Merlin and Clark: Extending inheritance

Dr Francesca Merlin from the IHPST (CNRS, Paris) gave a talk based on her forthcoming paper which evaluates recent calls to extend our notion of inheritance. She starts with a commonsensical notion of inheritance as 'like begets like' and claims that the notion of inheritance is intended, primarily, to explain the fact that organisms produce organisms that are similar to them. It grounds continuity across generations of living things, in other words. She argues, thus, that there is a privileged link between inheritance and reproduction.

Helanterä and Uller: Superorganisms as model systems

For the first guest talk of the meeting, we heard from Dr Heikki Helanterä, who is a biologist from the University of Helsinki, working on eusocial insects. Heikki is beginning a new project in which he tests the idea that eusocial insect colonies can be compared with organisms. He considers the best candidates to be those colonies in which workers are sterile - terminally differentiated - because this is when 'the cool stuff happens'. For example, the queens can mate multiply, bringing all kinds of genetic diversity into the colony, because the workers aren't in a position to do anything about it.

Helanterä is interested in establishing whether sufficient heritable variation exists at the level of whole insect colonies to support a between-colony selection process, in which colonies act as units of selection in their own right.

Inheritance and cooperation: Clarke introducing the themes

Apparently some short girl called Clarke dreamt up the idea of linking inheritance and cooperation for the focus of a conference. An audio file of my introductory talk can be found here.  Here is (roughly) what I had to say in my defence:

Inheritance and cooperation, June 25/25 2015

Well that was one awesome meeting, if I do say so myself. We came from all corners of the globe (Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter, France, Switzerland, Finland, California and even Australia), from all hierarchical levels (from UG to Emeritus) and from at least five disciplines (Philosophy, Biology, Computer Science, Psychology and Anthropology). We came, we talked, we shared, and it was good. The sandwiches left a bit to be desired and the rainstorm on departure was sub-optimal. But you can't have everything.

I was delighted to watch graduate students, doing their first ever public speaking, give clear and incisive commentaries to the main talks. My prestigious and eloquent speakers were lively and gracious when the enthusiastic and sometimes unrelenting debate flowed in after their talks. And break times were full of silo-busting chatter….Are philosophers more argumentative than biologists? Why are so many anthropologists hostile to evolutionary approaches? Do models beat informal arguments every time?

I learnt a ton, and I'm going to write a series of posts describing the talks in their order of appearance, followed by a final attempt at synthesis. I'll also be posting links to audio files so you can listen to the talks and responses for yourselves.

Comments and feedback will be more than welcome!

Inheritance and cooperation program

All talks take place in LR23 at Balliol College, Oxford

 Thursday 25^th June

 

09.45am – 10.15am	Welcome coffee
10.15am – 11.00am	Dr Ellen Clarke (Philosophy, Oxford): Introduction to inheritance and cooperation.
11.00am – 12.30pm	Prof. Heikki Helanterä (Zoology, Helsinki): ‘Superorganisms as model systems.’
	Dr Tobias Uller (Zoology, Oxford/Lund): Response
12.30pm – 2.00pm	Lunch (Hall)
2.00pm - 3.30pm	Dr Francesca Merlin (Philosophy, Paris):  ‘Limited extended inheritance.’
	Matthew Clarke (BPhil Philosophy, Oxford): Response
3.30pm – 4.00pm	Coffee
4.00pm – 5.30pm	Dr Simon Powers (Zoology, Lausanne): ‘What drove the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies?’
	Jessica Laimann (BPhil Philosophy, Oxford): Response

Friday 26^th June

9.00am – 10.30am	Dr Rachael Brown (Philosophy, Macquarie): ‘Generating benefit: Social learning and the other cooperation problem.’
	Prof. Cecilia Heyes (Psychology, Oxford): Response
10.30am - 11.00am	Coffee
11.00am -12.30pm	Dr Jonathan Birch (Philosophy, LSE): ‘Time and relatedness in microbes and humans.’
	Michael Bentley (DPhil Zoology, Oxford): Response
12.30pm – 2.00pm	Lunch (Hall)
2.00pm – 3.30pm	Prof. Peter J Richerson (Biology, UC Davis):
	Dr John Odling-Smee (Anthropology, Oxford): Response
3.30pm - 4.30pm	Roundtable discussion with coffee

Morality as Cooperation

Dr Oliver Scott Curry from Oxford's Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology came and gave a  really interesting talk to my reading group last week. Curry defends the claim that morality is best understood as being all about cooperation.

Here is a video of the talk.(The audio is rather low I'm afraid, but should be okay for headphones.)

The thesis was that morality is a set of instincts, customs, preferences and behaviours unified by their common function of facilitating for-the-good-of-the-group, cooperative behaviour. The morals themselves are best revealed by empirical techniques including ethnographic survey, Curry claimed, and the functions of the morals are best elucidated using game theory. When we survey moral attitudes and behaviours, we will see that we tend to consider as moral only those acts which are best for the group.

Toddler on tour

Well, I can't imagine this sounding anything but irritating BUT we just came home from a hot, exotic, holiday-of-a-lifetime, and I need to shout about it before the effects fade along with my tan.

Noder Dame review

Of Maureen O'Malley's 'Philosophy of Microbiology' here.

Conference Announcement

Inheritance and Cooperation

June 25^th & 26^th, Balliol College Oxford

Heredity is understood to be a core ingredient of evolution by natural selection, and is standardly thought of as mediated by the passing of genes from parents to their offspring. Genetic inheritance underpins the theory of kin selection, which stands as a leading explanation for the evolution of cooperation. Organisms can be selected to help their relatives, because those relatives inherited some of the same genes from the common ancestor. We say that helping relatives then boosts the organism's indirect fitness. However, cooperation takes place in many scenarios in which there is no recourse to explanation in terms of indirect fitness benefits, because the participants lack a common genetic inheritance: between species; between unrelated humans; between genes; to name a few.

We are becomingly increasingly aware of the action of systems of inheritance that are not genetic. Organisms inherit, for example, epigenetic marks, niches, symbionts, culture. We are learning more and more about non-standard genetic inheritance systems such as lateral gene transfer, meiotic driver genes and transposable elements.

What happens to our ability to explain the occurrence of cooperation if we expand our conception of inheritance? Might we throw light on the possibility of cooperation between partners that fail to share a common genetic inheritance? Can other inheritance systems play an analogous explanatory role to that played by genes in kin selection theory? Are all inheritance systems equal, in this sense, or do they vary in ways that systematically affect their influence upon cooperation?

The aim of this conference is to pull together people who research different sorts of inheritance systems, or explore the impact of those systems on cooperation, to see if anything general can be extracted about the ways in which inheritance influences cooperation.

Confirmed speakers: 

Francesca Merlin (Philosophy, Paris)

Heikki Helanterä (Biology, Helsinki)

Rachael Brown (Philosophy, Macquarie)

Simon Powers (Biology, Lausanne)

Maria Kronfeldner (Philosophy, Bielefeld)

Tobias Uller (Biology, Lund/Oxford)

Jonathan Birch (Philosophy, LSE)

Well this is depressing......

Over at Daily Nous there is a discussion taking place about the ethics and etiquette of using parenting duties as an excuse to duck out of certain academic duties,