> Or, perhaps, it was just the outcome of some random genetic mutation with no reproductive implications at all (like the crossbill’s beak).
Your linked post didn't at all establish that there were no reproductive implications to the crossbill’s beak. You mention Appenzeller Barthuhn experiencing it as a beak deformity. That phenotype is considered a deformity because it's not the norm, and it's frequency is presumably lower among them because, as you wrote, it's "no adaptive advantage" for them. If it's much more common among a population of finches, we can guess that the reproductive implications are less negative for them than for those chickens. If it's common enough, and doesn't appear to be an example of drift in a small/isolated population, then we can guess it probably has positive reproductive implications.
> it’s not a process that creates specific traits to solve specific problems
Traits exist in the present that didn't exist in distant ancestors. Where did those traits come from? Genes which cause those traits got selected. Why? Solving problems is a common reason.
> If true, this means that macaque female-female sexual behavior is a result of genetic changes that serve no evolutionary or reproductive purpose… like the crossbill’s strange beak, or a turtle’s second head.
Your link doesn't discuss populations of multi-headed turtles, presumably because there are such populations and (as your link accurately describes) those are just developmental disorders that aren't inherited from parents and aren't passed on. This makes them unlike populations of macaques and finches.
Thanks for the comment! I understand your point of view, but some of my opinions differ... e.g., one can't assume there's some advantage to a trait that's 'common' in a population. That's an empirical question, and difficult to ascertain. Think of the loss of rear spines in freshwater stickleback fish. A smooth belly has what advantage? None at all; it's a product of a switch gene mutation.... Redheads? Right versus left handedness? If you're saying that if a trait is not attributable to 'drift' then it must have an (unspecified) advantage that we have to figure out, then it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it? Random and (non-ergodic) spontaneous mutations give rise to new traits. It's not really a problem solving because the trait has to appear before it can be used. Like, you can't grow an umbrella because it starts raining. Although the traits can be functional in certain environments under certain conditions after the fact. That's a bit different than prospective problem solving... although the teleology is seductive, indeed. Thanks again for your thoughtful comment... I appreciated it!
> Think of the loss of rear spines in freshwater stickleback fish. A smooth belly has what advantage? None at all; it's a product of a switch gene mutation
There's a metabolic cost to many features. Thus it can be an advantage to lose them when they no longer provide a benefit. As with blind animals adapted to caves.
> Right versus left handedness?
There has been literature on the potential advantages of being a southpaw in terms of frequency dependent selection.
> If you're saying that if a trait is not attributable to 'drift' then it must have an (unspecified) advantage that we have to figure out, then it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it?
Drift and selection are the two ways frequencies of an allele can change (not counting the initial mutation that took it from 0 to 1).
> Random and (non-ergodic) spontaneous mutations give rise to new traits.
Yes, it gives rise to traits, and then selection determines which traits spread vs disappear.
> It's not really a problem solving because the trait has to appear before it can be used.
I don't think that follows. If I have a Swiss Army Knife, and I encounter a problem that it turns out that tool can solve, is it not problem solving because I had to have the knife first? It's problem solving if it solves the problem, in my book.
> Like, you can't grow an umbrella because it starts raining.
I assume it's covered in the literature, but naively the homosexual sex could be something akin to grooming, but results in a far more powerful chemical cocktail. Similar to sex in humans where the function of sex isn't always to reproduce (ideal Catholics notwithstanding).
Going a little from memory here but male-male non-reproductive sex is quite widely observed in non-human species, far more so than male-female which is mostly confined to primates and cetaceans, with female-female being vanishingly rare, as in I think this particular macaque group may still be the only known example.
What has to borne carefully in mind with primates is that they can and do transmit learned behaviours between generations, which means they have a culture, so the most parsimonious explanation for this particular behaviour does not require us to postulate the existence of a genetically distinct population of macaques, only a culturally distinct one.
The origins of this behaviour lie plausibly as an offshoot of normal primate grooming behaviour and. macaques being macaques, having accidentally found a rather pleasurable diversion they will quite naturally pass that knowledge on to other members of their troop, etc.
I am very positively impressed by your writing and ideas. Thanks for your efforts.
I have a question
In another essay I think you said ‘biology is behavior’. I also noted that you believe some behaviors are ‘good’ while others are ‘bad’. Yet, since Nature (the natural world which can be investigated by science) is ‘amoral’ (do you agree with this assertion), how could behavior (which is biology) be moral (good or bad)?
Thanks so much for the comment! This is a very good point. At first, I thought this would be an easy question to answer but it's not. Yes, behavior is a product of biology. It can't be anything else. And, you are absolutely correct that biology is "amoral" in the sense that there is no purpose or teleology in the way organisms are structured. The ones that exist do so simply because they "work" sufficiently well to reproduce. So, I can study the biological structures that give rise to aggressive behavior within an organism or within a group dispassionately and without judgment. However, organisms have preferences and make judgments about other organisms' behaviors. That's also biology... Whether it's the silverback gorilla whacking an upstart adolescent male who has gotten out of hand, or a human society articulating some rules of behavior and the associated punishments. When I referred to good and bad — in terms of youngsters acting rude, aggressive, or belligerently — I was taking the latter perspective. Of course, those perspectives are different among different groups of people, and they can change over time, but they do, in fact, exist. Darwin (and subsequently others) suggested that these are the roots of moral judgments among humans.
To be clear, I'm not committing the fallacy of saying what is the case should be the case (the so-called, 'is-ought' fallacy). I'm just saying that we overlay behaviors with value judgments, and these judgments have to be understood within the contexts of our neural organization (you and I don't have exactly the same brains), and the context in which the behavior occurs. So, consider aggression. It's neither good nor bad, per se. It is a product of a particular biological system. Our assessments about it are a product of the relationship between that biology and the environmental context in which it is embedded and in terms of which it operates.
Would we judge aggression to be good for the Fox? Well, yes, or it could never hold onto a territory or kill prey. Would it be a good idea for the rabbit to be more aggressive? Well, no. Trying to hold its ground and fight the Fox would be fatal. How about with people? Well, based on my values I would say it's not good in most circumstances, but valorous under others (like defending your children).
So, you are correct: behavior is just behavior. However, I employ a particular set of values that are a product of my particular biology... And they are an emergent property of my particular neurophysiological makeup as it developed within the environment(s) to which I was exposed.
Okay, now I need another cup of coffee! ....feel free to respond
Thank you. Your answer is well stated, and it is very familiar - I have encountered this many times before as my own training was in biology, pharmacology, and medicine. My criticism of ‘biology is behavior’ arises from a seeming inconsistency. In the amoral nature where we exist with our irrepressible sense of morality which leads to ‘values’ - virtue versus vice - it seems as if this sense of morality must be an illusion. There is not space here to go deeper into this argument but it leads to difficulties with an understanding of how an amoral and unreasonable nature can result in reasonable morality.
However I understand the world from the perspective of a deist, and this enables a different understanding of ‘good’. It allows the concepts of morality and virtue to have reasonable meaning. Indeed it allows the words ‘reasonable’ and ‘meaning’ to be reasonably meaningful. My thoughts on this are informed by the writings of C. S. Lewis and his version of ‘the argument from reason’ best explained in his book Miracles.
Thanks again for your considerate response here and for your writing generally which I enjoy and find to be useful!
What you're doing here by privileging your own preferred sort of delusion is known as special pleading and generally leads to the sort of circular reasoning above (e.g. 'reasonably meaningful reasonable meaning'.)
No - I am not engaging in circular reasoning. I am engaging in word play, as the words reasonable and reasonably can be understood differently depending on the context. I can be 'reasonable' in being accommodating, and I can be 'reasonable' in being logical. You may consider my thinking as unreasonable - my own sort of delusion - but then many great thinkers share my point of view which is not in fact mine, but which I have come to accept as true.
This is very interesting, especially your comment that morality is an illusion. At some level, I assume it is. Organisms create patterns of behavior that can constrain other organisms. This is especially true among social animals from invertebrates to people. I guess — because of our language and abstract thinking abilities — we perceive these constraints as moral dictums. Perhaps, this is the illusion of which you're speaking.
Yes - if nature is all there is to reality (i.e. there is nothing that is supernatural or outside of nature), and nature is amoral, then human perceptions of ‘moral dictums’ must be an illusion. When taken further, our perceptions of meaning along with beliefs in reason itself are illusions. As Solomon laments that ‘all is vanity’, without a supernatural reality all is illusion.
Biology was my first love in the academic world, and your explanations and insights about biology with implications for understanding our world are interesting, sometimes useful. But biology is not wisdom, it is not justice, and it does not offer any hope.
Nicely expressed! "Just so" stories are so intuitively appealing to people. Some might find that sufficient reason to believe we must have "evolved" a specific need to discover purpose in random events! We could call it the evolution of teleological thinking! So that people would be pre-disposed to search for the Ultimate Meaning.
I jest.
Your discussion of the teleological fallacy touches on a subtle and intriguing distinction. As you say, evolution is "not a process that creates specific traits to solve specific problems." Yet, a hair's-breadth away is the reasonable notion that some traits have adaptive significance sufficient to confer a selective advantage to populations with that trait. Such adaptive significance might well have all the characteristics of a "solution" to some environmental problem, from the peculiar perspective of that particular species' survival. I'm not quibbling with your argument; I completely agree. I just find it fascinating that evolution somehow seems like it solves specific problems by merely piggy backing on the simple, brute logic that only existing individuals can procreate.
And I completely agree with you. It can be the case, of course, that a specific trait is remarkably helpful reproductively but many traits are neither helpful nor harmful. They just are. You and I are both saying that one can't simply assume a trait has a reproductive benefit. That's an empirical question. If you look at those articles that I linked at the beginning about human behavior, you find just the craziest assumptions about the adaptive nature of virtually anything... from men's beards to babies falling asleep faster if you carry them around rather than just letting them lay in the crib crying. I think the crossbill finch is a perfect example. Fundamentally, it's got a birth defect. It manages despite this. It's no great benefit to the bird, yet it's claimed to be in Intro Biology classes here (and elsewhere, I presume).
I also think that people simply fail to understand the great variability within any breeding population. This should be patently obvious if you just look at all the different types of people on the planet who manage to have kids. Which one is the "normal" one selected for by evolution? Interestingly, I spent many years doing neurobiology research on invertebrates. Truth is, even individual insects are remarkably different... Stereotypes will always be just stereotypes. They are not reality.
More importantly, this misunderstanding (about variability) underpins many of the stereotypes that we have about human behavior... especially when it deals with sex. As we both know, judging a child who is not behaving according to some current stereotype and assuming they are [fill in the blank with some malady] is ridiculous on the face of it. A lot of us were harshly judged when young because we didn't meet the norms of the time... Certainly, I was. And, those harsh judgments still anger me when I think about them. Unfortunately, nowadays, the repercussions of being misjudged can be more than just retrospective aggravation... They can rapidly lead to irreversible damage perpetrated by those who "know" what you're really like... or what you really "should" be. In the end, it's a misunderstanding of basic biology.... I guess everything is biology!
> Or, perhaps, it was just the outcome of some random genetic mutation with no reproductive implications at all (like the crossbill’s beak).
Your linked post didn't at all establish that there were no reproductive implications to the crossbill’s beak. You mention Appenzeller Barthuhn experiencing it as a beak deformity. That phenotype is considered a deformity because it's not the norm, and it's frequency is presumably lower among them because, as you wrote, it's "no adaptive advantage" for them. If it's much more common among a population of finches, we can guess that the reproductive implications are less negative for them than for those chickens. If it's common enough, and doesn't appear to be an example of drift in a small/isolated population, then we can guess it probably has positive reproductive implications.
> it’s not a process that creates specific traits to solve specific problems
Traits exist in the present that didn't exist in distant ancestors. Where did those traits come from? Genes which cause those traits got selected. Why? Solving problems is a common reason.
> If true, this means that macaque female-female sexual behavior is a result of genetic changes that serve no evolutionary or reproductive purpose… like the crossbill’s strange beak, or a turtle’s second head.
Your link doesn't discuss populations of multi-headed turtles, presumably because there are such populations and (as your link accurately describes) those are just developmental disorders that aren't inherited from parents and aren't passed on. This makes them unlike populations of macaques and finches.
Thanks for the comment! I understand your point of view, but some of my opinions differ... e.g., one can't assume there's some advantage to a trait that's 'common' in a population. That's an empirical question, and difficult to ascertain. Think of the loss of rear spines in freshwater stickleback fish. A smooth belly has what advantage? None at all; it's a product of a switch gene mutation.... Redheads? Right versus left handedness? If you're saying that if a trait is not attributable to 'drift' then it must have an (unspecified) advantage that we have to figure out, then it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it? Random and (non-ergodic) spontaneous mutations give rise to new traits. It's not really a problem solving because the trait has to appear before it can be used. Like, you can't grow an umbrella because it starts raining. Although the traits can be functional in certain environments under certain conditions after the fact. That's a bit different than prospective problem solving... although the teleology is seductive, indeed. Thanks again for your thoughtful comment... I appreciated it!
It is indeed an empirical question.
> Think of the loss of rear spines in freshwater stickleback fish. A smooth belly has what advantage? None at all; it's a product of a switch gene mutation
There's a metabolic cost to many features. Thus it can be an advantage to lose them when they no longer provide a benefit. As with blind animals adapted to caves.
> Right versus left handedness?
There has been literature on the potential advantages of being a southpaw in terms of frequency dependent selection.
> If you're saying that if a trait is not attributable to 'drift' then it must have an (unspecified) advantage that we have to figure out, then it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it?
Drift and selection are the two ways frequencies of an allele can change (not counting the initial mutation that took it from 0 to 1).
> Random and (non-ergodic) spontaneous mutations give rise to new traits.
Yes, it gives rise to traits, and then selection determines which traits spread vs disappear.
> It's not really a problem solving because the trait has to appear before it can be used.
I don't think that follows. If I have a Swiss Army Knife, and I encounter a problem that it turns out that tool can solve, is it not problem solving because I had to have the knife first? It's problem solving if it solves the problem, in my book.
> Like, you can't grow an umbrella because it starts raining.
Rain can cause umbrellas to be more common.
I assume it's covered in the literature, but naively the homosexual sex could be something akin to grooming, but results in a far more powerful chemical cocktail. Similar to sex in humans where the function of sex isn't always to reproduce (ideal Catholics notwithstanding).
Going a little from memory here but male-male non-reproductive sex is quite widely observed in non-human species, far more so than male-female which is mostly confined to primates and cetaceans, with female-female being vanishingly rare, as in I think this particular macaque group may still be the only known example.
What has to borne carefully in mind with primates is that they can and do transmit learned behaviours between generations, which means they have a culture, so the most parsimonious explanation for this particular behaviour does not require us to postulate the existence of a genetically distinct population of macaques, only a culturally distinct one.
The origins of this behaviour lie plausibly as an offshoot of normal primate grooming behaviour and. macaques being macaques, having accidentally found a rather pleasurable diversion they will quite naturally pass that knowledge on to other members of their troop, etc.
A very interesting point! Thank you, Frederick
A very interesting perspective. I would agree.
I am very positively impressed by your writing and ideas. Thanks for your efforts.
I have a question
In another essay I think you said ‘biology is behavior’. I also noted that you believe some behaviors are ‘good’ while others are ‘bad’. Yet, since Nature (the natural world which can be investigated by science) is ‘amoral’ (do you agree with this assertion), how could behavior (which is biology) be moral (good or bad)?
Thanks so much for the comment! This is a very good point. At first, I thought this would be an easy question to answer but it's not. Yes, behavior is a product of biology. It can't be anything else. And, you are absolutely correct that biology is "amoral" in the sense that there is no purpose or teleology in the way organisms are structured. The ones that exist do so simply because they "work" sufficiently well to reproduce. So, I can study the biological structures that give rise to aggressive behavior within an organism or within a group dispassionately and without judgment. However, organisms have preferences and make judgments about other organisms' behaviors. That's also biology... Whether it's the silverback gorilla whacking an upstart adolescent male who has gotten out of hand, or a human society articulating some rules of behavior and the associated punishments. When I referred to good and bad — in terms of youngsters acting rude, aggressive, or belligerently — I was taking the latter perspective. Of course, those perspectives are different among different groups of people, and they can change over time, but they do, in fact, exist. Darwin (and subsequently others) suggested that these are the roots of moral judgments among humans.
To be clear, I'm not committing the fallacy of saying what is the case should be the case (the so-called, 'is-ought' fallacy). I'm just saying that we overlay behaviors with value judgments, and these judgments have to be understood within the contexts of our neural organization (you and I don't have exactly the same brains), and the context in which the behavior occurs. So, consider aggression. It's neither good nor bad, per se. It is a product of a particular biological system. Our assessments about it are a product of the relationship between that biology and the environmental context in which it is embedded and in terms of which it operates.
Would we judge aggression to be good for the Fox? Well, yes, or it could never hold onto a territory or kill prey. Would it be a good idea for the rabbit to be more aggressive? Well, no. Trying to hold its ground and fight the Fox would be fatal. How about with people? Well, based on my values I would say it's not good in most circumstances, but valorous under others (like defending your children).
So, you are correct: behavior is just behavior. However, I employ a particular set of values that are a product of my particular biology... And they are an emergent property of my particular neurophysiological makeup as it developed within the environment(s) to which I was exposed.
Okay, now I need another cup of coffee! ....feel free to respond
Thank you. Your answer is well stated, and it is very familiar - I have encountered this many times before as my own training was in biology, pharmacology, and medicine. My criticism of ‘biology is behavior’ arises from a seeming inconsistency. In the amoral nature where we exist with our irrepressible sense of morality which leads to ‘values’ - virtue versus vice - it seems as if this sense of morality must be an illusion. There is not space here to go deeper into this argument but it leads to difficulties with an understanding of how an amoral and unreasonable nature can result in reasonable morality.
However I understand the world from the perspective of a deist, and this enables a different understanding of ‘good’. It allows the concepts of morality and virtue to have reasonable meaning. Indeed it allows the words ‘reasonable’ and ‘meaning’ to be reasonably meaningful. My thoughts on this are informed by the writings of C. S. Lewis and his version of ‘the argument from reason’ best explained in his book Miracles.
Thanks again for your considerate response here and for your writing generally which I enjoy and find to be useful!
What you're doing here by privileging your own preferred sort of delusion is known as special pleading and generally leads to the sort of circular reasoning above (e.g. 'reasonably meaningful reasonable meaning'.)
No - I am not engaging in circular reasoning. I am engaging in word play, as the words reasonable and reasonably can be understood differently depending on the context. I can be 'reasonable' in being accommodating, and I can be 'reasonable' in being logical. You may consider my thinking as unreasonable - my own sort of delusion - but then many great thinkers share my point of view which is not in fact mine, but which I have come to accept as true.
Evolution is heterosexual.
This is very interesting, especially your comment that morality is an illusion. At some level, I assume it is. Organisms create patterns of behavior that can constrain other organisms. This is especially true among social animals from invertebrates to people. I guess — because of our language and abstract thinking abilities — we perceive these constraints as moral dictums. Perhaps, this is the illusion of which you're speaking.
"Morality" and any associated ideal is rooted entirely in a presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.
The Jewish god id a fraud . . . Evolution is heterosexual . . .
Yes - if nature is all there is to reality (i.e. there is nothing that is supernatural or outside of nature), and nature is amoral, then human perceptions of ‘moral dictums’ must be an illusion. When taken further, our perceptions of meaning along with beliefs in reason itself are illusions. As Solomon laments that ‘all is vanity’, without a supernatural reality all is illusion.
I am not sure that all is illusion.... but everything is biology....
Thanks - I will end my comments with this…
Biology was my first love in the academic world, and your explanations and insights about biology with implications for understanding our world are interesting, sometimes useful. But biology is not wisdom, it is not justice, and it does not offer any hope.
Best wishes!
I look forward to your next essay…
"...You know, like monkeys and children." - Genius!
Nicely expressed! "Just so" stories are so intuitively appealing to people. Some might find that sufficient reason to believe we must have "evolved" a specific need to discover purpose in random events! We could call it the evolution of teleological thinking! So that people would be pre-disposed to search for the Ultimate Meaning.
I jest.
Your discussion of the teleological fallacy touches on a subtle and intriguing distinction. As you say, evolution is "not a process that creates specific traits to solve specific problems." Yet, a hair's-breadth away is the reasonable notion that some traits have adaptive significance sufficient to confer a selective advantage to populations with that trait. Such adaptive significance might well have all the characteristics of a "solution" to some environmental problem, from the peculiar perspective of that particular species' survival. I'm not quibbling with your argument; I completely agree. I just find it fascinating that evolution somehow seems like it solves specific problems by merely piggy backing on the simple, brute logic that only existing individuals can procreate.
And I completely agree with you. It can be the case, of course, that a specific trait is remarkably helpful reproductively but many traits are neither helpful nor harmful. They just are. You and I are both saying that one can't simply assume a trait has a reproductive benefit. That's an empirical question. If you look at those articles that I linked at the beginning about human behavior, you find just the craziest assumptions about the adaptive nature of virtually anything... from men's beards to babies falling asleep faster if you carry them around rather than just letting them lay in the crib crying. I think the crossbill finch is a perfect example. Fundamentally, it's got a birth defect. It manages despite this. It's no great benefit to the bird, yet it's claimed to be in Intro Biology classes here (and elsewhere, I presume).
I also think that people simply fail to understand the great variability within any breeding population. This should be patently obvious if you just look at all the different types of people on the planet who manage to have kids. Which one is the "normal" one selected for by evolution? Interestingly, I spent many years doing neurobiology research on invertebrates. Truth is, even individual insects are remarkably different... Stereotypes will always be just stereotypes. They are not reality.
More importantly, this misunderstanding (about variability) underpins many of the stereotypes that we have about human behavior... especially when it deals with sex. As we both know, judging a child who is not behaving according to some current stereotype and assuming they are [fill in the blank with some malady] is ridiculous on the face of it. A lot of us were harshly judged when young because we didn't meet the norms of the time... Certainly, I was. And, those harsh judgments still anger me when I think about them. Unfortunately, nowadays, the repercussions of being misjudged can be more than just retrospective aggravation... They can rapidly lead to irreversible damage perpetrated by those who "know" what you're really like... or what you really "should" be. In the end, it's a misunderstanding of basic biology.... I guess everything is biology!
Thanks for the great feedback, Frederick
I know, right? I guess that's why they call them "animals"… LOL