Two things to sit next to each other on a table and stare at.

First, a review article (which I've also saved a here in case it disappears from the Manchester site) that's part of my reading list for the complexity summer school I'm (most likely) going to in a few days.

In it, Sumpter looks for principles of collective animal behaviour (though human behaviour appears plenty in there too.) He / she seems mostly to be poking around the question of substrate neutrality: can mathematical models be found that underpin different real-world phenomena? Sumpter's also looking for some benchmark / null hypothesis that lets us say 'yup, that's got some self-organisation going on'.

But its not until a little later that it gets to the question that's (ahem) bugging me at the moment; and Sumpter recognises it bugs a lot of people:

Tucked away here, as the last subheading in a section on components of collective behaviour, is the question that would spring to many biologists' mind even before I began giving different examples of collective animal behaviour: 'how did these collective behaviours evolve through natural selection?'

There's a fairly lengthy discussion, with some general principles stated, such as this one - Hamilton's rule - I'd not come across before...

The relatedness of the individual that profits from the altruistic act of the focal individual must be higher than the cost/benefit ratio this act imposes.

... which turns out to be far too involved for me to fathom. Still, an obvious fact that hadn't struck me before (until I went looking for more on Hamilton) is that its only the ant queen that reproduces. Everyone else is sterile. So, genetically at least, a colony could be seen as one organism... Ah, but it seems that's might be wrong too. Long quote from last link coming up:

Darwin's own solution was to assume that the colonies formed some sort of super-organisms that compete against each other in a very similar way as individuals do. To perceive animal colonies as super-organisms with their members as rough analogues of cells is a long known and, even today for certain studies, a very useful concept. The idea of family or "group selection" placated Darwin's contemporaries and was still widely accepted well into the 20th century. According to this idea, the unit of selection for altruistic alleles of an originally selfish gene would be the colony, not the individual. The altruistic, cooperative allele spreads in the species as colonies without a high occurrence (gene frequency) of this allele become extinct. However, in order for interdemic selection to be effective, one has to assume that there is no migration between the groups and that there is sufficient selection pressure, i.e. the rate of colony extinction is very high. Furthermore, individual selection will always be faster than group selection, as the number of individual organisms is much larger than that of populations and the turnover-rate of individuals is much higher. Thus, group selection can never counteract individual selection. Because of these considerations, group selection was eventually abandoned as the prime explanation for the evolution of cooperation. In its stead, William Donald Hamilton (1936-2000) discovered the principle of 'kin selection'. Hamilton's theory was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1964. At the time, it was so innovative that it almost failed to be published and was largely ignored for a decade. When finally noticed, its influence spread exponentially until it became one of the most cited papers in all of biology. It is the key to understanding the evolution of altruistic cooperation among related organisms, such as the social insects.

Which is nice to know - but for now, I admit defeat on unpicking Hamilton. Must learn some more basic stuff first. At any rate, Sumpter then says, while discussing evolution of self-organisation and co-operative behaviour, that:

in all cases, the argument for why acting alone or cheating does not out-compete co-operation first requires a full understanding of the other components of collective behaviour.

I'm going off on tangents - why does any of this matter? Well, the reason this review stuck with me - and why eusocial insects get under my skin (Aaaa! Get em out!) - remains this question of how a species evolves to take advantage of self-organisation. A related question is how that evolution is communicated in a population. I wonder whether there being a single genetic repository - the queen - is what makes it possible? Previously, I thought the genetic selection was more complex, but if there's only one carrier, it intuitively seems clearly more straightforward.

On a more mundane level, I think its useful to try and consider how self-organisation or distributed cognition could evolve in a genetic population, as a kind of base-line for thinking about the subject. Which is to say, if this stupid system can do it, how can it do it? And what does that mean for more fluid systems, e.g. ones that can invoke learning?

Second! The example currently in my head: at the Big Green Gathering last week, an oak timber-frame builder friend (Jack) was talking to another oak-timber-frame builder about the state of their hands. (Not the sort of thing, it must be noted, that often happens on building sites, at least not the ones I worked on. Only hippy builders would compare hands, I think, though neither made mention of Nivea.)

They talked a bit about how the tannin from Oak stained their hands. I hadn't previously connected tannin in Oak with tanning leather.

All cow-skin has to be treated to be useable - so some treatment or other has obviously been a key feature of the use of animal skin. How did the process of tanning become commonplace? That was my original thought, but having read the above article, I'm struck even more by the elaborate stages involved in producing leather, from getting the single layer of fibrous skin between the epidermis and the 'flesh', to rubbing dung into the hide and allowing it soften it through bacterial fermentation - stopping the process when the material felt right.

Tannin - present in all vegetable matter apparently - reacts with the collagen in the used layer of skin, preserving it. (It would otherwise dry out or rot, since it's still animal matter.) The leather was immersed in vats of water filled with chopped bark. Many and varied techniques were / are used, depending on the final required product.

So what? Well, its an example of technology evolving. But how did it evolve? And can I actually get away with using that term?

There's a whole load more complicating factors. Where there's people, there's voices and demonstration. Successful methods of leather production can be passed on - though note that it would work best when passed on through demonstration, since many of the skills involved are very specific and inter-locked with other aspects of the process. There's how leather production would affect the survival rate of any particular group, relative to other groups. Some technologies would offer a slight advantage; others might be a doomsday discovery. It would be a long time (how long?) before it had any impact on the genetic make-up of a set of groups, but its possible. (Lactose tolerance is an example of where this might have happened, if putting fences round cows counts as technology...)

There's also how technology, a group's knowledge, and materials interact. Its noticeable how many different chemical processes have to occur when making leather - including tannin and bacterial softening. That's perhaps of more interest in terms of blind discovery, and how that gets passed on, and might be the closest parallel to the introduction of a particularly successful new gene. (Though, again, not sure what value the parallel really is...)

Its most unlikely to be the case that pioneer leather makers had a great warehouse full of hides, carefully rubbing each with various elements, testing the timing of each, testing at different stages and keeping a record. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that didn't happen. But its equally clear that leather ain't our extended phenotype.

Sumpter says at one point:

Very little is known about redundancy in animal groups or even our own society, but it is often implicated in the observation that, as Frances Ratnieks has put it, 'insect societies never crash'.

The same could have been said about human's ability to keep a metis-knowledge of production processes, including leather. Maybe. I don't know. How was the knowledge transmitted? Well, it would depend on what society we're looking at, I guess. Roman leather production probably involved more specialised tradespeople than Britain had at the time, though that could be wrong.

Bugger, I had another thought about that, but it ran away down the back of the sofa. Onward.

But leather preparation and tanning is a far cry from getting yer alleles passed on, innit? Well, yes - leather production has, pretty much, an infinite variety of possibilities, and genes don't. Though this chap proposes using features of inventions as a gene analogy, I'm not sure that's any good. (Though, again, I've not studied the paper in detail, and have beeped over any mathematical notation.)

He does mention a fitness landscape for the invention, and that would seem appropriate for the use of leather... Baldwinian evolution would seem to come in there too.

Ants and tanning both is propagation/diffusion across a specific geography. The Romans had a lot to do with exporting certain leather methods, because they did a lot of conquering. What I think biological examples might offer is a minimum boundary: understanding how blind systems work, how they spread, what they're epidemiology is.

These are just the kind of parallels I've been cautioning against, now I think about it. Hmm. So is this going anywhere?

Well... if one of the central points of the PhD is to ask whether spontaneous order can be directed toward socially good ends, that would entail understanding what's so great about that spontaneous order. Innovation and creative destruction seems to be one of those things, and its something that a lot of people are studying. (Testfastion's lastest list of goings on is a daunting reminder of that.)

Er... which is nice. Just went to the loo, which is always good for thinking. What about knowledge of food production, storage, preparation etc? This is a useful focus: I have a feeling that food and its networks may become my main study area. There could obviously be a relationship between the connectedness of a group - across time as well as space - and its ability to exploit its local food resources (as well as to have shaped the environment to its benefit over successive generations.)

This seems to be leading rapidly into talking about the function of culture and language.

Just had a quick toe-dip into Terrence Deacon's Symbolic Species and Matt Ridley's Origins of Virtue.

Deacon talks about Baldwinian evolution: the symbolic horse pulling the evolutionary cart of humanity. Ridley does the same - though I haven't read the whole book, so can't comment on it. But what's interesting is the different emphases.

Deacon seems a lot more cautious about interpreting the impact of Baldwinian evolution. Even though his central premise, that the hoofing great change in the evolution of the brain is due to an innovation for symbolic representation, leading to Baldwinian evolution, is radical, he's still careful (or maybe just silent) about what this means for human cultural evolution.

He mentions sickle-cell anaemia as adaptation to malaria; the benefits have previously outweighed the costs. That is, they did - until farming in Africa led to deforestation, stagnant pools and lots more people. These perfect conditions for mosquitos, having only occurred in the past 10,000 years, has left that particular adaptations benefits far behind, leaving people only with the costs.

Ridley now:

The conventional wisdom in the social sciences is that human nature is simply an imprint of an individual's background and experience. But our cultures are not random collections of arbitrary habits. They are canalised expressions of our instincts.

The term 'canalised' comes up in Deacon too - British evolutionary Biologist Conrad Waddington coined 'genetic assimilation' (p.324) - that learned behaviour will canalise into a group's genetic future. Though Deacon makes it clear this is nothing like a one-to-one mapping. I think the term conveys very well that learned behaviour might constrain the direction of genetic change, without determining it in any way. (Deacon also notes that there seem to have been various traits selected for that relate to lactose tolerance, each with their own costs.

Is there a point here? Well, the only one I wanted to get to, I think, is, fuck. This is really bloody complicated. More specifically, it makes me wonder whether its possible to calibrate the rate of change, and the relationship between cultural and genetic evolution. Almost certainly not - and perhaps something best avoided, because someone's then bound to come along and try to make a political theory out of it.

Maybe Macaulay-like necessary illusions might be the way forward: maybe we should do our best to believe that we are made in the image of God, that we have natural rights, and that each person has innate and immeasurable value. Because if there's one thing that characterises people, its that there'll always be some of them prone to trying to do things to make stuff better, and these people will tend to use theories. "Humankind is on the threshold of the next stage of its evolution... and I'm the chap to push it over the line!"

Its a bit of a bind, really. We're bright enough to work out just how malleable our nature is, but not bright enough to grasp how to change. (And we can't not change.) That's my pessimistic view. I mean, no-one's going to say 'don't farm! You'll upset the delicate balance of evolution and end up with some awful maladaptive blood disease!' (Well... some people will, but they'll be in a very tiny minority, stomped underfoot by the hordes of people going to buy barbed wire and tractors.)

Maybe its a comfort. We couldn't have predicted anything; equally we can't predict the future either.

Our technology might out-evolve us anyway.

Hmm. I think in the next entry I'll be a little more upbeat.

Woo hoo!