V. Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An EarthWinian Genesis Synthesis

5. Cooperative Member/Group Societies

Weiser, Wolfgang. A Major Transition in Darwinism. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 12/9, 1997. The 20th century emphasis on a competitive struggle for existence is being superseded by the realization that cooperative relationships and group networks are an equally important factor.

Weiss, Kenneth and Anne Buchanan. The Cooperative Genome: Organisms as Social Contracts. International Journal of Developmental Biology. 53/5-6, 2009. The Penn State University scientists, who deftly meld biology, genetics, and anthropology in books and articles noted herein, survey the historic rethinking underway in these fields. A misreading of the Darwinian corpus has, over the past century and a half, and to Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, emphasizd a competitive war of all against all. But a confluence of recent research avows an innate tendency and preference from genomes to Gaia for salutary cooperation. If our observational compass can be so expanded, an endemic modularity “from the subcellular to the ecological” can be found, equally real and complementary to separate agents alone.

ABSTRACT A predominant theme in much of evolutionary biology is that organisms are the product of relentless and precise natural selection among them, and that life is about the competition of all-against-all for success. However, developmental genetics has rapidly been revealing a very different picture of the nature of life. The organizing principles by which organisms are made are thoroughly based on complex hierarchies of molecular interactions that require multiple factors to be relentlessly cooperating with each other. Reconciling these two points of view involves changing the scale of observation, and a different understanding of evolution, in which cooperation and tolerance are more important than competition and intolerance. (753)

Logic is an appropriate concept, because phenogenetic phenomena are the higher-order emergent results of interactions: life is organized by relational principles – the presence, absence, combinations, and arrangements of effectors of various kinds. (754) Cellular life implies modular life, but modular organization is ubiquitous from the subcellular to the ecological. The nature of information storage in genomes is modular, including exons, centromeres, enhancers, insulators, repressors, promoters, telomeres, dispersed repeat elements,…. If they are anything, genomes are the billion-year product of duplication events that generate functional modules. (755)

Weiss, Kenneth, et al. The Red Queen and Her King: Cooperation at All Levels of Life. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 146/S53, 2011. With Anne Buchanan and Brian Lambert, Penn State anthropologists continue (search) their articulation of this ubiquitous reciprocal behavior as it serves to mitigate and integrate competitiveness across societal groupings from microbes to civilizations for the good of both creature and clan. A new slant is then advanced whence this vital mutuality is seen as familial in kind, ideally a regal complementarity of mother and father, not a royal battle. As Table 1, Evolution and Development Compared, and Table 2, Shared Principles of Life, note “Life is organized by units of information, modular structure, and physiology based on interacting systems,” and “Getting along is as important as getting ahead.”

The Red Queen in “Through the Looking Glass” is often used as a metaphor for the relentless, unremitting competitive struggle by which Darwin described life. That imagery fits comfortably in our culture, with its emphasis on competition and inequity, but less so for nature herself. Life is manifestly much more about cooperation, at all levels and through a variety of ubiquitous mechanisms, than it is about competition. Most organisms of most species are nowhere near the proverbial Malthusian edge of survival, such that selection will detect the tiniest difference in their performance and enhance its genetic basis. Cooperation through interaction of multiple entities is inherent in many fundamental aspects of life, and its importance is not widely enough appreciated. Here we discuss a set of principles by which this works. We illustrate the points with a computer simulation of a topic of interest to anthropology, the development of the head. In a sense, our culture has its metaphors reversed. The red royal family is a more accurate symbol for the true nature of life, human or otherwise. (Abstract)

Life is a family affair. (5) The red royal family has a king and a queen – and a lot of other relatives. Monarchies only when the society is a large, extended, cooperating family, an assemblage that survives because it gets along. By not it alone, but keeping it within the family, life has succeeded on this earth without being a relentless race to nowhere. Competition is important, but life was far more cooperative long before issues of social cooperation and competition arrived on the scene. If the principles we have outlined here are as ubiquitous as we think they are, they can help us understand the nature of life at levels from the most reductionist to the most holistic. (16)

West;ey, Peter, et al. Collective Movement in Ecology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Vol.373/Iss.1746, 2018. An introduction to a special issue on this title subject, which as many entries here (Abaid, Bahar, Couzin) and Biology and Physics (Cavagna, Vicsek) attest has become an exemplar of similar self-organized complexities from midges and butterflies to salmon runs, starling flocks and wildebeest herds. An emphasis is on analytic techniques to better aid species management and conservation, such as Collective Animal Navigation and Migratory Culture: From Theoretical Models to Empirical Evidence by Andrew Berdahl, et al, and Using Activity and Sociability to Characterize Collective Motion by David Sumpter, et al (see review).

Recent advances in technology and quantitative methods have led to the emergence of a new field of study that stands to link insights of researchers from two closely related, but often disconnected disciplines: movement ecology and collective animal behaviour. To date, the field of movement ecology has focused on elucidating the internal and external drivers of animal movement and the influence of movement on broader ecological processes. By contrast, the field of collective behaviour has quantified the significant role social interactions play in the decision-making of animals within groups and has relied on controlled laboratory-based studies and theoretical models owing to the constraints of studying interacting animals in the field. (Abstract excerpt)

Whitehead, Hal and Luke Rendell. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Two premier authorities on this subject domain, Whitehead, a Dalhousie University research biologist, and Rendell a University of St. Andrews, Sea Mammal Research Unit and Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, whose association began as professor and student circa 2000 (search), now confirm by fascinating anecdote, vignette, and research study that our cetacean companions do indeed have an oceanic acumen and extensive sociality.

Whitehead, Hal, et al. The Reach of Gene-Culture Coevolution in Animals. Nature Communications. 10/2405, 2019. A premier team of bioecologists - HW, Kevin Laland, Luke Rendell, Rose Thorogood and Andrew Whiten – describe the creative interplay between genetic source codes and the common presence of behavioral groupings across aquatic, avian and mammalian species. See also Animal Learning as a Source of Developmental Bias by K. Laland, et al in Evolution & Development (e12311, 2019).

Culture (behaviour based on socially transmitted information) is present in diverse animal species, yet how it interacts with genetic evolution remains largely unexplored. Here, we review the evidence for gene–culture coevolution in animals, especially birds, cetaceans and primates. We describe how culture can relax or intensify selection under different circumstances, create new selection pressures by changing ecology or behaviour, and favour adaptations, including in other species. Finally, we illustrate how, through culturally mediated migration and assortative mating, culture can shape population genetic structure and diversity. This evidence suggests that animal culture plays an important coevolutionary role, in nature. (Abstract)

Whiten, Andrew. The Second Inheritance Systems of Chimpanzees and Humans. Nature. 437/205, 2005. A companion article to a special section on the newly decoded chimp genome that summarizes recent work to the effect that not only do we have a cultural domain which can override molecular genes, but so also do our nearest primate cousins.

Williams, Tom and Martin Embley. Changing Ideas about Eukaryotic Origins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 370/1678, 2015. As symbiosis finally becomes an evolutionary paradigm, Newcastle University bioscientists introduce a review issue on Eukaryotic Origins: Progress and Challenges. Contributors such as Laura Katz, Eugene Koonin, James Lake, William Martin, Ryan Gregory, and Ford Doolittle discuss many aspects genomes to phylogenetic trees.

Wilson, David Sloan. Animal Movement as a Group-Level Adaptation. Sue Boinski and Paul Garber, eds. On the Move. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. More case studies which support a multilevel selection based on the adaptive and cognitive properties of social species such as African buffalo.

Wilson, David Sloan. Cooperation and Altruism. Fox, Charles, et al, eds. Evolutionary Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. New evidence validates the concept of group selection whereby animal societies find cooperation more advantageous that conflict and can be seen as rudimentary social organisms. When this concept is situated in a multilevel selection theory, the rise of life appears as a nested series of whole entities.

Evolution is often envisioned as a long series of mutational steps, from the origin of life, to bacteria, to the multicellular organisms of today. It is almost certain that another evolutionary process is at work, in which social groups become so functionally integrated that they become a new organism. (229)

Wilson, David Sloan. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes and the Welfare of Others. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. In this latest work, the SUNY Binghamton evolutionary biologist advances his multi-level group selection views about beneficial cooperative behaviors that appear at all of life’s stages from microbes to a metropolis. A proper recognition of this constancy, aided by concerned social reformers from Auguste Comte to Elinor Ostrom, has the potential to foster a “planetary altruism.”

Wilson, David Sloan. Introduction: Multilevel Selection Theory Comes of Age. American Naturalist. 150/Supplement, 1997. A special edition to explore and articulate the rehabilitated appreciation of group selection. We quote from the author’s paper on “Altruism and Organism.”

One of the beauties of multilevel selection theory is that the same conceptual framework is applied to all levels of the biological hierarchy. (S123)

[Prev Pages]   Previous   | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19  Next