Week of March 22, 2020
Dawkins, Dyson, and the Scale of Evolution
My first experience with any semblance of mature evolutionary theory, as for many people, came through Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which reframes the naive high school biology narrative of antagonistic speciation in terms of microscopic warfare between individual genes. He posits that the victorious genes, or replicators, are those which have most successfully increased their total biomass, a process which in some cases has demanded that genes form alliances that we recognize as organisms. Darwinian competition between reproductively-isolated species, therefore, is a subsidiary contest reflecting the underlying, inevitable efforts by trait-bearing molecules to multiply. Dawkins’s view is not at all uniformly accepted, but in the history of biological thought, as the late Freeman Dyson wrote, the selfish gene theory was revolutionary:
His book portrays human society as a mechanical system of agents with behavior governed by genes, similar to a collection of machines with behavior governed by computer programs. The selfish gene is a device with a single purpose, to achieve its own survival and replication. It is not concerned with our welfare or with our human needs… His book is a classic because he makes a convincing case for a paradoxical conclusion, that selfish genes can orchestrate the evolution of cooperation, generosity and self-sacrifice in humans. He succeeds brilliantly in reducing our high moral principles and our ethical beliefs to the action of unthinking and uncaring molecules of DNA.
Dawkins, in sum, works backward—abstracting from observed matrices of behaviors and responses to locate competitively advantageous traits, then analyzing the potential effects of success on genetic makeup. He discusses standard game theory at surprising length, in particular how the outcome structures of various iterated games produce distinct action patterns (“hawks versus doves”). These translate into fertility for organisms containing the genes that convey a predisposition toward such behaviors. Some games may require complex cooperation, others cupidity, and still others combinations of the two. His world, as Dyson notes, is mechanistic (appealing for the economist)—to chart the path of an evolutionary change, solve for the equilibrium.
Dyson accords Dawkins the shortest section in his pantheon of evolutionary thinkers, and for a reason: scale. Dawkins deemed Dyson’s view of evolution as “competition for survival of noninterbreeding species” a “classic schoolboy howler,” Darwinian evolution really being intra-species competition between slightly differing individuals. Ecosystemic contests between different types only resemble Darwinism, and merely reflect the outcome of the genetic struggle. Dyson doubled down, however, declaring that the evidence of “punctuated equilibria” and ecological transitions suggested that the differential responses of species to suddenly altered conditions took precedence over gradual replicator mutation. His own view emphasizes the velocity of neutral genetic drift (highest in small populations and mating mechanisms) in explaining periodic abundance.
The controversy is partially disciplinary—between a biologist and a mathematician, and between fundamental mechanisms and statistical regularities. I naively favor the mechanical approach, but in the latter sense, the two may be compatible. Genetic competition would be most effective in small populations, in which prolific new replicators immediately constitute a larger fraction of the total pool (preventing dilution by the hegemonic type). Combined with a colossal environmental shock, the replacement of large, slow-moving species by dynamic alternatives might be merely an apparently exogenous acceleration of a deeper process. In terms of population dynamics, certain combinations of external factors might be required to generate the high rates of speciation that differentiated large organisms. The comprehensive nature of these factors—meteor strikes, climate change, invasive species—means that much intra-group diversity is annihilated, creating the appearance of a unified species-level reaction. That species, then, will die out: others endowed with a subset of workable types will adapt. Dyson’s counterexample—the negation of genetic change in Dodo species by abrupt human extermination—does not affect the main point, as Dodos and humans did not ‘compete’ in the sense that their rates of propagation were inseparably linked. A predator-prey relationship may drive Darwinian evolution, but is not be the locus of evolution itself. Are humans “replacing” fish in the Grand Banks? Are cows, chickens, and pigs thriving parasitically off of industrial agriculture?
Dyson’s argument for small-group dynamism is more a useful descriptive characteristic of evolutionary processes than a feature of evolution itself. His focus on the influence that innovators can have in limited associations can be productively applied throughout global history (though he likely overstated the case), and may serve as an important heuristic in the analysis of social systems in general. We can meld it on to Roland Fletcher’s theory of interaction-communication limits, for example, to model the effects of centralization and urbanization on civilizational change. Higher levels of centralization generally facilitate intellectual cooperation, but after a certain point, that concentration becomes stifling—an inescapable ideological hegemony made immutable by sheer size, rather than the previously nimble community of managers that once predominated. Examples abound, from the Chinese court that ignored both European and domestic technologies to the Soviet regime that ground revolution to a bureaucratic paste. In reverse, problems and solutions generated at the communications frontier may drive change in core regions until those discoveries either cease to be relevant or are too distant to be quickly shared—the arc of many a deep-space science fiction film, expansionist empire, and modern IT corporation.
Whatever the case, Dyson reminds us that statistical laws exist on separate ontological planes—modes of general representation rather than states of being. Analogies are the generalist’s curse.
Links
Portrait of the Author as a Historian: Fernand Braudel, by Alexander Lee
Lee describes Fernand Braudel’s surprisingly literary path toward the deterministic social history of the Annales school—a bit like Camus transforming into Marx in the Algerian desert.
Innovators vs. the Virus, by Alex Howes
Howes summarizes a few clever innovations developed during the ongoing viral epidemic, on both the prevention and response sides. Read through for some optimism about the private sector, which is usually maligned where medicine is concerned.
The Translation Wars, by David Remnick
A readable overview of the translation styles of the oft-slighted Constance Garnett and the popular Pevear and Volokhonsky duo. Three hundred pages into Garnett’s version of The Brothers Karamazov, I regret aping Nabokov’s jibes about her stuffiness (I blame my senior-year English teacher for the indoctrination)—hers is readable, humorous, and more than adequate by comparison with P/V.
Dawkins and Dyson: An Exchange
Cited and quoted repeatedly above, but the petty barbs traded by two world-class thinkers and the nuances of the questions discussed are worth reading through. You may join me in embarrassment at having forgotten Dawkins’s evisceration of the “survival of the fittest” apothegm.