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John Grohol

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CREDO:A Need for Rebels, Deviants, Individualists
by James Brody:

(An earlier draft of the following essay was distributed in late November 2002.)

"Traditionally approached through paleontology, systematics, and comparative anatomy, the story of animal evolution has, until recently been sorely missing one huge chapter---namely, genetics." Carroll, et al., (2001, p. xiii).
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Externalism and Internalism

A distinction exists between "externalism"and "internalism" in biology (Gould, 2002; Raff, 1996; Sterelny and Griffiths, 1999; Gerhart & Kirschner, 1997). The former assumes that outside forces are those critical to an understanding of phylogeny, that mutation supplies an infinite array of choices for selection's approval, and that very long intervals are required for very slow changes in form and conduct. Internalism credits genes, chemistry, and physics with channeling morphology, and changes can occur between single generations. (This distinction also aligns with that of Sowell, 1987, and of Pinker, 2002, in regard to politics and to recurring polarities between "utopian" and "tragic," or between "unconstrained" and "constrained" views of human nature.)

Dear Colleagues:

I understand from Bill Irons that you are the Program Committee for the HBES 2003 Annual Meeting in Nebraska. There are some unique opportunities for plenary speakers at this time and for that site.

1) Thomas Bouchard (University of Minnesota)
2) Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Notre Dame University)
3) Rudolf Raff (Indiana University).

They compose a triad: any one of them should be magnificent but the combination may (a) redefine our current scripts about an "EEA," (b) demonstrate that we are not the passive outcomes of our physical and social settings but have an active role in defining both those settings and our own nature, and (c) show us that homology has a far greater influence than convergence in the behavior of men and starlings.

Thomas Bouchard

Bouchard is instantly recognizable, he provides access to other speakers of similar persuasion, and he is a respected source for information about the subtle nature of environment...that environment makes its most persuasive contributions as "unique" or "nonshared" environment and that the major factor in those contributions is the nature of the individual who defines them.

1) Other species show these effects. Coral, worms, crickets, spiders, and leaf gall build microenvironments. Lugworms farm bacteria and mud into a richer meal of diatoms and nematodes. Scott Turner finds in his recent book, The Extended Organism, that natural selection can run from organisms to environments. (He shared his views in a poster at HBES 2002.) Further, Olding-Smee, Laland and others suggest that the constructed environments of one generation supply the survival platform for the next. We "inherit" the nests of our parents.
2) David Rowe remarked (The Limits of Family Influence, 1994, p. 91): "Dawkins' examples (from The Extended Phenotype) are undeniably examples of instincts---of stereotyped inherent patterns of behavior...Such instincts are shared by most individuals in a species, but the present topic is individual differences in traits. Yet the conceptual distance between the human expression of individual differences and the extended phenotype of a species may not be so great."
3) Relevance? Environment and culture are key explanatory factors in explanations of human evolution. We, however, pick, modify, and construct environments consistent with our genetic propensities (Plomin, 1994). Certainly, the twin studies show many examples of this process. We find other examples on a grand scale as we landscape this planet into a savanna.
4) Thus, culture becomes important not as an external cause but as a malleable supply of choices for its developing participants. Cultures with few choices might have a high component of enforced compliance (e.g., the Taliban) but individual preferences emerge once that culture passes (e.g., Afghanis watching TV sets that were hidden in their basements). Ironically, more choices in a culture may increase the genetic expression of its individual members.
5) We also might explore the possibility that "genes make environments" in our EEA (one that goes back 540+ my: see Raff, below.) Because genes make environments, a mutation, perhaps one at the Hox level, might have said "do one more cell division" in our neural development and allowed a greater range of possibilities for social manipulation, tool use, and refinement of the potentials that lay hidden in savannas and shorelines.
6) Bouchard commented in his paper, "Experience Producing Drives":

"We believe...that a framework informed by quantitative genetics and evolutionary theory is both highly appropriate and extremely useful. It allows for a quantitative description of some significant facts, it is consistent with standard practice in a variety of scientific disciplines, it incorporates our understanding that human beings are biological organisms whose functional and developmental mechanisms operate under the same biological constraints as do other organisms, and it provides a solid frame of references for reexamining the validity of the implicit and often deliberately unstated argument that human beings are somehow are a unique species that has evolved beyond ordinary forms of scientific understanding" (Bouchard et al., 1996, p. 6).

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

1) The notion of our having a statistical environment is an old one. The most recent explorers include John Forbes Nash, John Maynard Smith, William Hamilton, and Robert Axelrod. Most of them analyzed two-player situations. Barabasi (Linked: The New Science of Networks) shows us organizations and rules that emerge for hands-full, dozens, hundreds, or thousands of players.
2) There are nodes (individuals) and links (connections between them). Having many links constitutes a "hub." Emergent networks follow power laws: commonly, 20% of the nodes (hubs) will execute 80% of the work. Cellular chemistry, natural food chains, human social networks in business and entertainment, economics, language, and Internet home pages all show emergent network phenomena. All of us load 80% of our thoughts into 20% of our bins.
3) "Fitness" has a new meaning that incorporates older ones. Fitness is a function of the number of links that you have and your rate of acquiring them. Fitness could be influenced by territory, physical coloration, vocal quality, inventiveness, and political skills whether in networks of starlings or humans.
4) Implication: the rules of emergent networks were probably a significant aspect of our EEA and were a foundation for inclusive fitness, for hierarchic clusters of human groups, and perhaps more salient for our social and cognitive evolution than the claws and teeth of our predators.

Rudolf Raff

Dr. Raff is a founder of "evo-devo," evolutionary developmental biology...the study of how ontogeny changed during phylogeny. His book, The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form, is extraordinary. Alternative speakers might be: John Gerhart, University of California, Berkeley, Marc Kirschner, Harvard Medical School, or Sean Carroll, University of Wisconsin.

1) The great puzzle of evolution: bacterial core organizations are still found in metazoans but acquired peripheral adaptations that allowed the penetration and creation of new niches. (Selection's arrow runs from organism to environment.)
2) Cells and organisms have "exploratory systems": for example, microtubules, immune systems, neuronal differentiation, and angiogenesis all establish links between the core organization and its immediate surroundings. Imprinting and learning have comparable exploratory functions. These developmental tools are repeated in the conduct of parents, children, teachers, and allies: all improve the "fit" between one of us and our settings.
3) Just as claws, gills, and wings make new environments for metazoans, human adaptations include wrenches and hammers that extend the range and variety of niches that we occupy. "Mismatch" becomes a far smaller, more transient discomfort, smaller than ever before in human history. Technology, another exploratory system, allows far greater individual success as we each manufacture our own environments on Earth or in space.
4) Hox-ology (Gould, 2002): a linear gene sequence in flies has its homologs in mice and humans (Raff, 1996). The segmentation that we find in vertebrae and somites also exists in rhombomeres that underlie brainstem organization. Emx and otx, the vertebrate homologs of empty spiracule and orthodenticle, are expressed in the developing forebrain of mice (Carroll et al, 2001; Raff, 1996). One difference is that flies have one Hox sequence, mice have four. Duplication of Hox sequences allows new functions can be taken on and integrated with the original structures. This integration has two key effects: mutations become less lethal but possibly of larger magnitude and the newer structures can stabilize some aspects of the older. The organism may find uses for its new equipment while aspects of its old equipment become less labile.
5) Shared Hox structures imply greater roles for homology but lesser for convergence. There is less surprise that whales, hippos, and camels are close relatives or that the prosody of starlings, no immediate kin for any of us, duplicates that of human singers and talk show hosts. St. Hilaire was fundamentally correct when he saw one extended family that includes not only mollusks and insects but also humans.

Close

"Manipulation of the environment is the ultimate adaptation." Wilson, 2000, p. 59.
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Like many of us, Wilson straddles a fence between externalism and internalism. For example, he remarks on p. 144: "Social behavior, like all other forms of biological response, is a set of devices for tracking changes in environment." This latter view, merged with Bowlby's EEA, was massaged into a diagnosis of chronic misery for all of us. Our genes are thought to change more slowly than our environments. We are driven to be changed rather than being agents for change. Wilson's earlier statement is more optimistic and captures the missing half of evolution's story. Given life's propensity for organizing settings, there may be instances where genes take the lead in the construction of environments (Lewontin, 1998/2000). Externalism (Sterelny & Griffiths, 1997) is caricatured as environments' forming organisms. (Even EP is Lockean in its assumption that environments craft our behavior but across generations by selection rather than in decades through lectures.) An alternative thread, internalism, allows an active role for organisms in the definition of environments, and traveled from Liebnitz and Kant through Popper to Bouchard, Plomin, and Lewontin.

Genetics and evolutionary theory have informed each other ever since DeVries, Tschermak, and Correns and Fisher, Haldane, and Sewall Wright. We need both EP and BG for reasons of science, we also need them to attract and retain our next generation of interdisciplinary students, the ones with fire in their belly, the ones who take and hold territories, define new ones, and pass on legacy.

The racier biology also talks about multiple developmental options, emergence, about organisms' making environments, and about adaptability: less to change our clothes to match the weather and more to change the weather to match our clothes. In the traditional model, Calvin speculated that rapid climate changes forced us to be more adaptable. The other side is our becoming more clever at adapting other things regardless of climate. When we smudge these two aspects of development, we miss a lot of exciting detail, including links to many of the social sciences and a clear approach to old but vital problems of human will.

What Allport (1955, p. 82) said about our cultural environment also applies to our evolutionary past:
"That the cultural approach yields valuable facts we cannot possibly deny, for culture is indeed a major condition in becoming. Yet personal integration is always the more basic fact. While we accept certain cultural values as propriate, as important for our own course of becoming, it is equally true that we are all rebels, deviants, and individualists. Some elements in our culture we reject altogether; many we adopt as mere opportunistic habits, and even those elements that we genuinely appropriate we refashion to fit our own personal style of life."

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