Mark Rowlands - Animal morality

Mark Rowlands - Animal morality

Eleanor, the matriarch of her family, is dying. She is unable to stand, so Grace attempts to help her, lifting and pushing her back to her feet. She tries to get Eleanor to walk, nudging her along gently. But Eleanor stumbles, and falls again. Grace appears very distressed, and shrieks loudly. She persists in trying to get Eleanor back to her feet, to no avail. Grace stays by the fallen figure of Eleanor for another hour, while night falls.

If the figures that played out this grim tableau were human, we might have little hesitation in explaining what was going on in moral terms. Grace, we might say, was motivated by her sympathy for Eleanor’s plight. However, neither Grace nor Eleanor is human. Eleanor is the matriarch of a family of elephants, one that the British zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton and his colleagues have come to call the ‘First Ladies’ family. Grace is a younger, unrelated, member of another family, the ‘Virtues Family’.

Grace is not unusual among elephants. Take another series of events: a young female elephant suffered from a withered leg, and could put little weight upon it. A young male from another herd charged the crippled female. A large female elephant chased him away and then, revealingly, returned to the young female and gently touched her withered leg with her trunk. Joyce Poole, the ethologist and elephant conservationist who described this event, concluded that the adult female was showing empathy.

Animals naturally evolve as Y-Ro with team natures, they form cooperative groups that survive as predator and prey in a war of attrition. Elephants as Ro prey have survived more my protecting each other from the team attacks of predators, such as a pride of lions overwhelming a single elephant with sheer numbers. Those with less empathy then would abandon each other more and then survive less well against Y teams unless they as R became faster and more secretive. Elephants cannot run and hide so they must like buffalo rely on their team instinct to survive.

Why Women Are Too Tall and Men Are Too Short - Lindsay Abrams - The Atlantic

Why Women Are Too Tall and Men Are Too Short - Lindsay Abrams - The Atlantic

Shorter women have more children. And while being on the low end of the measuring stick benefits them on an evolutionary scale, it keeps their brothers from attaining the trait that favors their reproductive success: average height. Researchers in the UK claim to be the first to demonstrate this new explanation for why height variation exists: That one's height depends heavily on one's genes, and that the genetic mechanisms for determining height are similar in men and women, preventing each gender from being able to evolve independently toward their sex-specific ideals.

These same researchers have already come up with objective, if narrowly defined, parameters for "ideal" height. The tendency to have more children makes shorter women, in terms of reproduction, more "fit." For men, it's not good to be too tall or too short: Even though women tend to prefer taller men, those of average height turn out to be the most fit.

Why this may be so is unclear. People with these traits must to some degree be favored by the opposite sex, although other factors, like the age at which people of various heights tend to start having children, may also play a role. But it is nonetheless measurable.

An average height might be the most fit as the center of the V-Bi normal curve in cooperative communities, potential mates prefer the normal height and these have the most offspring. There is however a chaotic iv-B influence pulling makes an females apart, shorter females and taller males might also do better causing an oscillation between floors and ceilings of height. This can result in women too tall or men being too short, eventually this might produce an innovation or mutation in genes so that mean can be tall whole allowing women to be short as well. This can then happen because of color interactions as both chaos and randomness find ways to express themselves in evolutionary success.

The Evolutionary Importance of Grandmothers

Using the same people from their previous study -- a population of over 10,000 Wisconsinites who have been followed for over 50 years -- Gert Stulp of the University of Groningen and associates looked at the average height of the subjects and one randomly selected sibling. Controlling for age, birth order, and total number of siblings, they found that shorter sibling pairs had more reproductive success through the sister, while in pairs that were average in height, the brother tended to have more children. 

This indicates that ideal height for each gender differs significantly enough for mixed-gender siblings to be reproductively at odds with one another.

It also means that "high-fitness" mothers will tend to produce "high-fitness" daughters, to the detriment of their sons, and vice-versa for fathers.

Crafty Peruvian spider builds its own decoy « Why Evolution Is True

Crafty Peruvian spider builds its own decoy « Why Evolution Is True

Crafty Peruvian spider builds its own decoy

Don’t expect deep thoughts today, for I have writing to do!

For some reason I’ve been posting a lot of arachnids lately.  But this one is special: it weaves a web that contains a “fake spider” used as a decoy, so it’s a case of one of my favorite evolutionary phenomena—mimicry. Have a look:

A decoy spider hangs below its much smaller builder, suspected to be a new species in the genus Cyclosa. Photo: Phil Torres.

That big “spidery” thing in the middle isn’t a real spider, even though it has the requisite eight legs. It’s a dummy, woven (and with stuff added to it) by the much smaller real spider, which you can spot right above the dummy.

R prey can use deception to protect themselves against predators, this might work well causing spiders to increase exponentially in numbers until a counter mutation or counter innovation causes some predators to recognize the trick. Then those with this mutation might grow faster in numbers than those missing out on food because of the decoy.

A piece by Nadia Drake at Wired Science  explains (although leaves out some of the science):

A spider that builds elaborate, fake spiders and hangs them in its web has been discovered in the Peruvian Amazon.

Believed to be a new species in the genus Cyclosa, the arachnid crafts the larger spider from leaves, debris and dead insects. Though Cyclosa includes other sculpting arachnids, this is the first one observed to build a replica with multiple, spidery legs.

Scientists suspect the fake spiders serve as decoys, part of a defense mechanism meant to confuse or distract predators. “It seems like a really well evolved and very specialized behavior,” said Phil Torres, who described the find in a blog entry written for Rainforest Expeditions. Torres, a biologist and science educator, divides his time between Southern California and Peru, where he’s involved in research and education projects.

Fitness landscapes

Edge.org

Stewart Brand

Founder, The Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation; Author, Whole Earth Discipline

Fitness Landscapes

The first time I saw a fitness landscape cartoon (in Garrett Hardin's Man And Nature, 1969), I knew it was giving me advice on how not to get stuck over-adapted—hence overspecialized—on some local peak of fitness, when whole mountain ranges of opportunity could be glimpsed in the distance, but getting to them involved venturing "downhill" into regions of lower fitness. I learned to distrust optimality.

 People as well as animals can become overspecialized with chaotic competition, this optimum can be in comparison to competitors that can also be heading for collapse. Fitness can be a tautology if it only describes survivors as fit, they might survive because of chaotic or random influences. For example an R plague of rodents might only have a few survivors, this might require breeding as fast as possible while eating anything available to be on of these survivors. Fitness then here is to minimize losses in a negative sum game when hitting floors and ceilings. Random fitness can just be luck, a Ro herd of buffalo might be targeted by a Y pride of lions and the buffalo taken by chance. However to be fit the buffalo might move to an equilibrium of average characteristics so the war of attrition by predators leaves plenty of similar buffalo to survive. If they were very different then crucial genes might be lost to these predators and the species changes or collapses.

...

The man behind the genius of fitness landscapes was the founding theorist of population genetics, Sewell Wright (1889-1988). In 1932 he came up with the landscape as a way to visualize and explain how biological populations escape the potential trap of a local peak by imagining what might drive their evolutionary "path" downhill from the peak toward other possibilities. Consider these six diagrams of his :

[Image credit: © Sewall Wright, The Role of Mutation, Inbreeding, Crossbreeding, and Selection in Evolution, Sixth International Congress of Genetics, Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Botanical Garden, 1932.]

The first two illustrate how low selection pressure or a high rate of mutation (which comes with small populations) can broaden the range of a species whereas intense selection pressure or a low mutation rate can severely limit a species to the very peak of local fitness. The third diagram shows what happens when the landscape itself shifts, and the population has to evolve to shift with it.

This high rate of mutation can occur with Oy predators attacking R prey in the Roy animal kingdom, instead of being normal Ro prey through interbreeding the R prey become more diverse. This also happens with the Oy predators that feed on them, they also mutate so the results for both are highly chaotic between ceiling of high populations and floors of low numbers. When the environment changes some mutations hit the ceiling of their capability and starve or get eaten, this allows the R species or their Oy predators to innovate and counter innovate in the new situation. This is not evolution but R revolution and Oy counter revolution.

The bottom row explores how small populations respond to inbreeding by wandering ineffectively. The best mode of exploration Wright deemed the final diagram, showing how a species can divide into an array of races that interact with one another. That jostling crowd explores well, and it can respond to opportunity.
Fitness landscapes express so much so economically.

Ro animals are more cooperative as are Y predators, because the environment is less specialized in its Biv vegetation then generalists do better rather than those specializing in Oy-R foods. An animal can randomly eat different foods and the diet averages out ok, an Oy-R animal can specialize in certain foods allowing them to grow exponentially in numbers but sometimes also crash as that food varies between floors and ceilings in availability.

There's no better way, for example, to show the different modes of evolution of a remote oceanic island and a continental jungle. The jungle is dense and "rugged" with steep peaks and valleys, isolating countless species on their tiny peaks of high specialization. The island, with its few species, is like a rolling landscape of gentle hills with species casually wandering over them, evolving into a whole array of Darwin's finches, say. The island creatures and plants "lazily" become defenseless against invaders from the mainland.
You realize that for each species, its landscape consists almost entirely of other species, all of them busy evolving right back. That's co-evolution. We are all each other's fitness landscapes.

The Nature of Human Nature

Edge.org

Michael Shermer

Publisher, Skeptic magazine; monthly columnist, Scientific American; Author, The Believing Brain

The Nature of Human Nature

When I was a graduate student in experimental psychology I cut my teeth in a Skinnerian behavioral laboratory. As a behaviorist I believed that human nature was largely a blank slate on which we could impose positive and negative reinforcements (and punishments if necessary) to shape people and society into almost anything we want. As a young college professor I taught psychology from this perspective and even created a new course on the history and psychology of war, in which I argued that people are by nature peaceful and nonviolent, and that wars were thus a byproduct of corrupt governments and misguided societies.
The data from evolutionary psychology has now convinced me that we evolved a dual set of moral sentiments: within groups we tend to be pro-social and cooperative, but between groups we are tribal and xenophobic.

This is Iv-B and V-Bi in a Biv society, we can be cooperative in V-Bi or competitive in Iv-B. Civilization has grown as the I-O police and markets have evolved to moderate criminal behavior.

 Archaeological evidence indicates that Paleolithic humans were anything but noble savages, and that civilization has gradually but ineluctably reduced the amount of within-group aggression and between group violence. And behavior genetics has erased the tabula rasa and replaced it with a highly constrained biological template upon which the environment can act.
I have thus changed my mind about this theory of human nature in its extreme form. Human nature is more evolutionarily determined, more cognitively irrational, and more morally complex than I thought.