Discussion with Jay R Feierman in Human Ethology YahooGroup

[Craig Mackay]

Posted by: "mackaycraig11" c...@ast.cam.ac.uk   mackaycraig11

Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:24 am (PDT)

Dear Jay

As before, I am sorry it has taken so long to reply to your many
comments about this book. Some of them I have addressed in and
earlier posting today to James. The comments I have here interspersed
with your own comments to make it clear what I am talking about!

> Re: New Book Published: "Supergenes: What Really Makes Us Human"
> Posted by: "Jay R. Feierman" jfeierman@comcast.net jrfeier
> Sun Apr 6, 2008 8:55 am (PDT)
> Craig Mackay: The view expressed in the book is that our behaviour
in any social situation is better understood as the complete content
of our mind expressing an appropriate subset in a way that maximises
its appropriateness and therefore influence in that situation. The
complete content of our mind is continually updated because of our
experiences of others and so evolves continually. That is true of
everyone we come into contact with. The contents of our mind are
expressed differently in different social environments in a way
analogous to the way that our biological genes are expressed
differently in different cellular environments.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: Hello Craig. Thanks for posting this information
about your book. I wonder what you mean by a "mind"? That may seem
like a silly question but "minds" are not real, physical things. As
such, how can they have "content," which I presume is information.
Information is not a function that can be a part of a "mind". It is
energy/transformati

onal/thermodynamic. As such, information has to
have its effect on something of substance, such as the brain. (See the
various writings of Malcolm Dean on cognitive thermodynamics, which
you may find interesting given your physical science background.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/human-ethology/files/Drafts%20for%20comments/).
You talk about "the contents of our mind are expressed differently in
different social environments." What form does the "content of our
mind" take? You then shift from the mentalistic perspective of the
"mind" and talk about our biological genes expressing differently in
different cellular environments.

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Agreed: see earlier posting about by sloppy use of the words brain/mind.
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>
> Craig Mackay: It is this analogy that led me to call these our
SuperGenes. Because these SuperGenes are being continually selected
for and against and being continually updated to maximise their
reproductive success in a dynamic social environment they let us
evolve much more rapidly than is ever possible biologically. Hence
"super" genes.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: I don't understand. What do these "SuperGenes" code
for?
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see earlier posting, but basically SuperGenes do not code individually
for anything. The word is intended to encompass everything held in
our brains that is not coded into our DNA. Subsets of our super gene
pool are expressed in different social environments in a way to be
optimally adapted to those environments. Our success within society
(essentially the only success that matters to us) is consequent on how
well we are able to adapt to that society and that, in turn, is
consequent on how appropriately we behave.
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>
> Craig Mackay: It is increasingly clear that relatively little of our
social behaviour is encoded in our biological genes.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: Whoaa. If by "social behavior" you mean the
behavior (the movement of individuals) that occurs when two people
interact with one another, I very much would disagree with your
statement. I. Eibesfeldt, the "Father of Human Ethology," coined the
phrase "social grammar" many years ago to describe the innate rules of
social interaction that humans have. He discovered this by living with
lots of primitive tribal people. I also have done lots of traveling in
different non-western societies, many of which are primitive tribal
societies. I've lived with such people where I can not speak a word of
their language. Yet, we got along quite fine because we both have the
same innate social grammar. If you have followed the discussions of
Type I and Type II Behavior on this group, our social grammar is all
encoded in our Type I Behavior. We innately know how to relate to
other individuals, even other individuals from a completely alien
tribal society, because of our innate social grammar.
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I don't think we disagree here. What Eibesfeldt called "social
grammar" are the social behaviour patterns that I think are indeed
encoded in our DNA. However social grammar is all pretty basic
behaviour, relatively coarse-grained beside the subtleties of human
behaviour. There is a wonderful book by Kate Fox entitled "Watching
the English, The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour". She has an
astonishing understanding of the extraordinary subtlety of human
behaviour (and there is no doubt that English behaviour does take a
lot of understanding!). What the book makes clear is that there are a
vast thick layers of behaviour that make us the way we are, and that
the social grammar component is important but simply the framework on
which most of our behaviour is actually constructed The behaviour that
is invariant across the human spectrum is, as you say, likely to be
encoded in our DNA but the vast majority of our behaviour patterns is
learned. English and Scottish people behave significantly differently
and each, in turn, differently from the French. All these differences
must be learned.
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>
> Craig Mackay: I am convinced that the extraordinary speed with which
our society evolves makes it most unlikely that biology has very much
to do with it at all.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: It depends on what you mean by "Biology." The
extraordinary speed in which human societies and civilization have
evolved in the past few millennia has been due to cultural evolution.
However, there is a biological capacity which enables cultural
evolution, as very few taxa have the capacity to pass information
across generations by social learning.
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Again, I agree. Our DNA gives us the biological capacity to be human
and it is that capacity that we have used to enable cultural evolution
in a way that other species largely (though not entirely) do not have.
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>
> Craig Mackay: I think Tinbergen is wrong at least in the application
of his ideas to humans.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: I am not aware that Tinbergen even tried to apply
his ideas to humans other than to autistic children. What writing of
his are you referring to when you say this?
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what I wanted to say was that the ideas of Tinbergen about animal
behaviour would not be applicable to human behaviour.
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>
> Craig MacKay: Essentially I think that we humans have discovered
that the evolutionary limitation of our biology can be overcome by
evolving our society and behaviour and it is this that we really want
to propagate.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: I'm not sure that humans are trying to overcome our
biological limitations, as the capacity to transmit information across
generations by social learning is one of our biological capacities
which evolved by natural selection. It is simply an "add-on" to our
other capacities.
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The ability to transmit information gained by social learning is due
to biological capacity but that biological capacity is very limited in
its ability to evolve biologically because the timescales (millions of
years) are just far too long. Once we gained that capacity we were
able to evolve dramatically faster by transferring information, not
simply by transferring information to subsequent generations, but
principally by transferring information to peer groups.
***********************************************

>
> Craig Mackay: Unlike biological genes which can only be propagated
to a small number of offspring, our SuperGenes can be propagated to
anyone older, younger, childless or not.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: If you look at the mathematics of a successful gene
spreading in a population, that's not insignificant, as one has a
exponential expansion with each offspring having offspring, etc, etc.
A gene under strong selection pressure can go from being present in
only one individual to being present in almost all individuals at
least in a circumscribed population in a relatively small number of
generations. However, I would agree that cultural transmission has a
much faster horizontal spread (within generations) than genetic
transmission, which can only spread across generations (vertically).
***********************************************
I think, actually you are wrong here. Creating strong selection
pressure turns out not to cause rapid biological evolution because of
the random nature of biological DNA inheritance. This is why eugenics
(which is really what you are describing) was a fundamentally flawed
idea and why selective breeding which became very popular in the
earlier parts of the 20th century simply did not work. Population
genetics studies have shown mathematically why it didn't work. The
only way that relatively rapid biological evolution succeeds is if a
particular trait benefits everyone, and this is why, for example brain
volume in humans has increased relatively quickly.
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>
> Craig Mackay: I do not argue that social adaptation is so very
different now from what it was in the past.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: What do you mean by "social adaptation"? To me the
word "adaptation" means "a structural design feature, which when
possessed, confers a relative reproductive advantage to its bearer in
a specific environment." Is a "social adaptation" an adaptation that
facilitates one's social behavior? We have both phylogenetic and
cultural adaptations which facilitate our social behavior. The
internet is a cultural adaptation which is facilitating my social
interactions with you.
***********************************************
This may be where my unfamiliarity with the rigorous definition of the
word is leading to confusion. I think what I probably mean is social
adaption.
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>
> Craig Mackay: I do not know anything about what happened millions of
years ago to tribes hunter-gatherers (and nor does anyone else despite
the assertions of evolutionary psychologists, for example).
>
> Jay R. Feierman: Millions of years ago one would have only had
hominoid species, such as Homo erectus, as Homo sapiens is not that
old. However, the few hunter-gathers still left in the world have been
studied extensively, so we get some glimpses of what their life is
like and what all of our lives might have been like between 10,000 and
100,000 years ago. One also gets glimpses of that by observing the
behavior of primitive subsistence horticulturalists or pastoralists.
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This is something I have never really been all that convinced about.
I'm not at all sure that primitive tribes do more than reflect how
humans manage to survive in a non-technological subsistence
environment. Despite their appearances they have also evolved their
behaviour in ways that we will find difficult to understand. Their
lives are so different from ours that we are inevitably insensitive to
the subtleties of their lives.

I remember very many years ago seeing a television programme where a
group of primitive tribes people in some remote central or South
American area dressed in little more than loincloths were gathered
discussing something intently. The voice-over suggested that this was
some important part of their jungle lives that was being discussed.
Then the footage ceased and restarted to show that what was actually
happening was that there was a small petrol generator driving a colour
television set under a grass hut. The program they were watching was
"Dallas", and these allegedly primitive peoples were discussing with
great subtlety of understanding the eccentric behaviour patterns of
the super oil-rich in the United States. Primitive they may have
been, but not stupid or naive!
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>
> Craig Mackay: What is changing is our society, and it is our
adaptation to that evolving society that dominates our behaviour.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: Our societies changed from hunter-gather to
agricultural and pastoral within the last 10,000 years. Many
individuals now live in large metropolitan areas where they are
continually interacting with strangers. There is therefore more, not
less, positive selection pressure on the brain structures whose
functions are our social grammar, as we've become rather adept at
interacting with strangers. We know what to expect of others in terms
of their social behavior because of our universal human social
grammar. We can stand in line with people and not fight with them, etc.
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but actually much of this is at a much more subtle level than simple
social grammar. You simply do not stand in line in Italy, whereas to
queue jump in England is the most awful social crime. It is not our
social grammar that is being modified: that is left unchanged and that
is what is passed to subsequent generations in our DNA. It is the
much more subtle, much more complex behaviour that is evolving.
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>
> Craig Mackay: The book tries to understand the forces that are
directing our evolution so strongly in these terms and to reach a
concilience between sociology, social psychology, behavioural studies
and evolutionary ideas.
>
> Jay R. Feierman: Okay. I'm interested in your responses to some of
my comments. And, again, thanks for posting to the group.
>
> Jay,