Principles of Brain Evolution Review

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Principles of Brain Evolution ReviewThis is an excellent introduction to the field of vertebrate brain evolution for someone without much of a background in neuroscience or evolutionary science. The author critically reviews what is known about brain evolution from the perspective of trying to enunciate underlying "laws" governing how the vertebrate brain evolves. He is careful to point out the limitations of this approach, but nonetheless makes a reasonably good case for the existence of some overarching principles which can be used to guide progress in this still emerging field. These include "big is well-connected" and "late is large". The author proposes that much of brain evolution is driven by absolute as opposed to relative brain size, and that absolute brain size has not received the attention it deserves in this regard. The book is well-organized and the author's arguments are cogent, well-supported, properly qualified, and easy to follow, with numerous excellent figures and diagrams. The author is extremely well versed in the primary literature and is not afraid to point out what is not known or poorly understood, and where further research is needed. The reader finishes with a good sense of the current state of the field and the directions it may be heading. After reading this book I came away with a better understanding of how the human brain differs from the brains of other vertebrates, how it developed, and how it endows us with our human abilities and liabilities. Five stars.Principles of Brain Evolution Overview

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A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution Review

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A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution ReviewI was really looking forward to reading this book. One of the questions that keep haunting me is: how is it possible that the same species that David Livingston Smith called (correctly) "The Most Dangerous Animal" (dangerous for other members of its own species, that is !) is at the same time one of the most cooperative species of the world, surpassed only by eusocial insects and maybe naked moles? This book, I hoped, would give me some hint to solve this conundrum. And it did.

But first a warning : When the book finally arrived, I leafed through it - and was tempted to send it back immediately. Mathematical formulas and equations, lots of, crawling like little black spiders on every second page! Math makes me sick. I haven't got any mathematical education beyond the rule of three (and I'm not proud of it, believe me), so I tackled the book with more trepidation than hope. Unfortunately, the style also lived up to my worst fears: hardcore scientific prose you normally expect in journals like "Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology" or "Journal of Economic Theory". I never read these publications, a trait I share with the majority of Amazon customers, I guess.
It's not a book for somebody with a diploma in, say, philosophy or literature, who just happens to be interested in the question "Why are humans such a cooperative species?". It's a book written by two experts for their fellow experts, and unless readers are well versed in economic or game theory they will have to content themselves with reading for gist.
So I just kept skipping the parts with the math and tried to make sense of the rest. And now for the good news: The rest does make sense. It gave me some hints to look for an answer to the maddening ambivalence of human nature I mentioned above. The hint, in a nutshell, is something like: Take confrontation and cooperation as two sides of the same coin. The term Bowles/Gintis coined for this ambivalence is "parochial altruism".
There are in principle two ways of explaining human altruism.
(A) Altruism is only skin-deep. Selfishness always lurks behind nice appearances. For instance Trivers' "reciprocal altruism", a misnomer, because no genuine altruism is involved. People, according to this approach, expect (sub-consciously) to be repaid sooner or later. If somebody helps a total stranger, with no prospect of being repaid, this theory explains it as a kind of "Big Mistake". Because humans spent most of their history living in small groups based on kinship the human mind even today, in an anonymous situation, acts as if it still were in the pleistocene, helping not some stranger but a relative or some guy he or she will probably meet again sooner or later. Scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. See you. Genuine altruism today therefore would be a kind of misfiring in a situation unknown to the old mental moduls that still govern our behavior. Bowles/Gintis show that this "Big-Mistake-Hypothesis" cannot be true because even in the Pleistocene humans had plenty of contact with strangers. The picture of small and closed bands (based on kinship) of stone-age people is a myth.
(B) Bowles/Gintis argue that altruism can be genuine. But if altruism is defined as a behavior that increases the fitness of the recipient and that is costly to those practicing altruism - how can it spread ? Because evolution is a game that dispenses with rules other than natural laws, being nice has to pay off, or it will disappear. What, according to Bowles/Gintis, is the mecanism that assures the success of altruism ? Their answer is: group-selection. The whole argument of the book, as far as I can see, hinges on the question whether group-selection, or multi-level-selection as it is often called today, works or doesn'nt. That's the point where the mathematical models come in and where I drop out.
The prerequisite for group-selection to be effective is that selection within groups is reduced compared to selection between groups. The picture that emerges from the model is that groups who managed to reduce internal strife and competition by inventing and promoting cultural "leveling mechanisms" will act as units of selection and will outcompete groups with more selfish members. The competition, suppressed or reduced within groups, will increase between groups. Humans developed a special kind of groupishness: Being unconditionally altruistic towards their own people, being even eager to punish freeriders of the own group, even if the punishment is costly for themselves, while at the same time acting xenophobically towards other groups. The parochial quality of unconditional (not reciprocal !) cooperation is the necessary condition of genuine altruism to prevail.
Unfortunately, I'm in no position to decide whether the scientific arguments forwarded by Bowles and Gintis, based on mathematical models, hold true or not. On this question, I declare myself incompetent. But I'd say that everybody who is interested in human evolution should read this book, even without competence in higher math, because the idea is fascinating that in human history it was groups rather than individuals who were selected for or against. And that it was and still is culture that formed groups in a way as to making them act as units of selection. I think that culture and its group-forming force is the part of the picture that Dawkins and the gene-centered view of evolution missed ("memetics" doesn't explain anything).
Just one final remark: Herbert Gintis is one of the top reviewers of Amazon, and it's always a pleasure to read his commentaries. They are written in a clear, accessible style. If only this book was written a bit more like his reviews. My wish would be : keep the jargon to the journals. Books like these are for interested layfolks. The math may be essential for the argument; the jargon certainly isn't. Therefore only four points.
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Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind Review

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Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind ReviewThe intrepid team of Cheney and Seyfarth has done it again. Their work has a long-standing and deserved reputation for being both pioneering and sensible, a rather rare combination. This book traces implications for human evolution of their research on baboons in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. I have had my camps in the Delta raided by baboons who must be close relatives of Cheney and Seyfarth's friends. I formed a healthy respect for their intelligence. They can bring off a raid with military precision and scientific thoroughness, taking advantage of the least opportunity to steal everything usable and wreck everything else.
The title comes from Darwin: "he who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." Of course, we don't really learn about the baboons' metaphysics here; we learn how their behavior can change our metaphysics, as Darwin intended. (I don't know if baboons have metaphysics or not, but if they do, they surely believe that God is a huge dominant male baboon who mercifully sends endless parties of humans with crackers and bacon and peanuts.)
This book describes baboon social behavior and communication, and then goes on to show how it is and is not similar to human equivalents. They argue, convincingly, that human communication, complex thought, and high intelligence could and did evolve from primate social interaction. We need our smarts for our social life more than for toolmaking or feeding or avoiding predators. Their discussion of language is particularly good--a really thoughtful, excellent, up-to-date discussion of how human language differs from animal communication, and how this might have come about.
The authors also compare baboons with dogs, jays, and other highly social creatures. This leads them to many of their best insights.
I have three minor criticisms. First and worst, they take philosophy too seriously. We hear a lot about "theory of mind," "consciousness," "concept of the self," and other ineffable and "metaphysical" entities. The authors do as well as anyone could with these concepts, but one can go only so far in making a plate of cooked spaghetti stand up straight. Daniel Dennett's book CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED pretty well devastated philosophers' talk about consciousness, as opposed to the good old testable folk notion that contrasts being conscious with being knocked out, drunk, or asleep. And how do you really assess what an animal knows? I have spent thousands of hours listening to mockingbirds and still have no idea whether they actually think of or remember a jay or killdeer when they imitate one. I suspect they think only "This is a fun sound to work into my song." I suppose we will never know. At least we can know that they do NOT merely repeat mindlessly; they subtly change the imitations to fit their song patterns, such that the imitations change over time, according to a real if rudimentary plan. Cheney and Seyfarth try bravely to make operational science out of "theories of mind" and "the self," and say some very important things in the process, but one can go only so far in applying abstract, debatable, mentalistic concepts to animals, or even to humans.
Conversely, it seems to me that the real difference between people and baboons (and other animals) is that people can form deep hierarchic plans. We can go from tactics to strategy to goals, or from words to sentences to books to life work to whole literary genres. A baboon has trouble with "to be," and could never discuss how "to be or not to be, that is the question" fits with Shakespeare's oeuvre and the history of western drama. Baboons have tactics, strategy, and goals, but only at a quite simple level. They can raid camps and manage troops brilliantly, but can't do much beyond that. In communication and foraging, their plans are excellent but simple.
Second, somewhat related: The authors are somewhat primate-centric, and a bit unaware of how different other animals' communication and "consciousness" may be. Dogs, notably, live in a world of scent that is closed to humans. Dogs are alleged to have "no self-concept" because they don't make a big deal of mirror images of themselves. But, if you put a dog in front of a mirror for the first time, you learn why: the dog is startled by the strange dog in the mirror, sniffs it, and immediately loses interest--realizing that this is a trick of the light rather than a real dog. Similarly, when dogs meet, they don't communicate just by barking or whining; they interact by visual displays (which are exceedingly complex in their own right) and by pheromone releases. These latter are not detected by humans, so humans don't usually realize how complex the interaction really is.
Third, the baboons' very real abilities get somewhat short-counted here, because the interest is so much on humans. If baboons could talk (and read), they would surely say: "All very well for these stupid humans to talk about what we can't do, but let's see them execute a perfect campsite raid! Let's see them get into a 'guaranteed animal-proof' container in five minutes! Let's see them give up their fancy gear and still detect and escape lions, leopards and crocodiles!" Evolution gives us the minds we need, and documenting that is more interesting to this reviewer than trying to make sense of theories of "theories of mind" and self-consciousness about "consciousness of self."
That said, this is a totally delightful book. Cheney and Seyfarth write well; no dry scientific dullness here. You will find yourself getting fascinated with even the most arcane matters of baboon social life.Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind Overview

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A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity Review

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A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity ReviewAs a long-time admirer of Kuhn's concepts on paradigms and how they shift ("The Structure of Scientific Revolution" I really appreciate any thought leader that puts us on the cusp of such a shift. John Henry Clippinger is there.
I will begin with his conclusion: we are in the process of a "Big Bang" in human identity that shifts us away from organizations and nationalities and races and religions, and toward the realization that we are all "one" in terms of fractional variations of the same DNA, and hence, the world is going to start to revolve around the human end-users, not the organizations that turned them into slaves, amoral components of the industrial system, or mindless fundamentalists party to intolerant religions. For a sense of how the industrial era introduced evil by killing the role of kinship in trust, see Lionel Tiger's "The Manufacture of Evil."
In my view, this is one of three really great books on the coming revolution in human organization. The other two are Max Manwaring's "The Search for Security" and Philip Alott's "The Health of Nations." As Alott says, we took a wrong turn at the Treaty of Westphalia, and the world is long over-due for a return to localized kinship and global responsibility.
Those who favor the transpartisan transformational model of earnest and honest elections and engaged citizenry must read this book. The author opens with a long discussion of why it is relationships that matter, not transactions. Indeed, I am reminded of Margaret Wheatley and Esther Dyson--make the connections, don't worry about critical mass.
I learn the term "social physics" for the first time, and read again about reciprocity (Tom Atlee taught me about reciprocal altruism). The author disputes the idea that violence is a given, and joins Jonathan Schell ("The Unconquerable World") is stating that force is no longer a means by which to gain one's will.
The middle of the book discusses both the threat of technical progress when combined with more failed states, and the promise of digital modeling for accelerating our understanding and testing new paths forward. The author points out that we have no more than 20 years, having wasted the last six, with 2000-2025 being the tipping point period during which we can either go toward stable convergence or hyper-instability and cascading catastrophe.
Brilliant quotes on how the military must shift to soft preventive and remedial measures (General Al Gray, USMC and I called this "peaceful preventive measures in 1988), and how "Brute force is about to be rendered obsolete" at the state level (while flourishing at the gang level).
The author relates his thinking to terrorism in a very useful way, conceptualizing terrorism as a form of non-state parasite eating away at its host, and able to be more entrepreneurial than its bureaucratic adversaries, constantly changing the rules of engagement and winning the key terrain of the minds of the population, using perception in lieu of truth.
The heart of the book is on page 39: "But rather than being treated as peripheral to a primary military mission, well-articulated warfare doctrine and practices for the information, cognitive, and social domains could significantly reduce the need for more traditional methods of influence and control." Robert Garigue, RIP addresses this in his technical preface to my third book, "Information Operations," and I am writing my fifth book on how digital natives, serious games, and the way of the wiki are making our military obsolete and unaffordable.
The author attributes the US failure in Somalia (and one would add, Afghanistan and Iraq) to a complete lack of local knowledge and particularly knowledge about language, kinship, and the role of religion.
Key quote on page 44: "It would appear that the Americans and the Israelis are virtually alone in the world in not realizing that the rules and weapons of war have changed."
The book draws to a conclusion with lengthy discussions of how the complexity of social networks both define the size of one's brain, and the potential success and prosperity of the collective. Language is described as "social grooming" (hence one must be concerned when fundamentalists and extremists hijack the language). The author cites Shakespeare in suggesting that the inability to comprehend complex social networks is at the root of many misunderstandings and attendant tragedies. My first book, "On Intelligence" points out how the US Intelligence Community, a $60 billion a year endeavor, is utterly incompetent at understanding ideas, minds, individual, groups, clans, gangs, and tribes. They are optimized for counting THINGS.
Notable observation that tracks with Michael O'Hanlon's research: when women are in charge, collaboration flourishes.
Long discussion of trust and reputation, listing and discussion of seven types of leadership: authoritarian, exemplary, visionary, gatekeeper, truth teller, fixer, connector, and energizer.
Fairness is the balance point of society.
Cites Michael Vlahos, one of my personal intellectual heroes, on how the radical Islamic movement is a study in the failure of group identity and the failure of the group's "story" to adapt and prosper.
Lists and discusses Cameron's seven laws for digital trusted identity (OSS automatically destroys all digitally signed messages that demand registration before one can respond--that stupid technology is NOT part of the answer).
Engagement, not isolation. The books ends quite properly with praise for STRONG ANGEL, pioneered by Eric Rasmussen and Dave Warner, and suggests that the end game is going to be when we can engage everyone, in their own language, in their own identity terms, in the greatest story YET to be told, that of creating heaven on earth.
I totally respect this book. It is a KEY building block for moving forward with an Open Source Agency and a global free online public education as public diplomacy endeavor. It validates my view that we need a reality based Earth Game with embedded reality-based budgets, immediately. See Medard Gabel, whom I hope will develop such a game.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Global Inc.: An Atlas of the Multinational Corporation
Energy, Earth, and Everyone
Where to find 4 billion new customers: expanding the world's marketplace; Smart companies looking for new growth opportunities should consider broadening ... consultant.: An article from: The Futurist
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The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life Review

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The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life ReviewFirmly based on Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, the author attempts to explain what makes humans unique cultural animals. Rather than focussing on the differences between cultures, he points out, how cultural animals (man being the only such species)are different from social animals (e.g. woolves, horses..). His explanation is, that this must have offered an evolutionary advantage to the animal, so so it evolved over time
He draws from a huge pile of information from experiments done by countless phychologists over many decades, and manages to offer logical explanations of their results.
There is much information in this book about results on human behaviour, which are interesting in their own right - even if the reader is not interested in how / why they evolved.
I can highly recommend this book to anybody, who is interested in how humans "operate", and even more so to people, who (like me)want to know the evolutionary background of human traits.The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life Overview

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The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure Review

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The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure ReviewBrian Skyrms is one of the few philosophers who has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. He is an outstanding example of what seems to me to be a trend in modern philosophy of science, which is to learn the relevant scientific practices thoroughly so that one's contribution as a philosopher is at a high technical level of expertise. This book is accessible to the interested non-professional, but the journal articles on which it is based are quite sophisticated. I am not sure whether we should consider Skyrms' ideas as contribution to social theory, social philosophy, or both. Then again, perhaps it doesn't matter.
Skyrms' preferred method is to take a simple two-player game like the stag hunt or the prisoner's dilemma and explore the implications of repeating the game, playing it on a lattice, allowing player strategies to evolve, and otherwise enriching the game's structure to better approximate some forms of real social interaction. Skyrms is above all an explorer rather than an exhaustive taxonomist. He wanders through the forest of exotic plausible assumptions for two-person games, stops here and there to admire a particularly interesting specimen, and the moves on. This is a delightful approach for both the casual reader, who is not interested in complex details, and the professional student of game theory, who is tired of taking a highly specific game and absolutely beating it to death with forays of analytical purity.
One serious limitation of this book is that Skyrms is almost single-mindedly concerned with two-player games, whereas understanding human social life requires n-player games for fairly high n (at least 20 in some important cases). While a deep understanding of two-person games does shed light on behavior in larger games, it also can be very misleading. Certainly human society is much more complicated than one might infer from the workings of the prisoner's dilemma, the stag hunt, and the hawk-dove game.
I also believe that Skyrms' major point in this book is just dead wrong. In the Preface, Skyrms says "If one simple game is to be chosen as an exemplar of the central problem of the social contract, which should it be? Many modern thinkers have focused on the prisoner's dilemma, but I believe that this emphasis is misplaced. The most appropriate choice is not the prisoner's dilemma, but rather the stag hunt." (p. xii) Now, the stag hunt is a pure coordination game of the following form. Suppose there are n players (Skyrms prefers two players, but any n will do). If all players "hunt stag," each will receive an payoff of 1000 calories of meat. However, if any player decides instead to "hunt rabbit," the stag hunt will fail, and all players will get no calories except the rabbit hunter, who gets 100 calories. This is a coordination game, or an assurance game, because a player can be assured of getting 100 calories no matter what the others do (by hunting rabbit), but if the players can coordinate so all hunt stag, they will all do much better.
Skyrms defends his statement that human social life is basically a stag hunt-like coordination game as follows. At first sight, social cooperation seems to be a prisoner's dilemma, or in the n-player case, a public goods game. In this game, by cooperating an individual helps all the other members of the group, but at a cost to himself. Therefore, a self-regarding player will never cooperate. It follows that social cooperation requires altruistic players---people must cooperate even though this is personally costly and the others alone benefit from one's prosocial behavior. It is easy to see why the public goods game is an allegory for social cooperation among humans. For instance, if we all hunt, if hunting is dangerous and exhausting, and we must share the kill equally, then a self-regarding hunter will prefer to shirk rather than hunt. Cooperation in this case requires altruistic hunters. Skyrms' point, however, is that if the game is repeated indefinitely, then cooperation among self-regarding agents is possible using what are known as "trigger strategies." A trigger strategy for a player is to cooperate on every round, as long as all other players cooperate as well. However, the first time one player defects, the trigger strategy dictates that all players defect on every succeeding round. It is easy to see that in this case, even selfish players will cooperate on all rounds, because the gains they have from defecting on one rounds may be swamped by the losses incurred by not benefiting from others' efforts on the succeeding rounds.
Why is Skyrms wrong? Note first that the repeated prisoner's dilemma or n-player public goods game (the latter is just a prisoner's dilemma with n players) is not really a stag hunt game at all. The stag hunt game has exactly two equilibria, one where everyone hunts rabbit and one where everyone hunts stag. The repeated public goods game (rppg) has an infinite number of equilibria! For instance, suppose it costs 100 calories to generate 1000 calories for the other players. Now suppose in a ten player repeated public goods game, all players cooperate on all rounds, except player 1, who defects on all rounds. With an obvious alteration in the trigger strategies of players 2 through n, we still have a Nash equilibrium of the rppg. This is because 9,000 calories are generated in each period, so each player gets 900 calories, and players 2 through 10 only expend 100 calories, so they have a net gain of 800 calories and hence are willing to participate. Now, by varying who participates and how much, we can generate an infinite number of equilibria for the rppg. In game theory, this is known as the Folk Theorem of Repeated Games.
Despite the fact that the stag hunt is not exactly the same as the rppg, Skyrms would be correct in principle if it were true that the rppg were a coordination game, like the stag hunt. But the rppg is NOT a coordination game at all! In fact, in the rppg, a self-regarding player has an incentive to shirk if he can get away with it; i.e., if others do not observe his shirking. This is not the case in the stag hunt.
Economists generally treat the Folk Theorem as a brilliant solution to the problem of cooperation among many self-regarding agents, and Skyrms is here merely following their lead. My study of the Folk Theorem, by contrast, shows that the Folk Theorem is no solution at all, except for groups of size two, or larger groups under generally implausible informational conditions (see my book, The Bounds of Reason, Princeton University Press, 2009). The reasons is that cooperation in the rppg requires that each player send a very accurate signal to each other player indicating cooperation or defection, and the same signal must be transmitted to all players if they are to coordinate in their manner of reacting to a defection. When different players get different signals (e.g., when each player sees only a subset of the other players) and/or when the signals have a significant probability of being inaccurate (e.g., a hunter worked hard but by chance failed to be successful in the hunt), the cooperative equilibrium to the rppg will not exist, or will exist but will be extremely inefficient.
The implication of Skyrms' position for social theory is quite dramatic. If he were correct, it would follow that humans could cooperate very effectively even if they were perfectly self-regarding, with absolutely no need for altruistic preferences, empathy, no predisposition for cooperating and sharing, nor any other prosocial behavior that goes beyond simple mutualism: An individual would help the group only as a byproduct of helping himself. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that humans have fundamental other-regarding preferences, including a predisposition to follow legitimate social norms, and to make personal sacrifices on behalf of the group if they perceive that others are make such sacrifices as well.
My reading of the empirical evidence is that humans have evolved a social psychology that lead them to cooperate with others even when there is a personal cost, so long as others are doing the same. This implies that to sustain cooperation in a social group, we need a lot more than to simply coordinate on the high-yield strategy. We need a social system that fosters a sense of morality that includes caring about others and sacrificing on behalf of society. When that morality is absent or in disrepair, life will be "poore, nasty, brutish, and short," to use Hobbes' famous words.
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The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice Review

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The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice ReviewThis is a powerful book. It answers the critical and timely question: what should replace the shambles of pure socialism and unfettered free market capitalism? So many books that fall into the same category are utopian and myopic rather than grounded/policy driven and thus fall short on many counts. The Fair Society was obviously instructed by robust thinking on many aspects of human society and does not strive to attain some fixed and abstract ideal. Instead, Corning's ideal of fairness aims to mitigate the mundane suffering of the masses through social justice (rather than 'liberate' them). It focuses on improving what he calls the "collective survival enterprise," a kind of "we're all in this together" view of human society grounded in basic needs such as food and shelter. I agree this view is a more accurate reflection of the realities of highly interdependent post-modern societies than the "stay off my lawn" worldview of libertarianism, a favorite target throughout the book.
The thing that impressed me most about the book, aside from the prolific citations and references, was Corning's thorough contemplation and rejection of both idealized capitalism and socialism: "Neither the rational, calculating, egoistic Homo economics nor the cooperative, caring, altruistic 'socialist man' can encompass the dualities and the diversity of human-kind. All the evidence suggests that a more nuanced and complex view of human nature is essential" (143). While the book treads ancient paths by looking for a political and economic philosophy to manage increasingly large and complex human communities by looking towards human nature, it treads new ground by rejecting this dichotomy (and thus the tired conclusions engendered by it). This is extremely welcome, especially in a time of hyper-partisan, historically untethered news cycle mumbo jumbo and truly incredible public ignorance about the nature of economic behavior.
I could write considerably more, especially after just having finished it, but will end by wholeheartedly recommending a book that delivers in breadth, depth and sheer force of argument timely conclusions on subjects of high importance.The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice Overview

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