Page 12 - 2011 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - March 2011

Beyond The Super Computer BEYOND THE SUPERCOMPUTER: SOCIAL GROUPS AS SELF-INVENTION MACHINES was coddling replicas of her own internal psychoendocrinologists and others to shed new blueprint. Altruism, asserted Hamilton, was light on phenomena from the bickering of local self-interest in disguise. cliques to the machinations of nation-states and Hamilton's ideas and those built upon from the maneuvering of economic competitors by Howard Bloom them have contributed mightily to our to the butchery of armies. understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in But perhaps the best way to demonstrate fields from psychology, medicine, and ecology how far one can move if one accepts both In the new evolutionary disciplines there to the study of animals in the wild. individual and group selection is to reveal one is a debate with major implications for the way But roughly twenty-five years after the of the many potential approaches to a post- in which we view politics, citizenship, Hamiltonian epiphany, examination of real individual selectionist sociobiology. I propose emotions, health, ideology, and even the world bee colonies demonstrated that to outline five elements which turn virtually perceptual processes that produce a consensual Hamilton's mathematics did not correspond every form of social group--from a teenage reality. with fact. There was far more genetic variety in gang to a multi-national culture--into a In one sense, the scientific argument clusters of unselfish insects than the equations collective intelligence, a complex adaptive resembles that between the Lilliputians and the would allow (Queller et al., 1988; Seeley, 1995: system whose powers of perception and Blefuscudians who, in Gulliver's Travels, 7). Individuals were not abjuring their interests invention both utilize and transcend those of the warred over whether a breakfast egg should be simply to protect near-clones of their own individuals within it. Next I'll show how social opened at the large or at the pointed end. genomic material. Apparently something else groups at every level on the evolutionary ladder Dominating the field are individual was going on. Nonetheless, concepts based on operate as group brains. Finally, I'll present selectionists, those who believe that the what became known as the selfish gene examples to suggest how the five principles can emergence of all behavior must be explained by (Dawkins, 1976) are now dogma. throw individual passions, mass mood swings, forms of self-interest which embody what Many scientists have been tempted to geopolitics, fashion, fads, and health into author Robert Wright, in his summation of "the propose non-Hamiltonian approaches to the surprising new perspective. credo of the new paradigm," calls "head to head activities within and the competition between A great deal of work has been done since competition" between individual genes and groups. For decades, these thinkers have been 1980 on complex adaptive systems--biological often between individual animals or humans stopped by the quiet threat of exclusion from and electronic learning machines. Most of this (Wright, 1985: 188). Group selectionists, on the professional respectability, expulsion from scholarship has taken mathematical form. other hand, are convinced that new evolutionary career advancement, and banishment from the However, it is possible to sum up a complex forms can emerge both from the battle for possibility of academic tenure. adaptive system's quintet of key elements personal advantage and from the competition However it is becoming increasingly entirely without equations. These elements are between social coalitions. obvious to a small group of heretics that a new (1) conformity enforcers, (2) diversity The formulae upon which individual breed of evolutionary insights can emerge if one generators, (3) utility sorters, (4) resource selectionism rests were enunciated by biologist accepts the coexistence of both group and shifters, and (5) intergroup tournaments. William Hamilton in the early 1960s. individual selection. In other words, indications Hamilton's conclusions were based on an are that the social and biological sciences may Conformity enforcers impose analysis of bees and other Hymenoptera. The benefit enormously from a truce between the sufficient similarity on group members to give view that all behavior is ultimately based on Blefuscudians and the Lilliputians. the social structure coherence, relative self-interest had strongly taken hold. How, then, In my book The Lucifer Principle: a permanence, and the ability to carry out large- could one account for altruism? Hamilton scientific expedition into the forces of history scale, integrated, multi-participant projects. focused on the selfless manner with which (Bloom, 1995), I've attempted to show the many In humans, conformity enforcers lead, female worker bees sacrifice their reproductive ways in which we are both selfish competitors among other things, to a collective perception, a rights and chastely serve their queen. His and pawns of the social group. For example, socially constructed view of reality which triumph was a mathematical demonstration that The Lucifer Principle presents evidence that influences both childhood brain development the workers were carrying essentially the same individuals are biologically wired as and adult sensory processing, and which genes as the queen. Hence when an individual expendable cells in a social "superorganism." produces a Weltanschauung displaying many of lived out her life on behalf of her monarch, she The book goes on to contend that human groups the characteristics of a shared hallucination. only appeared to be ignoring her own needs. follow the rules of dominance hierarchies The genes she carried were closely related to uncovered by naturalists but normally applied those in the eggs laid by her mistress. By primarily to individuals. The Lucifer Principle This article by Howard Bloom is pampering the colony's egg-layer, each worker combines naturalists' observations with those of Continued on Page 14