Blute Blog

Blute's blog about evolutionary theory: biological, sociocultural and gene-culture.

What is Consciousness?

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I recently purchased book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness by a neuroscientist, Patrick House, published by St Martin’s Press in 2022. No, I am not going to review it here (and maybe or maybe not here, later or elsewhere) because I have not read it yet but I am looking forward to reading it. But before I do, I thought I would write down what I suspect consciousness is.

To put it briefly, consciousness is not a unitary phenomenon, a thing, it is an ecosystem of thoughts, the objects of which are other thoughts.

For a little more explanation, I prefer to speak of actions rather than behaviours because they normally have objects (and that includes perceptions as well) – e.g. I pick up a cup, see a neighbour, cross the street, hear a horn etc. These objects can include yourself e.g. I comb my hair, hear myself cough etc. In the beginning, a neuron or coupled group fires or is induced to fire, which causes other neurons to fire, which cause others to fire, eventually resulting in a pattern of muscular and/or glandular activity – an action. However, some cease before that, i.e. do not result in an action – these are thoughts. Thoughts too can have objects – I can think of picking up a cup etc. But some thoughts have a different kind of object – other thoughts – and the ecosystem of these constitutes consciousness or as some would call it self consciousness or self awareness.

Written by Marion Blute

April 24, 2023 at 3:39 pm

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Science Studies: Natural Selection, Sex and Sexual Selection

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Academics, including scientists, tend to be specialized and the discovery of specialized knowledge is important. But so too is getting a hold on the big picture (which is part of why I am fond of much Philosophy of Biology but that is another story). Anyway, I have for long wondered why the literature on natural selection, on the evolution of sex and on sexual selection tend to be isolated from one another. Since natural selection comes logically, historically and developmentally before sex, sex must flow somehow from the existence of natural selection. And of course there could not be sexual selection without sex. In 2019 I published an article “Mating Markets: A Naturally Selected Sex Allocation Theory of Sexual Selection” in Biological Theory in which natural selection flows readily into sex which flows readily into sexual selection but that is another story.

On the 20th of this month I used that font of expert knowledge, “Wikipedia”, to briefly check my belief about the existence of a disconnect between the literatures on the evolution of sex and of sexual selection and it was strongly confirmed. The major articles there on these topics are “Evolution of Sexual Reproduction” and “Sexual Selection”. Not only are each title not present in the text of the other article, but I searched the reference list in the latter for each of those in the former and they do not have a single reference in common! Even the Charles Darwin references are different! The former references an article of his on cross and self fertilization while the latter references his books on the origin, on the descent of man, and an article on the tendency of species to form varieties. This is no criticism of Wikipedia which in this case and many, even most others, reflects the literature it draws on.

Written by Marion Blute

April 1, 2023 at 10:06 am

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Ruse and the Direction of the Biological & Cultural Evolution Analogy

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Michael Ruse, the distinguished philosopher of Biology kindly sent me a copy of his new book, Why We Hate: Understanding the Roots of Human Conflict after I congratulated him on his receipt of ISHPSSB’s David L. Hull prize. We were old acquaintances from his time at the University of Guelph in Ontario before he left for Florida State University. In his new book he mostly links why we hate to the coming of agriculture which mostly makes sense to me. On the other hand, I can imagine when some foraging groups travelled through a familiar landscape on a route timed to when and where particular resources were expected to become available, that they might have encountered each other at a point utilized by two groups and came into conflict, even violence there. I suppose we will never know.

Meanwhile, that is not the point of this post. I also went back and reread his 2017 book Simply Darwin in a Great Lives series which was on my shelf and it reminded me of something that I knew but had forgotten. Beginning roughly in the last quarter of the 20the century, there has been an explosion of work in almost all of the social sciences arguing that culture changes by processes essentially analogous to those of biological evolution. Ruse’s book reminded me that Darwin used the concept of artificial selection to explain to readers (and perhaps to himself) the concept of natural selection. But what exerts artificial selection except the beliefs and values i.e. the culture of human groups small and large – preferences for large plants and animals in farming and animal husbandry for example. So the question arises, was the origin of the analogy between the two forms of evolution the cultural to the biological rather than the biological to the cultural in the first place?

Written by Marion Blute

February 8, 2023 at 4:12 pm

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Fifty Years!

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I realized lately that it has been 50 years this year since I published my first article as a graduate student in 1972. Maybe it is time to quit. But I am not quite ready to yet!

Written by Marion Blute

November 28, 2022 at 10:32 am

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Remembering Anatol Rapaport (1911–2007)

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Anatol Rapaport came to the University of Toronto from the USA as a mature scholar during and because of the Viet Nam war. He was a co-founder of the Society for General Systems Research (now ISSS – the International Society for Systems Sciences) as well as of Science for Peace (see his biography on Wikipedia). Among academics, beyond systems scientists, he is probably most well known for a computer programme written for a tournament on the evolution of cooperation. Compared with other long programmes entered, his “Tit for Tat” had just four lines of code – cooperate if the other does and defect if they do. It won when run against all the others!

He was a person of few words in my experience as well. In 1977 I had finished a draft of my PhD thesis on “Darwinian analogues and the naturalistic explanation of purposivism in biology, psychology and the sociocultural sciences” in the sociology department with a biologist on the committee. I had not yet had my oral when my husband to be told me about a conference coming to the campus. I forget its official title but I went, and among other things, found out that Anatol had coauthored an article in the first issue of Behavioral Science in 1956 on the analogy between biological and cultural evolution. Since that view was part of my thesis, after checking with my department, I went to his office with a copy of my thesis and asked him if he would sit on the committee. His response was “leave it with me and come back in a week.” A week later I went back and his response was similarly brief. “I think this is very clever, and yes, I will sit on your committee.

That was not the end of it however, Apparently because of its interdisciplinary and theoretical character, a philosopher of science who shall remain nameless was recruited as the external examiner. He did not like it because he thought selection is only selection against. This created a fuss in the committee of which I was of course unaware and at the oral, obviously by prearrangement, Anatol asked the first question. I had difficulty understanding the question at first, but eventually said “selection is not selection against or selection for, it is a change in relative frequencies”. Anatol responded, “that was what I wanted to hear”. He then sat back and in a few minutes fell asleep for the rest of the oral! Later I received an invitation from Behavioral Science to submit an article, undoubtedly at his instigation. I eventually did and published there “sociocultural evolution: an untried theory”.

To this day ISSS has a quote from him featured on their web page. “To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for the answers to occur to us.”

Written by Marion Blute

November 7, 2022 at 4:29 pm

Where did the summer go?

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I know where mine went. I spent most of it refereeing a very long book with articles by many authors. Interesting but . . . Oh well, fall is here and I a getting back to my own work so stay tuned.

Written by Marion Blute

September 8, 2022 at 4:18 pm

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Life Speed

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A research article by Cagan et. al. on “Somatic Mutation Rates” and a cover story on it titled “Life Speed” were published in Nature on April 21. Some organisms have short, fast life cycles and tend to be small, others have longer, slower life cycles and tend to be large – think mice and men. A previous study of animals in zoos had found that the latter do not suffer from cancer any more than the former. The general phenomenon was once called “Peto’s paradox”. Cagan et. al. found in the particular case studied (gut epithelial cells in 16 species) that those in long-lived animals mutate much more slowly than do those in short-lived species. The only thing surprising to me is that anyone should find such results surprising! That could only come from viewing mutations from the perspective of physical rather than biological science. Rates per unit clock time should be similar from that perspective. But from a biological perspective, why should mutation rates not scale with all other life history traits – morphological, physiological, behavioural etc? They mostly do indeed as this research shows. The biological fact is, that like other pace of life characteristics, they have evolved. Does that mean they are adaptive? Possibly but not necessarily. Even in terms of the conventional synthetic theory of evolution, there are causes of evolution beyond natural selection – mutation, migration, drift etc.

Written by Marion Blute

May 7, 2022 at 10:12 am

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Reticulation in Evolution

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I have known and liked Nathalier Gontier for years and respect her work in general but on the importance of “reticulation” in evolution I am afraid she is just plain wrong. For the sake of argument, imagine that there was a single origin of life. Then if hybridization were as common as speciation, there would currently be a single species and the history of life would resemble one of those stage theories of history! Instead there are millions of species. Obviously, speciation has been more common than hybridization. To be sure both hybridization and reticulation in the form of horizontal gene transfer (dragged by a viral parasite for example) do occur. However, the weight of current evidence and opinion is that they are relatively uncommon. Horizontal gene transfer implies that evolutionary trees have some cobwebs not that they are in any sense outdated.

Written by Marion Blute

April 6, 2022 at 11:11 am

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Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

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This review of a biography of E. O. Wilson by Richard Rhodes, Doubleday (2021) was written for the newsletter of the Evolution Biology and Society section of the American Sociological Association but for some reason the newsletter has not been published so I am posting it here. A few days after it was written, E. O. Wilson died.

For R & R I like to read books that are not exactly work, but not exactly unrelated to work either. One I read lately which both older and younger members of the section might enjoy is Richard Rhodes’ biography of Edward O. Wilson. Wilson was the author of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) among other books including earlier The Theory of Island Biogeography; The Insect Societies; and later, On Human Nature; Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process; and Biophilia among others, as well as many articles.

I say both because the oldest of us know that without Wilson, our section might well not exist, and for the youngest, well his importance may be lost in history. Personally, I well remember, while finishing my PhD thesis comparing theories of change in biology, psychology and the social sciences, reading a review of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis on the front page of the New York Times no less. While at a conference in another city I found a copy of the large format, heavy hardback book in the university bookstore, purchased it, and subsequently wrote my own review, the second thing I ever published.

Wilson’s argument was that a new science of “sociobiology”, the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior, will incorporate the sociology of all species into the neo-Darwinian synthetic theory of evolution so that the social sciences will “shrink to specialized branches of biology . . . the sociobiology of a single primate species”. Not surprisingly, reactions went to both extremes – raving or scathing. To give an example of how heated things became, a graduate student dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head while he was on stage at a conference exclaiming “Wilson, you’re all wet”! I tried to be more balanced in my review- praising his treatment of the “preformationist” disciplines but criticizing his neglect of the “epigenetic” ones i.e. of development, as well as of the possibility of a distinct sociocultural evolutionary process. To this day there is a large literature on the elusiveness not of a theory of evolution and genetics which is well established, but of one also incorporating development and ecology. However, in the second case, the study of Darwinian-style cultural evolution is flourishing, among other places, in a large Cultural Evolution Society.

Rhodes biography is not officially authorized, but one with which Wilson cooperated by being interviewed in a series of lengthy interviews while resting comfortably in a retirement community at the age of 92. He had a difficult childhood growing up in Alabama with divorced parents, the loss of an eye in an accident, and due to the exigencies of his father’s job, attending 16 different schools! (I once read a study showing that moving for a child, involving a change of neighbourhoods, schools and friends is as hard on a child as a divorce.) His fascination with insects, particularly ants, and later membership in the Boy Scouts saved him and after his bachelors and masters degrees in Biology at the University of Alabama, he did his PhD at Harvard. For that, with his fiancé waiting at home, he was funded for a long trip throughout many Pacific islands, collecting, classifying and identifying many new species of ants. Shortly thereafter he married and soon became a faculty member at Harvard.

Rhodes includes interesting material on Wilson’s conflicts with Watson who also joined the faculty there (yes, that Watson) who thought that the kind of field naturalists’ research that Wilson engaged in was outdated “stamp collecting” and all that was important for the future was biochemistry and molecular biology. It did not help their relationship that Wilson received tenure before Watson. They clashed over positions for hiring at Harvard and eventually the department was split into two – organismic and evolutionary biology in the one and molecular biology in the other. However, as Wilson’s reputation grew, they eventually reconciled and Watson decamped anyway to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island where he achieved great success for some years.

Wilson had a 40 year career at Harvard, retiring from there in 1996. During that time, among other things he championed the concept of group selection particularly for eusocial species like ants which have reproductively sterile casts and embraced gene-culture coevolution (doubtfully according to some). Once retired, he embraced “consilience” rather than reduction as the best concept for inter-disciplinary relations, became even more of a champion of the conservation of biodiversity, and developed from an agnostic to an atheist. He received many awards and honorary doctorates during his career and after his retirement, and in fact was one of most publicly well known scientists of his time. Whatever one thinks of Wilson’s concepts and his work which Rhodes provides an entertaining overview of, there can be little doubt that he was the origin of modern discussions of the relationship among evolution, biology and society.

Written by Marion Blute

March 26, 2022 at 3:14 pm

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Niklas Luhmann still publishing!

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A few days ago I received one of those notices from research gate that an article of mine had been cited in a journal article in 2021 by the German sociologist, Niklas Luhmann no less. I was aware that he had cited an early article on mine on “Sociocultural Evolution: An Untried Theory” in one of his books and I had reviewed a book of his (“Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity” translated and introduced by William Rasch) in the Canadian Journal of Sociology in 2002. Still, that was nice given that he was probably the most prominent sociological theorist in Europe in the Parsonian era. Nice, except that he had died in 1998!

John Simpson kindly contacted an ex-colleague of his who reads German. The journal was “Soziale Systeme” 24(1-2):71-105 with the issue actually dated 2019 and the article (title translated) was “The paradox of system differentiation and the evolution of society” .It would appear that the entire issue of the journal is composed of articles by Luhmann. Given that he published some 40 books and hundreds of journal articles while alive and was said to write 3 hours a day, every day, it should not be surprising that he left more writing when he died that someone has resurrected. I doubt that any of us alive today will still be publishing more than 20 years after our death!

Written by Marion Blute

December 8, 2021 at 10:45 am

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