Wilson's Defection from Hamiltonism, Richard Dawkins As a "Science Journalist"

I can't deny that reading this article in The Independent was gratifying to me. Not that I am especially supportive of E. O. Wilson's position, it would be rather hard for me to claim that after having said what I did in what I now realize is an unfinished series I did a while back.  Though I will welcome E.O. Wilson into the fold of the disbelievers in the pudding headed ideas of William Hamilton.  I thought William Hamilton's ideas were ridiculous the first time I read about them and that their having gained the amount of support they got was a sign that there was something seriously wrong with the ways of evolutionary biology, its standards of testing and accepting ideas, the ability for bad ideas to gain influence through the habits of its practitioners.  That Hamilton was a scientific racist and eugenicist stems directly from his conception of natural selection as, indeed, all modern scientific racism and all of eugenics have.  The consequences of scientific racism and eugenics having had the most serious if impact on the world, I don't think this problem can be allowed to continue to go on as it has and still call the science that maintains it "science" with the automatic prestige and required, faith based, acceptance that comes with that label.

The corners cut in the adoption of natural selection as THE explanation of evolutionary change, the flattery of class, race, ethnicity that are a congenital feature of the idea - despite the brave attempts at some to either deny that or to pretend it isn't there - have, I've come to conclude, guaranteed that bad ideas based on natural selection are inevitable and that with the firm establishment of ideology as a legitimate basis for making those decisions, those gaining currency is only somewhat less bound to happen.

It is too bad that most of the fanboys of either side will concentrate on the mutual dissing between Wilson and the god of their idolatry, Richard Dawkins, will overshadow the more important assertion by Wilson (who I will acknowledge is an actual scientist as compared to the more popular figure of Dawkins) instead of the far more important assertion that Hamilton's ideas were wrong and their widespread adoption is a serious mistake.   The article does, I think, identify why sci-guys got into such a tizzy over Wilson's defection, it calls their work, the basis of their credentialing and status into the most basic question.

Here, from the article.

After such a stormy career, you might expect Wilson to be taking things a little easier in the late autumn of life. Not so. He has once again poked a stick into the wasps’ nest of academia by publicly denouncing Hamilton’s inclusive fitness and the concept of kin selection.

“It was a mistake and I went along with it to begin with. But it’s finished. It’s over,” Wilson tells me, with a flick of his hand.

To add petrol to the fire, he has embraced “group selection”, a concept thought to have been comprehensively debunked in popular style by the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene.

When Wilson co-authored a 2010 scientific paper in Nature magazine with two young Harvard mathematicians rejecting inclusive fitness in favour of group selection, he unleashed a torrent of criticism. About 140 evolutionary biologists wrote to Nature denouncing Wilson’s revisionist thinking and re-affirming the central role played by the selection of genes and individuals rather than the “multilevel” group selection proposed by Wilson.

“What happened was confusion and unhappiness because a lot of people had based their life’s work on this idea of inclusive fitness,” Wilson says. He now believes that the protest was orchestrated by one person, whom he declined to name, rather than being the spontaneous outpouring it first appeared to be.

“We just corrected a mistake made originally by Hamilton and then repeated by a number of people, myself included,” he says.

Wilson argues that multilevel selection – both at the level of individuals and groups – has led to the creation of eusociality in ants and humans. In the simplest terms, individuals who co-operate together in groups achieve more and enhance the survival of their group, while selfish individualism does not, even in terms of Hamilton’s inclusive fitness and kin selection.

“Within groups, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals but in the selection of other traits of individuals that are interactive with other individuals – social traits – then groups of altruists defeat groups of selfish individuals,” Wilson explains. “In a nutshell, individual selection favours what we call sin and group selection favours virtue.”  But for many evolutionary biologists, this is demonstrably untrue, at least in animals. For the past 40 years or more, biology students have been taught that natural selection works on the level of genes. Richard Dawkins was the first to articulate this approach to a mass audience, arguing that individuals and their bodies are mere vehicles or “gene machines” for carrying genes through one generation to the next.

Two years after the 2010 Nature paper, Dawkins wrote a scathing review in Prospect magazine of Wilson’s support for group selection which Dawkins dismissively labelled “a bland, unfocused ecumenicalism”.

Natural selection without kin selection is like Euclid without Pythagoras, wrote Dawkins. “Wilson is, in effect, striding around with a ruler, measuring triangles to see whether Pythagoras got it right,” he said. “For Wilson not to acknowledge that he speaks for himself against the great majority of his professional colleagues is – it pains me to say this of a lifelong hero – an act of wanton arrogance.”

Although Wilson has much to be arrogant about, few who have met him would accuse him of it. But the criticism must have hurt, and Wilson was evidently still feeling stung by it when writing his latest book, in which he rather waspishly describes Dawkins, a distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society and retired Oxford professor, as an “eloquent science journalist”.

“What else is he? I mean journalism is a high and influential profession. But he’s not a scientist, he’s never done scientific research. My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’,” Wilson says.

“I don’t want to go on about this because he and I were friends. There is no debate between us because he’s not in the arena. I’m sorry he’s so upset. He could have distinguished himself by looking at the evidence, that’s what most science journalists do. When a journalist named Dawkins wrote a review in Prospect urging people not to read my book, I thought the last time I heard something like that I think it came from an 18th-century bishop.”

Despite his critics, Wilson is convinced that it was group selection over thousands of years of early evolution, combined with a deep fascination with one another, that led to human altruism. “While similarity of genomes by kinship was an inevitable consequence of group formation, kin selection was not the cause,” he writes in The Meaning of Human Existence.

I think I still have the copy of Harpers with the article I based my series on, perhaps I'll go back and finish it.

UPDATE:  So Insanely Funny I Can't Make It Up Dept.

Someone, in the midst of a scat filled comment says,  "Dawkins is a great scientist and no one ever heard of Wilson"... WELL NO ONE WHO NEVER READ DAWKINS APPARENTLY.   In the index of The Selfish Gene I count no fewer than 14 citations of Wilson and his work, in the 1976 edition.  If I had the time I would go looking for more.  Though, I suspect in his more recent work Dawkins is probably more likely to cite Douglas Adams and James Randi than he is an actual scientist.