory" is supposed to be, even though it yielded novel predictions for the genetics and evolution of kin recognition that were upheld by 50 years of evidence. We end this podcast with a brief discussion of the differences between scientific peer review and open software forums that allows "bugs" to persist in science. This episode is essential listening for anyone who wants to know what is wrong with science today. References and notes for this episode can be found at the natural reward blog.

Transcript

00;00;07;12 - 00;00;30;18

Speaker 1

Hello. Welcome to the Natural Reward Podcast. My name is Owen Gilbert. Today I'll be talking to my brother Jon Gilbert about my own research on the evolution of kin recognition. We'll start this conversation with a discussion of Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness and how it led to a major anomaly of theory called Crozier's Paradox. Crozier's Paradox called into question the paradigm that took the finding of kin recognition in nature as evidence of inclusive fitness. We’ll then discuss how I resolved Crozier's paradox with a new model that allowed for a more complex genetic system in different forms of behavior along the way. Jon will make some analogies to software engineering and finding bugs and debugging software. Listening to this episode requires getting into some specialized topics, but I think you'll be rewarded with a profound understanding of social evolution at the end and Jon's lingo, your software will have been updated.

00;00;55;12 - 00;01;25;11

Speaker 1

HAMILTON He had this model of the evolution of altruism. That was the first thing he published about, and that's what he mainly talked about. And that actually was a useful principle, and it was based on sound evolutionary reasoning. But then he also had this notion of inclusive fitness maximization, which he used to give the appearance that he had predicted kin recognition with his model, even though he didn't have a model of kin recognition and by kin recognition, what we mean is the ability to perceive correlates of relatedness.

00;01;25;11 - 00;01;47;11

Speaker 1

And so that would mean both the perception and the cues accused for discrimination could potentially be contexts like spatial locations or times. But if they're going to evolve adaptively by natural selection, they have to be phenotypes of the organism with a genetic component. It's also possible that the perception ability of kin recognition could evolve adaptively. Although most evidence suggests that that could evolve for other reasons.

00;01;47;11 - 00;02;06;20

Speaker 1

And it's only the key component that has to be explained by adaptive evolution for the purpose of kin recognition itself. HAMILTON And actually, in recognition of the model said he simply said, well, if an organism could recognize as kin an advantage to inclusive fitness would appear. It kind of makes sense. If you help your kin, it helps your own genes.

00;02;06;20 - 00;02;36;17

Speaker 1

So it's almost like helping your offspring. You hope you can reproduce that kind of behavior. You can be selected. Okay, so then it seems to follow will kin recognition, you know, that would that would help you in your ability to aid relatives and so maybe kin recognition of also the same type of reason and it's maximizing your comfort inclusive fitness which is what he defined was the effect of your actions, whatever behaviors you have on your own reproduction and others like your whoever you are associated with.

00;02;36;22 - 00;03;00;16

Speaker 1

Although Hamilton's model was based on a single gene, Hamilton said that the notion of inclusive fitness applied to the individual level is useful. This would seem to imply that individuals like an entire organism, all its genes and its genome, will maximize this thing he calls inclusive fitness, although you can derive it for one gene. And really any selective model is all about a allele frequency change.

00;03;00;26 - 00;03;28;21

Speaker 1

And so it's really no different than any other model of natural selection. He just did the math in a more complicated way, but he gave the impression that he had predicted this phenomenon with the model kin recognition. Right? That's what everybody took from his paper, that kin discrimination and discrimination being the actual behavioral actions, not just the recognition of ability, but actual behaviors and the ability to recognize can would evolve in order to maximize inclusive fitness.

00;03;28;21 - 00;03;53;09

Speaker 1

And a lot of people basically embarked on these empirical research programs to show kin recognition in nature. And so they started finding in all sorts of organisms. And every time somebody found that these various organisms could recognize kin, you know, it seemed to be evidence for this theory because before Hamilton's theory and nobody had talked about this much and it seemed to be a novel prediction.

00;03;53;09 - 00;04;07;15

Speaker 2

So what you're saying is that Hamilton came up with this idea of inclusive fitness, where some particular gene could be seen as increasing fitness for this for for some organism. Right.

00;04;08;07 - 00;04;08;15

Speaker 1

Yeah.

00;04;08;26 - 00;04;29;18

Speaker 2

And then he then also predicted that if kin recognition were to evolve, organisms that had the ability to recognize their own kin would be favored over the ones that couldn't because they could use that kid in recognition to avoid harming their kin or help their kin or whatever.

00;04;30;01 - 00;04;31;07

Speaker 1

Right, exactly.

00;04;31;22 - 00;04;43;24

Speaker 2

And so then people started finding kin recognition. And so they're like, oh, Hamilton's right. But Hamilton had said that inclusive fitness about some particular gene would be why this happens.

00;04;44;12 - 00;04;44;23

Speaker 1

Yeah.

00;04;45;12 - 00;05;04;14

Speaker 2

But he never proved that that would actually happen that way. Or and when people would find these organs, I'm guessing they didn't, like, genetically sequenced and then do an experiment where they edit out the one gene with CRISPR and then see if it still has kin forever. They just they just assume that, like. Oh, he's right.

00;05;04;15 - 00;05;27;26

Speaker 1

Exactly right. Yeah. That's an interesting thought experiment. My prediction would be that if he edited out the main genes involved with kin recognition with the initial behavior, then you would have some other genes that are less variable. And these cases where it's involved with fusion rejection systems or association preference, you'd have the secondary genes that are conflict genes, and it's the low variability of those.

00;05;27;26 - 00;05;56;02

Speaker 1

It's like for the high variability of others. But we can get to that in a minute. Okay. But just like the medicine, for a long time after Hamilton's theory, there is all this research on kin recognition sharing and all sorts of organisms, from bacteria to vertebrates and even, you know, slime mold, fungi, marine invertebrates, plants. And so this was seen as this amazing prediction, apparently from this very complicated, abstract mathematical model that almost nobody understood.

00;05;56;18 - 00;05;58;24

Speaker 2

When when was when was that?

00;05;58;25 - 00;06;00;10

Speaker 1

That was in 1964.

00;06;00;23 - 00;06;12;11

Speaker 2

Right? So 1964. So he's at this point, he's introduced a very complex mathematical model for inclusive fitness that almost no one actually understands.

00;06;12;13 - 00;06;12;24

Speaker 1

Yeah.

00;06;13;21 - 00;06;35;11

Speaker 2

But is it wrong? I mean, is it just overly complex or is there something about it that is wrong? Because it seems to me that with evolution, you're dealing with an extremely complex system, so you're having to be reductionist about it because there's no way you could possibly model, like all the variables and everything. So you're trying to be reductionist enough about it that you can create some predictions.

00;06;35;14 - 00;06;43;15

Speaker 2

Does his equation make good predictions or is it just really cumbersome to work with and it doesn't make good predictions?

00;06;43;28 - 00;07;05;05

Speaker 1

So I would say, number one, at the time that he was taking this approach and doing this in social evolution, behavioral ecology, that same approach based on the fitness maximization equations of right was going out of style in population genetics. And the reason was that the population geneticists realized that if you have more than one gene, then fitness doesn't maximize.

00;07;05;15 - 00;07;34;13

Speaker 1

And they starting around 1963, 1964, they had some controversy. And eventually by the early seventies, they moved away from that kind of holy grail. Hope to find some kind of like fundamental theorem of adaptation that, you know, you do a fitness maximization equation. It tells you like where evolution's headed. Population geneticists moved away from that approach and they then moved towards more like historical approaches of understanding the past history of evolution.

00;07;34;13 - 00;07;36;15

Speaker 1

How do you reconstruct phylogeny?

00;07;36;16 - 00;08;04;08

Speaker 2

And history is that Hamilton's model, as complex as it was, was all about understanding how one particular gene does one little unit of evolution could lead to, you know, could get selected for be the kind of locus of the forces of selection. But as soon as you have a trait that involves multiple genes that have to evolve separately for different reasons of selection, it breaks down, doesn't work.

00;08;04;29 - 00;08;24;28

Speaker 1

That's right. And the other thing is, in terms of being a single gene model, it was quite complicated. And there's easier ways to do it. There's there's much simpler ways to do the math and everything and but his model led to this assumption that individuals do maximize fitness in the way that the people in population genetics were trying to prove.

00;08;25;03 - 00;08;31;18

Speaker 1

So a lot of the behavioral ecologists type of people, they kind of forgot that his whole thing is based on one gene.

00;08;31;21 - 00;09;17;14

Speaker 2

So the population geneticists had moved away from using this idea of fitness because it just breaks down when you have multiple genes involved that could have been selected for for different reasons. And it's but the behavioral ecologists and social evolution people kind of latched on to this idea of inclusive fitness, but then sort of bastardized the theory by forgetting that it was one of the requirements of that model is that it's based on one gene and then they just started, I guess, using it or they would say, okay, kin recognition must be getting selected for somehow through this inclusive fitness deal, even though Kin recognition is actually based on multiple genes that can't work in

00;09;17;14 - 00;09;19;00

Speaker 2

that model, that that fair.

00;09;19;19 - 00;09;43;16

Speaker 1

Yeah, it was this weird situation where people totally forgot that it was a single locus model. And that's in part because of the concept of individual inclusive fitness that Hamilton advocated. And so people thought that they could apply the model to any trait, no matter how complex. And then it work not just for social actions like altruism or restraint on selfishness, but that it would also work for traits like kin recognition of unknown complexity.

00;09;43;25 - 00;10;11;28

Speaker 1

But I would like to point out what a Hamilton's model actually did. When you're talking about social interactions, there can be frequency dependency. Frequency dependency just means that like how common a gene is will impact its fitness. Kinship creates thiis very local scale genetic similarity that's different than the population average. It actually doesn't matter for that version of altruism or nepotism in general what the population average frequency is.

00;10;11;28 - 00;10;40;25

Speaker 1

What matters is the local scale frequency caused by kinship. From a genetic perspective, relatedness can be interpreted as the probability above random of sharing an allele. As the the frequency of an allele increases the random probability of sharing it increases. But relatedness stays the same. Thinking in terms of an allele for indiscriminate altruism when it's rare relatedness allows it to have a high local frequency, which means then that altruists encounter each other.

00;10;41;01 - 00;11;08;25

Speaker 1

And the more common non altruists also encounter each other. Therefore, the individuals with genes for altruism encounter other such individuals and they aren't cheated. And the genes for altruism gain an advantage. Then when the rules for altruism are common or fixed, what that means is that there ever was relatively stable because there's a an illegal for cheating pops up or non altruism its local frequency is high and it encounters itself, therefore it cheats itself and doesn't cheat.

00;11;08;25 - 00;11;31;16

Speaker 1

Altruism and altruism persists despite the threat of cheating. That's something that Hamilton shared. It's actually pretty easy to see if you use modern game theoretical ways of modeling social evolution. You're right that social evolutionists use a model of single Lucas evolution and applied it to multi Lucas system. I'm just pointing out that the single Lucas model was useful for modeling frequency dependency.

00;11;31;16 - 00;11;38;08

Speaker 1

In that sense, it did have some merits even if it wasn't really useful for modeling kin recognition per se because it was too simplistic.

00;11;38;08 - 00;12;06;26

Speaker 2

I just want to give a an overview for the listeners to understand where this is all going because this is extremely technical talk about evolution. But I think what's really important, the broad overview, what we're getting at here is that the theory of evolution is a body of theory being used to interpret natural history. So all the observations that scientists make about living organisms and their histories that we can find in the fossil record and in the living record and everywhere else.

00;12;07;08 - 00;12;33;13

Speaker 2

So that body of theory has these interpretive frameworks in it, like Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness or Darwin's theory of natural selection, or these other ideas that get used to interpret the data and say, This is the sort of evolutionary mechanisms by which these things have happened. So if you can think of that whole framework of ideas as like an operating system, it's like the software of evolution.

00;12;33;18 - 00;13;03;09

Speaker 2

And you have when Darwin's theory came out, you have like evolution 1.0, let's call it. And then over the course of time, people have added these new ideas like Hamilton's idea and so on. And you get like evolution 1.1, 1.2, right? It gets updated with these new ideas, but then sometimes you might run into a situation where there's something that gets observed that can't be accounted for by the existing evolution 1.2 version that's out at the time, right?

00;13;03;25 - 00;13;10;06

Speaker 2

And that's what like Crozier's Paradox was. It's like, right, is this so tell us about Crozier's Paradox.

00;13;10;23 - 00;13;34;11

Speaker 1

Crozier reasoned that sea enemies are sedentary, so when they discriminate, when they're like stinging each other and they're recognizing non relatives from relatives, they're relying on some kind of variable genetic cue, meaning like a variable gene that codes for some conspicuous trait that you can, you know, it can sort of sense it somehow and, you know, attack the ones that are different from it.

00;13;34;24 - 00;14;03;03

Speaker 1

Okay. So there's this variation that this gene, that's the Q locus. Okay. And so his question was like, what would maintain the variability of the gene? And when he just thought about it using basic logic, he thought, well, if I see a anemone had a common a well, it wouldn't get into as many fights. And so the ones with the common phenotypes that the cues or the common alala should reproduce more.

00;14;03;03 - 00;14;16;00

Speaker 1

And the over time there should just be one cue and kin recognition shouldn't exist because all this variability is what allows them to distinguish kin from non symmetry.

00;14;16;00 - 00;14;48;29

Speaker 2

My father so, so like let's say the sea anemones, I mean this is just me just totally like hypothetically inventing this idea. But let's say they all have like different color tips of their tentacle that they can attack with. And if it's pink, you know, the other ones with pink don't attack each other that have pink, right? But like what you find in nature for what I'm understanding is that the CNN engineers will have lots of different like a wide variety of different colors at their tips.

00;14;48;29 - 00;15;00;03

Speaker 2

But what Crozier noticed was that, well, why would that happen? Because if they all had pink, then nobody would have to attack each other. And they would be like there would be an advantage to pink as you wouldn't be getting attacked.

00;15;00;04 - 00;15;09;04

Speaker 1

Well, it's not quite that. If they all had pink, it's more like if you were an individual that happened to have a common color, that would give you an advantage on average.

00;15;09;11 - 00;15;19;23

Speaker 2

Right. So if there's like 50% of the population has pink, but only 1% has blue. If you have blue, you're getting attacked by all the pink ones all the time. You are pink. You're getting attacked.

00;15;19;23 - 00;15;42;12

Speaker 1

Let's well, that's almost right. But there's some subtleties here that are important to point out because they're crucial to my whole argument. So I was just talking about the average individual benefits of possessing some a will. But here's where we have to be careful because we're kind of flipping between an individualistic view and a jeans view when I'm arguing that much of the problem comes from taking an individual view rather than a jeans view.

00;15;42;13 - 00;16;08;16

Speaker 1

So let's be more specific here. So it would be more properly said that you think in terms of the advantage cure we all for the common pink color, right? So if you're acutely ill, that's pink, you suffer less conflict. The individuals in which you find yourself less often enter into fights. So it's not that you're being aggressed less as an individual because in some cases as an individual, you might be stronger than your opponent and you actually want to get in the fight.

00;16;08;16 - 00;16;30;03

Speaker 1

And other times you're weaker. And so from an individual's perspective, sometimes it is good to get in to the conflicts because you win and you take the resources of the other individual, but on average across individuals from the perspective of the small unit that they have, which is these different wheels that are lurkers, you can look at the average advantage to one wheel and compare it to the other.

00;16;30;03 - 00;16;37;11

Speaker 1

And they're it's not that you're avoiding aggression. Let's say you're avoiding fights, the average cost of conflict.

00;16;37;26 - 00;16;39;29

Speaker 2

But why is that a paradigm?

00;16;39;29 - 00;16;55;06

Speaker 1

The reason that's a problem is that it suggests that kin recognition shouldn't exist because the way they recognize a kin is based on the pink versus the bluebird or Serena versus or purple. All this variability is what allows them to distinguish the kin from non.

00;16;55;06 - 00;17;14;07

Speaker 2

Can I see because because if it's a you have to have the variability. Otherwise ones that aren't as related to you would have the same trait and you would see them as related to you. So, so then the question is how do you end up with lots of variability on a trait that suppose to get selected.

00;17;14;07 - 00;17;14;13

Speaker 1

Yeah.

00;17;15;01 - 00;17;22;01

Speaker 2

Okay. So that's, that's the paradox because if you're getting selected for it, why doesn't the selective pressure make everything go to the same thing rather than.

00;17;22;01 - 00;17;44;10

Speaker 1

Exactly the same? The same thing also works for discriminatory altruism because in that case, if you have a common male, will you cooperate with a greater fraction of the population like you co-op? You have more cooperative partners. You either avoid conflict or you get more cooperation. And so in either case, the kin recognition abilities should get eroded by the selective pressure.

00;17;45;14 - 00;18;05;24

Speaker 2

Right? In software we would call that a bug and you would file an issue ticket with a description of the bug and the steps to reproduce it. And then it would have to get patched in the next version of the software that got released. So how is evolution going about updating the theory of evolution to patch? So where it doesn't have that bug anymore.

00;18;05;25 - 00;18;30;25

Speaker 1

This is where you start to run into the the the limitation of the single gene paradigm because it worked when you're talking about a single gene for altruism, for example, or restraint on selfishness. So now you're talking about another lurkers that's involved with discriminatory altruism. And then you have this other locus that's the trait that you're discriminating on the colors of the sea, anemones, tentacles, you know, this other gene over here, codes for that.

00;18;31;04 - 00;18;55;06

Speaker 1

Now you've got a multi locus model. And so this is what we're talking about with maximizing like the whole organism's fitness. Yeah, it'd be great for the whole organism, the whole population, if there is all this variability because that would allow you to discriminate in your cooperative behavior and avoid conflict. But evolution doesn't work for ultimate benefits. You have to look at the individual advantage to the gene.

00;18;55;06 - 00;19;10;12

Speaker 1

And that's what Crozier did. And what's good for a gene isn't necessarily good for the organism or the whole population. You know, it didn't have a huge impact. People kept on doing their research on kin recognition and kept on saying that it supports inclusive fitness theory.

00;19;10;28 - 00;19;54;11

Speaker 2

So it was a bug that people pretended didn't exist. Well, you know, that happens. I'll tell you. That happens all the time in software where there's there's some bug that people know, that there's some piece of the software that needs that bug to be there, to keep being part of the software because like uses it somehow. It sounds to me like what you what you're saying is that this paradox that Crozier found tended to actually contradict using the inclusive fitness idea where there's just one gene responsible for the kin recognition, which people were pretending or didn't really realize was had to be the case because they were using the inclusive fitness model after having pasteurize

00;19;54;11 - 00;20;16;09

Speaker 2

it away from being based on one gene, even though that's what the math requires. So you can't do that. But people did it anyways and they didn't want to have to deal with that. And so that's maybe why they didn't really want to like pay too much attention across this paradox, right? Because it would tend to to say that all this other stuff they did had to get rethought, right?

00;20;16;28 - 00;20;39;11

Speaker 1

Yeah, I think that's right. And what they did, instead of trying to actually create multi locus models of gradual evolution through standard Darwinian, we all frequency change one locus at a time. What they did was they created this sort of selfish gene theory that was like inclusive fitness express in terms of a single gene. And recall that inclusive fit is right.

00;20;39;11 - 00;21;00;11

Speaker 1

It's like the idea of an individual level maximizing agent. Therefore, like all these different genes involved with kin recognition, instead of being assumed to be maximized for the individual's fitness, you just place them all into one gene. And then that kind of has the same effect of of a model of that. This all evolves for the final purpose because it's all in one gene.

00;21;00;11 - 00;21;18;29

Speaker 1

That way you can kind of finagle a single gene model to be like an individual level maximizing Asian model. And that's what, you know, Richard Dawkins did. Of course, you know, a lot of people listen to my arguments about focusing on the gene as a level of optimization, say, oh, that's Dawkins idea. But in reality, Dawkins did not do that.

00;21;18;29 - 00;21;36;07

Speaker 1

What he did was he said that all these functions that cue the perception action, they're all on a single gene. And that's the Dawkins greenbelt effect. And this idea of the green beard effect has just caused enormous confusion in the field of social evolution. So many people talk about kin recognition loci as if they're involved with the green bird effect.

00;21;36;12 - 00;22;01;10

Speaker 1

And then you'll see people who even understand the difference between what was supposed to be the green beard effect and kin recognition. Having reviewed these papers and they still accept these into the literature despite the confusion they cause. And it's because they prop up this paradigm that all these things evolved for the final effect. And it's kind of is odd situation where Dawkins constantly talked about, you know, focusing on the gene as a unit of selection and optimization.

00;22;01;19 - 00;22;20;13

Speaker 1

And he would say that natural selection doesn't have foresight and it's all about the immediate benefits. And then he would end up explaining all these complex traits like bottleneck life cycles and sexual reproduction and the evolution of cells with respect to the ultimate benefits can very appealing to the ultimate benefit of some Immortal Replicator.

00;22;20;23 - 00;22;21;03

Speaker 2

Right.

00;22;21;17 - 00;22;39;17

Speaker 1

But ultimately, it's kind of a moot point of whether Dawkins goes wrong, because the paradigm goes back to George Williams, who was the first to argue in favor of gene selection ism. But then if you give George Williams credit for gene selection ism, you also got to give him credit for the origin of this teleological way of thinking that Dawkins later adopted.

00;22;39;24 - 00;23;17;02

Speaker 1

And I think that's appropriate because Williams argued that apparent design should be taken as evidence of adaptive cause or the cause for origin. So Williams is really responsible for creating that teleological paradigm. And for a lot of people, George Williams was the honest abe of evolutionary biology. He could do no wrong. But for those people, I say, just go back and read adaptation and natural selection, you know, see, the point is they that he argued that the apparent design purpose of a trait is evidence of natural selection, acting for that final, an example of teleological reasoning and then on top of that, he aligned with Paleo and natural theology.

00;23;17;11 - 00;23;42;07

Speaker 1

In his book 1992 on natural selection, he included a whole passage of William Paley's book at the end of his book in the appendix. I mean, he was totally bought into that and adopted that paradigm. And then Dawkins just took what Williams said and ran with it. And I would just point out that in adopting the material logical paradigm of Williams and Dawkins, social evolution is like Alan Graf and Andy Gardner and David Waller.

00;23;42;19 - 00;24;08;06

Speaker 1

They'll bought into this teleological paradigm and they use it to reinterpret the whole history of evolutionary biology, including the works of Darwin and Fisher, and they interpreted them in the light of teleology. So for them Darwin appealed to something called organismal fitness, defined in terms of not reproductive success, to explain the origin of complex traits. And Fisher just formalized Darwin's argument with mathematics.

00;24;08;06 - 00;24;16;22

Speaker 1

And then finally Hamilton extended it to include effects on relatives. And this is just terribly wrong, as we'll discuss in some future episodes.

00;24;17;14 - 00;24;21;05

Speaker 2

That sounds like it would be pretty insulting to social evolutionists.

00;24;21;14 - 00;24;40;20

Speaker 1

But yeah, that's why they don't like my stuff, because that's what it implies, you know? But if I'm right that they've totally mischaracterized the work of Darwin and Fisher and totally misunderstood that this approach to study complex traits, we're going to be way better off if we clearly understand this and move on. And I don't personally fault people for having bought into this paradigm.

00;24;40;20 - 00;24;52;07

Speaker 1

I mean, at one point I accepted inclusive fitness because that's what I learned from my textbooks as an undergrad. But, you know, at some point you got to realize your mistake and admit it and then just move on.

00;24;52;28 - 00;25;12;12

Speaker 2

Yeah, but I mean, what would a social evolutionist say? Because I'm not one, but like, I would think they probably have some rationale they would give, right? I mean, what's the like what's an example of something that they're arguing that you think is has missed the boat?

00;25;14;02 - 00;25;33;18

Speaker 1

Well, I mean, I could go on and on. I could go on about how they missed the boat with their interpretation of Darwin or they missed the boat with their interpretation of Fisher, or they missed the boat with their attempts to rescue the concept of inclusive fitness by developing so-called generalized versions of Hamilton's rule that actually aren't the same thing as Hamilton's rule.

00;25;33;25 - 00;25;57;27

Speaker 1

And just these attempts to try to create a general theorem of adaptation. That's what they thought Fisher's Theorem was supposed to be, which is what they thought Hamilton's rule was supposed to be. And really, none of these things are even accurate to what happened or what's relevant to biology. Now we can get to this in further episodes. I mean, in this episode, I think it's important to focus on how they missed the boat with respect to kin recognition, because that's what we're talking about.

00;25;58;13 - 00;26;06;15

Speaker 2

What's their argument for? Put your your social evolutionist hat on and tell me why can recognition evolves?

00;26;06;27 - 00;26;09;27

Speaker 1

Kin recognition evolves to maximize inclusive fitness.

00;26;10;18 - 00;26;12;25

Speaker 2

What makes some fitness inclusive.

00;26;13;07 - 00;26;15;25

Speaker 1

Because it incorporates effects on relatives.

00;26;16;11 - 00;26;20;07

Speaker 2

So it's like your family or your closest kin or whatever. Okay.

00;26;20;23 - 00;26;21;04

Speaker 1

Yeah.

00;26;21;20 - 00;26;37;02

Speaker 2

Okay. So the fitness value of some like if some mutation comes along, that causes me to suddenly have kin recognition and I share that mutation with a bunch of my can. Like we're going to be more fit than, than the ones that don't have that.

00;26;37;09 - 00;26;39;28

Speaker 1

Yeah. That's the idea right now.

00;26;39;28 - 00;27;05;13

Speaker 2

That's, that's what a social evolutionist would say. But we go back to Crozier's paradox and Crozier finds that when you actually look at the CNN Minis, the things that they're using as a Q to know which ones are canned have a high degree of variability. So my closest Ken might have pink, but the next group of of less related can over here have blue.

00;27;05;20 - 00;27;18;00

Speaker 2

It doesn't make sense because it why wouldn't the other ones also be pink? Because now you're getting attacked less or whatever. Right. So what was your insight that you brought along to kind of cure that problem? And in the theory?

00;27;18;14 - 00;27;44;25

Speaker 1

So the most important thing I realized, okay, well, there's two separate kinds of behaviors. There's how you treat somebody and whether you associate with them. And both of them can be discriminatory type of behavior and you can have different cues for each one. So here's the interesting thing. Once you use a different cue gene for association preference, natural selection favors the rare folios and it favors variability.

00;27;45;00 - 00;27;52;27

Speaker 1

And the reason is if you have a rare allele, then you can avoid associating with non relatives and that's advantageous because you avoid conflict.

00;27;52;28 - 00;27;53;13

Speaker 2

Gotcha.

00;27;53;19 - 00;28;17;03

Speaker 1

And I'll just mention how this explains some of the peculiar aspects of the kin recognition system. Okay. So in my model, you first of all, the association that could be aggregation or fusion for the first model idea was just about fusion, one of these particular associations or like a coral or something or a hydride. All right. Or they have the they have colonies and they fuze.

00;28;17;14 - 00;28;36;21

Speaker 1

It's also very similar to a fungus or a slime mold. Okay. Okay. But I'd just like to point out now that although we started talking about sea anemones, because that's what Crozier talked about, in fact, most of the research was on these organisms that Fuze or reject and actually Crozier talked about that also, but it was later than at one time.

00;28;36;21 - 00;29;02;03

Speaker 1

He said that a potential way that you could resolve his own paradox was if there was a cost of fusion. So he thought about these fuzing marine invertebrates as well as sea anemones. And I would say that CNN these are an example, more of a situation where organisms aggregate and have the potential to segregate thereafter, whereas we'll be talking more about when organisms fuze and have the potential to reject after fusion.

00;29;02;11 - 00;29;25;06

Speaker 1

And so in this case is aggregation of fusion are usually indiscriminate behaviors to begin with and then segregation rejected or discriminatory. And I'll talk mostly about fusion rejection systems, whereas the the CNN is like an aggregation segregation type of system. But getting back to the Fusion example, assuming that both of them have to want to fuze with other one in order to fuze, right.

00;29;25;06 - 00;29;53;00

Speaker 1

Okay. Because they've got to break down their epidermis and fuze the blood vessels, they both have to be involved in it. There's a benefit of fusion and you can find an individual has your rare gene with you, which can come if there's some kin structure to the population already, you can get the evolution of fusion once you start associating with common specifics, once you start fuzing, well, sometimes you fuze with a non relative that opens up the potential for the evolution of social actions the most.

00;29;53;07 - 00;30;14;22

Speaker 1

The ones that that is selected most easily is robbing non relatives that you're associated with discriminatory based on a Q that is preexisting. So you know you're associating with all these individuals, right? And you've got your own family. Now there's some trait that happens to be variable in the population that lets you distinguish your your kin from others.

00;30;15;07 - 00;30;37;09

Speaker 1

You can easily evolve to rob or selflessly take from ones that are different than you. And like that behavior will be favored by natural selection really easily. That's called discriminatory harm, discriminatory conflict. One of the things that comes from that is that, well, that behavior will fix pretty soon. So it's not just you robbing them, they're also trying to rob you.

00;30;37;17 - 00;31;00;25

Speaker 1

And so then that what that means is you're fighting that's actually on average not good. So you like it's better to avoid those situations. Okay. Then there's selection to just associate with your your relatives that have that, that. Q that you're using for the conflict. Well, here comes the problem is that you evolve the behavior in a closed situation, and there's a possibility that that.

00;31;00;25 - 00;31;24;15

Speaker 1

Q That you're using for conflict isn't useful for avoiding another one before you're already in a fight with them. So it's better to like find something else that you can see at a distance or you can, you can detect before you're already engaged in a fight. And to get to the Marine invertebrate example, they fuze and they fuze or blood vessels and everything, well they're already like exchanging cells and they're already kind of in a fight if they've already fuzed.

00;31;24;19 - 00;31;48;24

Speaker 1

So they want to find something to detect before they fuze their blood vessels that lets them avoid the conflict. This also explains like the way these systems work mechanistically, right? Because like a vitreous, they always start to fuze with any member of the same species and then at some point they start rejecting, okay, this is like one of those imperfections that tipped you off to it, not being to a logical right.

00;31;49;00 - 00;32;12;27

Speaker 1

It's like a leftover from history because the first step was just fuzing with members of your same species, and that is still there. Now there's like a different. Q That's used to reject after you start fuzing and if it was if it was just discriminatory cooperation, well, there would be no reason that that, you know, you start fuzing indiscriminately first and then reject it should be just discriminatory fusion.

00;32;13;24 - 00;32;35;20

Speaker 2

So essentially what you're talking about and let me just borrow a term that we like to use in software, but what you're doing is you're decoupling concerns from each other. So you're saying that the association cure would be something that that could be detected from a little bit farther away before you get close enough to even do help or harm.

00;32;35;20 - 00;32;36;00

Speaker 1

Yeah.

00;32;37;08 - 00;33;09;17

Speaker 2

Right. And because like, it's it's real risky. Once you've got up close, it's like the cost of war is always higher than the benefit. Like you want to avoid it if possible. So now it's beneficial not to get up close unless you're pretty sure somebody is related to you. So, so big picture here, you came up with a model that refines an understanding of how kin recognition could have evolved without running into some of the problems that existing model had with like Crozier's Paradox.

00;33;09;17 - 00;33;36;19

Speaker 2

So you kind of resolve Crozier's paradox by saying like, here's the stuff that could happen, and that if it happens that way, it's a sort of a gradual building up where you have one step after the other of these additional phases that it goes through where the final the very last thing to happen in that chain gives you the final picture of what we currently see and can recognition behavior.

00;33;36;26 - 00;33;43;13

Speaker 2

But like you're not saying, there's just like one. This is just one thing that evolves all at once for that and reason.

00;33;43;28 - 00;34;03;16

Speaker 1

Well, that's right. But I'd like to say one thing that's relevant to how social evolution is would interpret my model. I mean, some of them will say, oh, I didn't resolve Crozier's paradox because I didn't share how that discriminatory cooperation was like for polymorphous some of its. Q Or did it for discriminatory cards like although they usually focus on cooperation.

00;34;03;24 - 00;34;26;08

Speaker 1

The response of that, I would say three things. Number one, in nature, the cues that are highly variable that can't be explained by other selective pressures are always involved with association preference. And then number two, if you have a discriminatory harm, look as that's just a modest variability, my model shows that I can select for extreme polymorphism of an association preference.

00;34;26;08 - 00;34;49;07

Speaker 1

Q There's a lot of evidence that there are. These discriminatory conflict cues are things that are detected after fusion occurs. Sometimes they are shown to have extrinsic, selective pressures like the mating type workers and the just the black fungus. Number three, a lot of social abolitionists have argued that social parasites or cheaters can select for kin recognition abilities.

00;34;49;17 - 00;35;15;02

Speaker 1

But I'm the only person that actually tested this idea with empirical work in nature. And what I found was that these so called social parasites just don't exist in natural populations and social maybe. And it was studies of social maybe that led to the assumption that these social parasites actually do exist commonly in natural populations. So I think out of anybody, I've got the right to challenge this cheater paradigm because I actually did the empirical studies that question that.

00;35;15;11 - 00;35;37;02

Speaker 1

So I developed this model that doesn't require these social parasites, but just requires that individuals discriminate in how they treat each other. And there's abundant evidence for discriminatory help, in harm in nature, in contrast to these social parasites are obligate cheaters and you commonly find differential treatment along with association preference. But you almost never find these obligate cheaters or social parasites.

00;35;37;02 - 00;36;02;03

Speaker 1

And so there's a ton of evidence for my model and just very little evidence for this idea of cheaters. Some people have called this the missing cheater phenomenon, and they often cite me for it. And it was really the missing cheater phenomenon, not Crozier's paradox per se, that led me to do this theoretical research, because originally in grad school, my goal was to find these cheaters in nature and actually design laboratory experiments to show how that they could select for kin recognition.

00;36;02;12 - 00;36;24;14

Speaker 1

So when I couldn't find them, I transitioned over to trying to develop a new theory that was more consistent with the biological evidence. And it's kind of funny, as we'll get to a little bit later, that people recently have tried to kind of rescue this this cheater hypothesis with some formal models and they're just neglecting that's it's already been ruled out and replaced with a different model that's got a lot more evidence for its basic assumptions.

00;36;24;23 - 00;36;44;00

Speaker 1

So in some ways, my whole theoretical endeavor was a response to my own paradox, which was an inability to find the cheaters in nature that I thought could select for recognition. It would probably be more appropriate to say that my model resolves the missing cheater phenomenon, or maybe Gilbert's paradox, rather than that it was a direct response to Crozier's paradox.

00;36;44;11 - 00;37;02;12

Speaker 1

In any case, one of the reasons it's really tempting to view it the way they had previously viewed it as that once all this has evolved, yeah, what you see is they fuzed with their kin and they have no conflict and it's peaceful and they don't fuze with non kin. And so it looks like discriminatory cooperation.

00;37;03;14 - 00;37;11;23

Speaker 2

I see. Because, because they're, they've evolved away from having to get into these fights after they fuzed with somebody that wasn't can.

00;37;12;00 - 00;37;32;13

Speaker 1

Yeah. In other words because the system so well now in the final stage you don't see that conflict. It's hard to know that it ever was a selective pressure unless you you look at those like rare instances when non relatives happen to share you we'll have one of these hyper variable association preference Q genes which like almost never happens.

00;37;32;25 - 00;37;53;13

Speaker 1

But there's enough of those examples that you can kind of piece together, you know, something wrong here. Like if you do happen to share that gene with the non relative, like according to their model, you should cooperate because you share your gene, the cooperation gene. But in reality they fight and often die. And that same thing has been seen in slime mold and marine invertebrates.

00;37;53;14 - 00;37;59;08

Speaker 2

The evidence suggests that your version of this is correct.

00;37;59;25 - 00;38;01;15

Speaker 1

Yeah, there's a bunch of evidence for it.

00;38;01;23 - 00;38;18;04

Speaker 2

And yet your theory has faced a lot. That particular I mean, you've got multiple models of theories that you've put out now in the meantime, but like that was the original one. And that one, even that one faced some, some uphill battles getting into the academic journals and stuff, right?

00;38;18;04 - 00;38;19;28

Speaker 1

Yeah, it was it was tough.

00;38;21;01 - 00;38;40;16

Speaker 2

Because it goes against the established version of the idea. And this is something I just don't understand is because like I said, from I'm coming from software. So, you know, when we have a bug like that gets pretty high priority. Usually it's a repeatable bug that you have, you have a good description of here's and here's what you will.

00;38;41;02 - 00;39;13;14

Speaker 2

If you do this and this, you will observe this. And that's obviously a bug because the software is intended to have this app, right? And then knowing those things, that gives a developer or an engineer something to work on, something to do something where you go, okay, well, if I change the software and so that doesn't happen anymore, and then now we have then that's the next version of the software, because now we've clean that up, we fix that, and then everyone else, no one's going to reject that, that pull request.

00;39;13;14 - 00;39;39;06

Speaker 1

Now, the weird thing is there's, there's always like a bunch of bugs in any theory and it's hard to tell which one's a, the like sensitive indicator of anomaly that's like the key to the revolution of thought. Yeah, sure, sure. A lot of them are genuinely just some problem of sampling or, you know, will be resolved by something within the paradigm eventually if you just have a slightly different model.

00;39;39;12 - 00;39;58;25

Speaker 1

And the funny thing is they're so worried about maintaining this paradigm that even after my paper, like this year, so I published a paper that's trying to force kin recognition into this box, taking something that I did and appendix creating this whole model that their paper had 70 pages of equations. The reviewers said there are 70 pages of equations.

00;39;58;26 - 00;40;01;04

Speaker 1

They shorten it for the published version.

00;40;01;17 - 00;40;03;26

Speaker 2

What did they get? Where, when? Where do they get published?

00;40;04;06 - 00;40;05;13

Speaker 1

Nature Communications.

00;40;05;20 - 00;40;12;16

Speaker 2

Oh my God. It's defending the existing theory in terms of, you know, like with all this complicated math to try to shoehorn it.

00;40;12;16 - 00;40;23;07

Speaker 1

And it's like it's assumptions are so real unrealistic. It doesn't apply to anything and it doesn't make any of the same predictions as my mind does. And mine's already supported by a bunch of evidence.

00;40;23;07 - 00;40;25;23

Speaker 2

Did you respond to it with a letter to nature?

00;40;25;23 - 00;40;27;13

Speaker 1

I did. And they didn't publish it.

00;40;28;14 - 00;40;29;08

Speaker 2

Did they say why?

00;40;30;05 - 00;40;34;18

Speaker 1

There is a some cookie cutter reply after like a week or so.

00;40;35;07 - 00;40;58;00

Speaker 2

You're you've been saying it for this all this time and other recognized the same problem, but proposing something really ridiculously complicated solution that doesn't even really address it. But no one, the letters that get sent are the responses of that kind don't. They're not publicly seen. The public doesn't know that you've sent that letter. They can just quietly reject it.

00;40;58;09 - 00;41;26;24

Speaker 2

And now there's no dissent. You've been silenced, and you can't do that with a public code repository. Anyone can file an issue and with the issues filed, people have to respond to it and they know that other people are going to read it and and see that. And they can't just pretend like it doesn't exist. Because if other people have noticed the same issue, they'll come along and upvote your your issue.

00;41;27;09 - 00;41;43;16

Speaker 1

There was a potential for me to just put something on their notes and like that was there. You could do that, but nobody ever does that. Nobody reads those things. Like I wanted them to have to reply my reply to their paper. Right.

00;41;44;01 - 00;41;58;00

Speaker 2

Well, have you have you tried arguing back to the editors of Nature Communications to make your point that that's not good enough and that, hey, like this needs to be in a public debate?

00;41;58;00 - 00;42;21;07

Speaker 1

Like I'm just sick, a juggler out with editors, honestly, and, and I'm just going to do a different paper and send it to a different journal and mention some of the stuff that's related to this paper. But I'm not going to, like, press it with them. Okay. So can you tell me how inclusive fitness was teleological with respect to kin recognition?

00;42;21;07 - 00;42;49;15

Speaker 2

My take is that people have looked at kin recognition, the ability to know if somebody is related to you or not as good because now you can help. Those are more related to you and hurt ones that are not and not hurt ones that are closely related to you. And that's that evolutionarily would you know, you would kind of think I mean, it sort of makes sense if you think about it logically, right?

00;42;49;15 - 00;43;15;01

Speaker 2

Like If I'm helping those that have my genes, they're more likely to survive and have kids or whatever. Now then those genes are more likely to carry on. So you could argue that something like can, you know, evolution out of favor, can recognition evolving? And obviously it has evolved. You could make the argument that it evolved for the reasons why it's good observable.

00;43;15;09 - 00;43;36;23

Speaker 2

Right. But the reason that's teleological is because you're arguing from the end result why some why these other things happened when evolution couldn't have known that end result. That's sort of a religious form of thinking, sort of like God came up with the best plan. And, you know, and that's why you mentioned that this teleological stuff is basically pretty Darwinian ism.

00;43;37;14 - 00;44;00;19

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's right. And what ended up happening was that inclusive fitness maximization played the same role as the creator and the teleological theory. But I'd like to mention one caveat to what you said, which is that the final straw, the last selective step actually is not that purpose of cooperating with or avoiding conflict with kin, it's avoiding conflict with non kin.

00;44;00;29 - 00;44;20;17

Speaker 1

And so it's actually different than what it appears to be doing even at the end. But I will grant that there could be an incidental effect on preventing the spread of social parasites. That is something we mentioned before. It was taken initially as a reason for adoptive origin. But what I'm saying is that that's most likely just an incidental effect.

00;44;21;06 - 00;44;23;24

Speaker 2

But what does that have to do with teleology, though?

00;44;24;14 - 00;44;34;03

Speaker 1

Because that's that's one of those things that was a hypothesis to explain the origin of this sort of trait. And I'm saying it actually could be an incidental effect.

00;44;34;21 - 00;45;04;10

Speaker 2

I gotcha. So so in other words, you can have these evolution and the natural selection could sort of tinker with individual genes. And then basically you have this add on effect where every step of the way optimize. It's like if I fix all the bugs in my operating system software now it runs smoother and someone starts using it for like recording audio perfectly because now it's, now it performs well enough to be able to even do that.

00;45;05;03 - 00;45;25;18

Speaker 2

And someone goes, Oh, they must have fixed all these bugs. We could record audio. That's like, No, that's just what ends up happening. Once all these other issues are taken care of, you would have no way to know what all those issues even were. So going back and reverse engineering, what the problems were that were solved, that aren't there anymore to even observe is more difficult.

00;45;26;02 - 00;45;52;16

Speaker 1

I think that's a good example, especially because it highlights the reality that it is more difficult to do historical models correctly. It's much easier to just defer to the final cause, and that's why it's popular. But I'd like to mention that there are cases in which the final effect, the thing that people naively confuse as a cause for origin, ends up having such a big effect on it expanding and persisting in the long term.

00;45;52;27 - 00;45;56;24

Speaker 1

Now that does become an explanation for why it exists now.

00;45;56;24 - 00;46;17;00

Speaker 2

And that ties into your other theory of natural reward. And, you know, there's a reward that comes along with that final effect. But we can't say that natural selection is what's giving that reward, because natural selection is acting on the level of the genes, but that's already happened.

00;46;17;03 - 00;46;23;15

Speaker 1

So often people come in and they say natural selection is the thing that did that for the final apparent purpose.

00;46;24;02 - 00;46;56;18

Speaker 2

They're kind of taking a simpler view and they're not appreciating the actual degree to which randomness and complexity and stuff happening for other completely unrelated reasons is what actually got us there. And not now. Now that you're there, something else can happen and that might like totally spread the organism all over the place and be huge. But like all those other problems being solved up to that point that enabled that, there was no way for that, for evolution to know that rewards would be there.

00;46;56;23 - 00;47;02;20

Speaker 2

And there's a lot of organisms where it's not and they don't spread, but we don't talk about those.

00;47;02;28 - 00;47;24;01

Speaker 1

Yeah, I totally agree with you, but I think what's important to mention is that when you said that things are happening for other reasons, complexity and randomness, that it's important to mention that a complex trait originated through selective steps. Those selective steps often have nothing to do with the reason that the complex trait succeeds in the long term.

00;47;24;08 - 00;47;50;29

Speaker 1

So, in other words, we're not talking about random drift. When we say randomness, we're talking about that the immediate selective pressures are random. With respect to the long term effect. No, I'm not aware of anybody else making this particular argument. Usually when people invoke randomness, they use it to refer to mutation or to genetic drift. But in my theory, there's a randomness in evolution and that occurs at the level of complex inventions, and this allows for nonrandom force of natural reward at a higher level.

00;47;51;01 - 00;47;59;23

Speaker 1

But we can discuss that in a future episode. But I think this is a good stopping point because we've gotten to the point where we're talking about reward.

00;48;00;05 - 00;48;30;08

Speaker 2

Right. But, you know, again, I. I get that you're frustrated with the sort of establishment of the scientists in your particular field, all sort of sharing what you would view as a common error of thinking, a sort of a misconception, almost like a religious mode of thought that has crept into the field and I kind of feel like evolutionary theory was a response that gets that kind of thinking.

00;48;30;08 - 00;48;57;08

Speaker 2

And that's what's ironic about it. You know, I kind of feel like if the right people, given the fact that people haven't been open to accept, you know, your theories having been more widely accepted, you know, I think that that shows that there's a lack of transparency in the process of addressing the issues with the main theory, and that's allowing people to get away with kind of brushing things under the rug, as it were.

00;48;57;17 - 00;49;04;01

Speaker 2

I mean, I should not be part of science. Science deserves much better than to have that kind of thing going on in my opinion.

00;49;04;04 - 00;49;19;01

Speaker 1

I mean, this this field was I mean, every time I submitted a paper on this, I got reviewed by a bunch of people that were all of the same mind. They were all like the old guard type of people. And I got them every single time I got this reviewed.

00;49;19;21 - 00;49;35;29

Speaker 2

And they don't want to hear about it because it meant that that they had all missed that or that they're you know, you're basically saying, hey, you guys, you know, have a bug in this code that you wrote. Yeah, I've run into that, too. And people there are times where people don't want to hear critics. I've ran into this a lot, actually.

00;49;35;29 - 00;50;13;04

Speaker 2

People don't like it and called out, especially in public in public settings like honor code review, leaving a comment that says like, hey, this, this needs to be like that or, you know, kind of like calling out an issue that makes someone else have to do more work now because to fix it, there would have there's there's definitely people out there that that kind of have this attitude like, hey, that makes you must not be part of the like, like there's like an expectation that we all have to kind of toe the same line or else you're not one of us or something of that nature or that, you know, you get a negative reaction

00;50;13;04 - 00;50;27;03

Speaker 2

or somebody gets they get mad or they think you're trying to, you know, it's like a personal attack or something. And then they get weird about it. They get really weird about it. I don't feel like that kind of getting personal about this stuff belongs in an intellectual and sort of enterprise.

00;50;27;22 - 00;50;47;05

Speaker 1

Yeah, I think that's really well and absolutely true. And I've had people tell me, yeah, if you say what this model means and that's going to offend a lot of people. But you know, I'm interested in why can recognition evolves whether we're testing Hamilton's rule correctly. I'm interested in finding truth on these subjects. And if somebody gets offended by the truth, well, what am I going to do about that?

00;50;47;17 - 00;51;13;08

Speaker 1

But, you know, I try to be sensitive to people and the way I've done that is instead of focusing on the way people have misrepresented Darwin and Fisher and totally misunderstood evolutionary theory and adopted a sort of teleological religious like approach to biology, instead of focusing on that, I just focus on the data and evidence of kin recognition and, you know, hope that people will just let all that other stuff fall by the wayside.

00;51;13;10 - 00;51;39;15

Speaker 1

But what I found is that in this field, it's not enough to have a new theory, models and evidence. But I'll just explain briefly what ended up happening and how essentially I was prevented from publishing my ideas or explaining what they meant. I'll start with the discussion of the first paper I published on this subject. I published the first paper in the best journal in the field, but in order to get it published, I had to hide all of the implications for kinship and kin selection and kin recognition.

00;51;39;15 - 00;52;05;18

Speaker 1

Like I couldn't use me in those terms. They forced me to take them out. So I used my real specific terms about histocompatibility and the particular terms that were there, and I couldn't say anything about its general relevance to like theory. And so I wrote a separate review paper afterward that explained why this was important for like understanding kin recognition and redoing like ways Hamilton's rule had been applied to those studies in nature.

00;52;05;18 - 00;52;15;25

Speaker 1

I mean, it had all these implications for the theory, okay, required that you like rewrite the textbooks, basically, like I showed that the textbook examples of these things were totally wrong. Wrong.

00;52;16;05 - 00;52;17;26

Speaker 2

Yeah. And then don't want to hear it right.

00;52;18;00 - 00;52;44;10

Speaker 1

You know, they reviewed it initially and then they wanted me to remove anything that might explain what it meant, which ultimately was a way to protect their paradigm. But the whole point of my paper was explain what my model meant. Generalize it from fusion and rejection to include aggregation segregation. Define terms like association preference. Explain in more detail the assumptions of my model that distinguished it from other models and review the large body of evidence for it that accumulated over half a century.

00;52;44;10 - 00;53;00;04

Speaker 1

But they wanted me to remove anything that might explain the relevance of my theory to the previous theory. Again, that was the review. So I was like of that. So I, you know, made a few changes to clarify a few points and I put it back. I'm like, you know, I'm not going to take the time. I come to keep saying what this means.

00;53;00;08 - 00;53;20;13

Speaker 1

And one of the reviewers came up with some other model that was verbal to explain certain things. I had explained no like math justifying why this was correct and no one had ever shown it before. And he had no evidence for for what he was saying. And then he said some other guy had that. I needed to cite this other dude that like it was his buddy or something.

00;53;20;27 - 00;53;39;23

Speaker 1

And I'm like, No, I'm not saying that guy because he didn't even talk about any of the stuff that I'm talking about. And when I said I wasn't going to say to the guys like, Oh, well, you know, he wrote that cite the literature and his model was wrong because this other thing would happen. But you're telling me I've got a mathematical model.

00;53;39;23 - 00;53;50;21

Speaker 1

I've got tables and tables showing that the predictions are upheld by like 50 years of research, and this guy didn't have a single line of evidence or, a model, and the editor just defers to him.

00;53;51;18 - 00;54;04;13

Speaker 2

Well, you know, that's why I think there needs to be this stuff has to be public, because if that was in public view, that people wouldn't do that because it would be obvious what they were doing.

00;54;05;02 - 00;54;30;12

Speaker 1

Yeah, I think you're right about that. And I'll point out something I did after I got reviewed that nature I'm not talking about when I got reviewed at Nature Communications for the response to that paper. Well, talking about is I actually submitted this review paper first to nature and it actually got reviewed there. And I had one reviewer that seemed to be the old guard of inclusive fitness and other reviewers seem to be the type of person that was formerly a critic of inclusive fitness.

00;54;30;12 - 00;54;51;20

Speaker 1

They're the sort of person that adheres to Dawkins selfish gene paradigm, which is really the same thing. And what both of those reviewers did was they totally misrepresented my arguments. In other words, they created Straw Man in order to refute it. It was almost as if they didn't even read my paper. It was very frustrating and I felt like I had a pretty good idea who these particular people were.

00;54;52;01 - 00;55;14;05

Speaker 1

And one of those people had come to my poster at an academic conference. It was all smiles and nods and had no objections at the time. But when it came to reviewing my paper, he didn't mind misrepresenting what I said and rejecting it. And so later, when I submitted to American Naturalist, I revealed my identity because I knew this paper was going to receive a lot of bias and prejudice reviews anyways.

00;55;14;11 - 00;55;33;20

Speaker 1

And I revealed my identity even though I didn't have to, and hopes that the reviewers would reveal their identity and make themselves accountable. And in fact, they went ahead and revealed their identities. And I thought that was somewhat honorable, except they still gave what I thought was a highly prejudicial review and that let me understand who these people are.

00;55;33;20 - 00;55;59;06

Speaker 1

And they were certainly old guard type of people. And I'd just like to say something else about why I think that these people are so biased in this field. They all had this attitude that general theory is supposed to be based on these generalized equations that are meant to justify teleology. And so this is like Allen and Griffin's formal Darwinism project and quilters attempt to find a generalized version of Hamilton's rule.

00;55;59;10 - 00;56;25;10

Speaker 1

It goes back to Hamilton's notion of inclusive fitness that you could somehow find this general theorem of adaptation. All of these are this attempt to, after the fact, justify what I call teleological empiricism, which is perfectly exemplified by the field of kin recognition where people are taking for a long time the mere finding of kin recognition in nature as evidence of a final cause of inclusive fitness maximization.

00;56;25;10 - 00;56;54;23

Speaker 1

Yeah, teleology is very simple. There's just this one ultimate, unifying, final cause. And if you could somehow quantify it, then you would have the ultimate, simple theory of nature. And so the theorists in this field, what they think general theory is supposed to do is to justify teleology drafting as this formal Darwinism project, which is echoed by Fowler's quest to find in general his version of Hamilton's rule, where, you know, the goal is to find this Holy Grail fundamental theorem about of Tatian.

00;56;55;03 - 00;57;14;08

Speaker 1

But it's so obvious to anybody that has the first clue about Darwinism. But these guys are just tilting at windmills. And I think that's what E.O. Wilson understood intuitively. But unfortunately, he wasn't able to express himself clearly, and he got in cahoots with some mathematicians that just did the same thing as they increased their fitness figures and their models.

00;57;14;08 - 00;57;40;26

Speaker 1

The idea that a single fundamental theorem of individual level adaptation can be taken to a justified teleology. It's kind of like the eternal quest for the Grail keeps it alive. But ultimately what happened was that because these theories were so accustomed to their kind of Holy Grail search and just evaluating new models in terms of the old models and continually going in circles on this stuff, that they're kind of stuck in their own world.

00;57;40;26 - 00;58;01;00

Speaker 1

They don't even realize that they've left reality. They're not in science anymore. They're in metaphysics. And so when they reject a paper like mine that doesn't agree with their worldview, but has all this evidence for it, they think they're doing something that's noble, and that's because they're so convinced that they're correct. These people are so confident that they're correct that they don't even get angry at something that challenges their worldview.

00;58;01;06 - 00;58;15;10

Speaker 1

So it's not like the situation that you were describing where somebody gets offended when you call them out in public because you never even have the chance to call them out in public. They totally control what is published. So it doesn't matter how much evidence you have of facts and evidence and truth is just not a threat to them.

00;58;16;03 - 00;58;17;21

Speaker 1

I order you to be quiet.

00;58;18;04 - 00;58;22;27

Speaker 3

All right. Thank you. Yes, I'm your king. Well, I didn't vote for you.

00;58;23;04 - 00;58;35;25

Speaker 2

You don't vote for kings. Well, the fact that these these reviews are like that, they go back and forth, isn't public at allows this good old boy network to continue to function that way.

00;58;35;25 - 00;58;55;12

Speaker 1

Yeah and although I got reviewed mainly by theorists, it's not just theories that are bought into this paradigm, of course. It's also a lot of the empirical workers that have been doing this kind of research. So people have been measuring Hamilton's rule incorrectly or applying it to association who've been taking kin recognition as evidence of inclusive fitness maximization.

00;58;55;15 - 00;59;23;25

Speaker 1

You know, these people don't want to hear it either. But despite all that, I ultimately believe that these people would defer to evidence and my hope was that if I explain how my model related to biological evidence that I had big tables that explained 50 years of research and how the novel predictions, with my models for the genetics and evolution of kin recognition, were supported by all this evidence that people would defer to the evidence rather than their prior theoretical expectation and at least publish my paper.

00;59;23;26 - 00;59;38;10

Speaker 1

I submitted the paper to numerous journals and I just can never get it published. So I published a preprint online and then just left it at that. But this experience is in part what caused me to write a paper about how to fund science in a way that makes it more innovative and less prone to cronyism and corruption.

00;59;38;18 - 00;59;44;28

Speaker 1

After all of this happened, such a prominent field of evolutionary biology, it probably could happen elsewhere. And we can talk about that in a future episode.

00;59;46;01 - 01;00;06;03

Speaker 2

I mean, there has to be something we can do politically because they're basically serving as a role closed network with no no sort of transparency in the how they're deciding what is science or what gets published and gets to be part of the, you know, record. Like then public dollars shouldn't go to that.

01;00;06;08 - 01;00;09;08

Speaker 1

So nature is a private magazine.

01;00;09;22 - 01;00;16;28

Speaker 2

Yeah, but it's how much, how many public institutions are subscribers to nature? Well, there's that and there's also.

01;00;16;28 - 01;00;23;19

Speaker 1

That the researcher publishing is publicly funded, so they're profiting off of the publicly funded research, for sure.

01;00;24;00 - 01;00;24;13

Speaker 2

Course.

01;00;25;03 - 01;01;05;16

Speaker 1

All right, Jon. Well, I think this has been a good discussion. And, yeah, thank you for being on the Naturally World podcast. For further discussion links and references, please visit the Naturally Word Blog it naturally Broadcom until next time. I'm your host Ellen Gilbert.