Brown and Heyes: Social learning and the other cooperation problem

This is the latest in my series of blog posts summarising the talks and responses that took place at the meeting 'Inheritance and cooperation'.

Unfortunately, some idiot forgot to press the 'rec' button on this one (an idiot called 'Clarke'). So i cannot make any audio available I'm afraid : (

Dr Rachael Brown is a Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney who has written about learning, its ability to act as an inheritance mechanism and its effects upon evolutionary processes. Her talk, 'Generating benefit: Social learning and the “other” cooperation problem', explored the idea of treating social learning as a cultural inheritance mechanism, and one that occurs, furthermore, in non-human animals.  

Birch and Bentley: Time and relatedness in microbes and humans

Dr Jonathan Birch from the LSE is working on a book called 'The Philosophy of Social Evolution'. For this meeting Birch drew on his recent paper 'Gene mobility and the concept of relatedness' to talk about a foundational idea in contemporary evolutionary theory - Hamilton's theory of Kin Selection - and in particular at its application in the context of what has been called 'sociomicrobiology' - the study of sociality in bacteria and other microbes.

Missed

'Miscarriage' is such a cruel world. Like 'misconduct', it implies irresponsibility, fault, deliberately improper handling, by a woman, of her duty. She carried it wrong.

Powers and Clarke: Insititutions and the development of human sociality

Dr Simon Powers is a member of the Lehmann group in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, although he originally got his PhD in computer science.

Powers is concerned to explain how humans have moved from small-scale, self-sufficient tribes or kin-groups, to large-scale, differentiated exchange economies, a change which has elsewhere been called the 'Holocene transition'.

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.