Posts Tagged ‘evolutionary biology’
“Unhappy is the land that needs a hero”*…
To the extent that evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist Robert Trivers has been in the news over the last decade, it has been for his entanglement with and highly-questionable defense of Jeffrey Epstein. But as Lionel Page reminds us, two decades before that– well before he could have known the execrable “financier”– Trivers made hugely important contributions to his field…
Steve Stewart-Williams announced… that Robert Trivers passed away.
Trivers was one of the most—perhaps the most—influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His work should be much more widely known in social and behavioural sciences, in particular in economics, as Trivers’ intellectual approach is very much in line with a game theoretic understanding of social interactions.
It is hard to overstate the importance of his work. Einstein famously published four groundbreaking papers in 1905, a year often referred to as his “Annus mirabilis”, during which he revolutionised physics. Trivers might be said to have had a “Quinquennium Mirabile” for the five years between 1971 and 1976, during which he produced a series of ideas that revolutionised evolutionary biology…
[Page unpacks four of those contributions: Reciprocal Alturism, Parental Investment, Parental Offspring Conflict, and Self-Deception, each fascinating…]
… Trivers has been one of the most influential evolutionary biologists, and his papers are still worth reading today. His insights, published more than 50 years ago, are fascinating. They often align very well with economic theories of behaviour, and it is therefore regrettable that his ideas are not more well-known in economics, and in particular in behavioural economics.
A key feature of Trivers’ take across these contributions was to see that beneath the world of social interactions we observe, there are deep structures in terms of incentives that shape the game we play. Understanding these games and their structures helps us make sense of the seemingly endless complexity of human psychology and social dynamics. In several key contributions, Trivers helped lift the veil on the underlying logic of human behaviour…
From cooperation to conflict: the evolutionary grammar of social interactions: “The fascinating insights of Robert Trivers” from @lionelpage.bsky.social.
For more on Trivers and the controversies in his life (Epstein, but also the Black Panthers and a Rutgers set-to), all of which followed the burst of productivity described above, see here.
And for some thoughts on how one might reconcile appreciation for a scientist’s work with abhorence of his later sins, see “Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us. We Can Put Them to Rest.“
* Bertolt Brecht (through the mouth of Galileo, in The Life of Galileo)
###
As we linger over legacies, we might send material birthday greetings to a man who helped lay the groundwork for the field to which Trivers contributed, Ludwig Büchner; he was born on this date in 1824. A philosopher, physiologist, and physician, he became one of the leading exponents of 19th-century scientific materialism. Büchner was an early champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, endorsing it within a decade of its first issuance, then did much to spread it by citing and building on it in his own books.
As far as we know, Büchner’s life was free of the scandal and conflict that plagued Trivers. He taught at the University of Tübingen and published dozens of books and papers. Later in his life he founded he “German Freethinkers League” (“Deutsche Freidenkerbund”) and served as a member of the second chamber of the Landstände of the Grand Duchy of Hesse as a representative of the German Free-minded Party from 1884 to 1890. He was the younger brother of Georg Büchner, a famous revolutionary playwright, and Luise Büchner, a women’s rights advocate; and he was the uncle of Ernst Büchner, inventor of the Büchner flask.
“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”*…
The horse transformed human history—and now, as Christina Larson reports, scientists have a clearer idea of when humans began to transform the horse…
Around 4,200 years ago, one particular lineage of horse quickly became dominant across Eurasia, suggesting that’s when humans started to spread domesticated horses around the world, according to research published [recently] in the journal Nature.
There was something special about this horse: It had a genetic mutation that changed the shape of its back, likely making it easier to ride.
“In the past, you had many different lineages of horses,” said Pablo Librado, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and co-author of the new study. That genetic diversity was evident in ancient DNA samples the researchers analyzed from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating back to 50,000 years ago.
But their analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes showed a notable change around 4,200 years ago.
That’s when a specific lineage that first arose in what’s known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a plains region that stretches from what is now northeastern Bulgaria across Ukraine and through southern Russia, began to pop up all across Eurasia and quickly replaced other lineages. Within three hundred years, the horses in Spain were similar to those in Russia.
“We saw this genetic type spreading almost everywhere in Eurasia—clearly this horse type that was local became global very fast,” said co-author Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France.
The researchers believe that this change was because a Bronze Age people called the Sintashta had domesticated their local horse and begun to use these animals to help them dramatically expand their territory.
Domesticating wild horses on the plains of Eurasia was a process, not a single event, scientists say.
Archaeologists have previously found evidence of people consuming horse milk in dental remains dating to around 5,500 years ago, and the earliest evidence of horse ridership dates to around 5,000 years ago. But it was the Sintashta who spread the particular horses they had domesticated across Eurasia, the new study suggests…
People had domesticated other animals several thousand years before horses—including dogs, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep. But the new research shows that the shrinking genetic diversity associated with domestication happened much faster in horses.
“Humans changed the horse genome stunningly quickly, perhaps because we already had experience dealing with animals,” said Laurent Frantz, who studies the genetics of ancient creatures at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was not involved in the study.
“It shows the special place of horses in human societies.”…
“Scientists have traced the origin of the modern horse to a lineage that emerged 4,200 years ago,” from @larsonchristina in @physorg_com.
* Shakespeare, Richard III
###
As we mount up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that Eadweard Muybridge took a series of photographs to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs. He had been retained by former California Governor (and university founder) Leland Stanford to help settle a bet. While Muybridge was best known in his own day for his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, he did seminal early work on motion picture projection, and the approaches he developed for the study of motion are at the heart of both animation and computer analysis today.
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”*…
DNA is indisputably important to biological development. But, Alfonso Martinez Arias argues, far from being a blueprint for an organism, genes are mere tools used by life’s true expert builders: cells…
… Over the past century, scientists have discovered a material explanation for the source of life, one that needs no divine intervention and provides a thread across eons of time for all beings that exist or have ever existed: deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA. While there is little doubt that genes have something to do with what we are and how we come to be, it is difficult to answer precisely the question of what their exact role in all of this is.
A closer look at how genes work and what they can accomplish, compared to what they are said to achieve, casts doubt on the assertion that the genome in particular contains an “operating manual” for us or any other living creature. When it comes to the creation of organisms, we’ve overlooked — or, more accurately, forgotten — another force. The origin and power of that force are cells.
What makes you and me individual human beings is not a unique set of DNA but instead a unique organization of cells and their activities…
A fascinating essay, adapted from Martinez Arias’ forthcoming book, The Master Builder- How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life: “Cells, Not DNA, Are The Master Architects Of Life,” in @NoemaMag.
[Image above: source]
* Psalm 139: 13–14
###
As we delve into design, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Ernst Mayr; he was born on this date in 1904. A taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science, he is best remembered as one of the 20th century’s leading evolutionary biologists. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.
His theory of peripatric speciation (a more precise form of allopatric speciation which he advanced), based on his work on birds, is still considered a leading mode of speciation, and was the theoretical underpinning for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Mayr is sometimes credited with inventing modern philosophy of biology, particularly the part related to evolutionary biology, which he distinguished from physics due to evolutionary biology’s introduction of (natural) history into science.
“Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put in the world to rise above”*…
Questions about what matters, and why, and what exists in the world, are quintessentially philosophical. The answers to many of these questions are informed by how we conceive of ourselves. How has what is often described as the ‘Copernican revolution’ effected by Charles Darwin changed our self-conception? One particularly surprising feature of evolutionary biology is that it lends significant support to existentialism…
Philosopher Ronnie de Souza suggests that ethics cannot be based on human nature because, as evolutionary biology tells us, there is no such thing: “Natural-born existentialists.”
[Photo above: “Children play on Omaha beach in Normandy, France, 1947,” by David Seymour/Magnum Photos. International Center of Photography]
* Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in African Queen
###
As we sidle up to Sartre, we might spare a thought for Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher whose rationalism and determinism put him in opposition to Descartes and helped lay the foundation for The Enlightenment, and whose pantheistic views led to his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam; he died on this date in 1677.
As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honored save justice and charity.
– Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670
You must be logged in to post a comment.