A Challenge for Political Group Selection

Below, Tom argues that a dogged commitment to a political party might be well understood in terms of the dynamics of group selection. My intuitions generally agree. However, although the conclusion might be alluring, the mechanism proposed to get there seems like an all too crude application of evolutionary theory, and exactly the sort of just-so story that Darwinists should strive to avoid.

Here's why. Tom proposes that group selection produces pressures for individuals to engage in elaborate forms of signalling so that they can secure themselves as a member of that group. Crucially, this needs to be irrational, so that groups maintain their stability over evolutionary time-scales and are allowed to be selected for. The premise, of course, is that human social groups are a good way for individuals (or gene-lineages) to propagate themselves downstream.

This premise is the one which doesn't stack up, and is generally regarded with skepticism in evolutionary biology. Why? Because from the perspective of an individual (or their genes), adaptive fitness would be much higher if you exploited a group, than if you did your best to be a co-operative member of a group. This point is most vivid if we consider a possible proto-human social group: the hunting party.

It seems to make sense for a collective of cavemen to co-ordinate hunting activity, since it reduces the costs to any individual hunter, while allowing them to track bigger game (woolly mammoth et al) and thus maximise their payoff. But consider any individual hunter. They could do even better than the others, if they simply slacked off their hunting duties but still had access to the spoils. Of course, this kind of reasoning is symmetric, so every individual will think the same way and try to free-ride off the group. Obviously, this will destroy the stability of the group in favour of individual fitness.

The simple way to think of it is this. If the group is thought to be the unit of selection, then the challenge is to show that successful groups don't simply grow in number, but actually spawn new groups which are similar to themselves - groups that are their offspring. Otherwise, the best explanation for human groupish tendencies isn't group selection, but simply a cascade of individual selective pressure. Pace Tom, but I don't think his account paints the correct picture of the evolutionary architecture of political commitment, because it doesn't establish how these groups get going in the first place.

However, all is not lost for the conscientious Darwinist. I still agree with Tom's conclusion, but with a slightly different flavour. The answer, I think, is a question of cultural rather than biological evolution. And not just in a metaphorical sense, but in the literal application of natural selection to the propagation of social information. This is a big topic in itself, and hopefully one which I will explore shortly.

Evolutionary Irrationality

I've been intending to write about political ideology and group selection for a while now, but a good example last night has spurred me into action.

NZ's top left wing blog The Standard has a post in which the author argues:

One of the great strengths of the Right is that the rank and file supporters are such slavish followers of their leaders. ... Simply doesn’t happen with the Left’s support base. You can’t get the buggers to agree on anything. They care about detail. They argue over it. The educated ones, especially, see simple slogans and shallow arguments as anathema. They don’t tend to go in for blind adherence to their leaders either. They see leaders as tools. Servants for furthering their shared ideals. They critically assess what their leaders say. If they do agree with it when they repeat it to others it will be in their own words. Not a simple repetition of a carefully crafted slogan*. The Left will never have our version of ‘PC’. It’s just not the way we think.

Certainly there are often cognitive differences between people on difference parts of the ideological spectrum, but I think any reasonable non-partisan would think that this far overstates any possible case.

But we shouldn't be dismissive - there is a potential evolutionary explanation for why people do things like this.

In group selection, the necessary (and most problematic) part is getting people to irrationally commit to a group - that is, so they stop considering the relative merits of other groups. A group that people left as soon as they found a better one wouldn't be very stable, and would be selected against. Of course, this is hard to do - even if you assign people to monitor defection, they are also incentivised to defect, and if you set up people to monitor the monitors, the problem just regresses! Some have proposed religion as possible solution (God is impossible to defect from if you believe in Him), but another potential one is simply costly signalling (although obviously this is part of the religion story as well).

Costly signalling is essentially just telling people that you are in the group. It has to be costly so it's difficult to fake (and therefore you are less likely to tell people you're committed to the group when you aren't). I think we can look at posts like the one discussed (and in fact a lot of political behaviour in general) as part of a scheme of costly signalling - the author is just telling his/her left-wing friends that they are part of the group, and he/she would never consider joining the other group because they are so deplorable.

Too simplistic? Of course. But I am fairly sure that it is a substantial part of why political behaviour is so irrational.

Spontaneous (Dis)Order

Today William Easterly at his great blog Aid Watch argues that the Pope, like many, is suffering from what he calls the 'Man in Charge Fallacy' - a false assumption that the economy is or can be centrally run.

This fallacy is related to something Udayan discussed a while back on this blog; the way people like to assume design when there is none. Economist readers will no doubt recognise the links to Hayek's 'spontaneous order' theory of the economy (or perhaps Adam Smith's Invisible Hand), but an perhaps even more fundamental application of it is in our own evolution, where amazingly complex order arises without any design at all.

It is not surprising that the head of a major religion has a tendency to see design in non-designed processes. But the rest of us should be wary of making the same mistake.

Dennett's Dangerous Idea

My favourite philosopher recently gave this talk at the superb annual TED symposium.

The inversion of logic that Dennett explains here, is one of the more subtle consequences of adopting a evolutionary outlook on life, one that most people fail to appreciate. Design without a designer seems fine when talking about nature's feats of engineering, like the wing or the eye. But when the Darwinian lens is trained on human thought, people are surprised by the implications.

Responses to Dennett's line of argument are generally more or less complicated versions of this: "But....um....I experience my experiences. Thats what gives them meaning, you reductionist fool!". The design of our subjective experiences seem to need a meaning attached to them. And while we can accept design without a designer, the concept of meaning without a 'meaner' is harder to grasp.

Obviously, I have glossed over a lot here, but I suspect this point underpins much of constructivist approaches to understanding society. Why must patriarchy have a function? Why do we need a 'death of the author' to justify alternative readings of literature? Why is political language inevitably a form of social control? The answers to these post-structuralist (or whatever) questions are only really crucial if one is unable to grasp that collective trends can simply emerge from the ebb and flow of individual behaviour.

Decoupling design from a designer should imply something similar for meaning. We should look inwards to find out how we attach meaning to things, rather than appeal to some wispy holism. Dennett channels Darwin to give a possible solution to this existential conundrum.

The Days of the Old School-Yard

In his essay Why do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?, the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick hypothesised that the considerable disdain with which many public intellectuals view capitalism was a result of their school-yard days.

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit ... The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest.

Essentially, Nozick suggests that individuals that did well in class but struggled in the more 'anarchic' environment of the playground naturally seek a return to a centrally planned system where they were more successful.

Recently I stumbled upon the most compelling piece of evidence for this hypothesis I have seen to date. Witness this piece from Chris Trotter called "Rise of Life's Bullies".

If schools really were about preparing us for life, they'd not only teach us how to endure bullies, they'd teach us how to become one. What is a bully, after all, but a person who has embraced the basic principles of social organisation more ruthlessly than his or her peers?

Indeed, Trotter seems to think the market is indistinguishable from being bullied at school. It is unsurprising then that he views it with such disdain. He even attempts to offer an evolutionary justification for the apparent prevalence of bullying:

Millennia have taught us that when the powerful start exercising their power, the smartest thing for those not involved to do is to stand well clear. Those brave (or foolish) individuals who, in ages past, displayed their empathy too openly, or recklessly intervened on behalf of the victim, were clearly placing themselves at an evolutionary disadvantage.

This is not strictly true - there are many evolutionary advantages to a certain level of altruism. We routinely see recpirocal altruism and kin selection, to name just two. Trotter's intuitions about human behaviour are highly negative - and seeing as many such intuitions are formed at a young age, perhaps this lends weight to Nozick's thesis.

Ambitious use of 'arguably'

From Frogblog:

Arguably, this is the way of the world. The Right is wrong and the Left gets to clean up.

That is indeed arguable.

The ubiquity of massive over-generalisations like this (if you've ever thought to yourself 'the Right just want to look after their rich cronies' or 'the left are economically illiterate' then you too are guilty) lend a lot of support to the idea that political ideologies are (partly) signalling devices, and built around evidence-resistant commitment. This is something I will perhaps develop into a more in-depth post at some point.