In a podcast, Eric Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu discuss a number of things, including evolution. I want to focus on that topic, which comes up sporadically, especially at minutes 11-15, 1:19, 1:24-1:31. A related issue is learning disability, which comes at minute 25, minute 57, minute 1:03, minute 1:17, and elsewhere.
My understanding of genetics and natural selection differs from Eric’s. Keep in mind that I never took a biology course, and most of any scientific discussion of alleles and so on goes right past me. So you should trust him more than you trust me.
I want to claim that evolution is like a statistician with insufficient data to determine whether a particular gene should be passed along or not. My slogan might be “Evolution selects for traits, and genes only code for proteins*” *or do other biochemical stuff.
Think of evolution as statistician. Call this EAS. EAS does not necessarily know which traits to keep. Take left-handedness, for example. Do we need to tell a just-so story in which left-handedness has survival value at a population level? Or can the genes for left-handedness have survived because they don’t have much impact on survival either way? Or is left-handedness an emergent property of gestation, not determined entirely by genetics? Maybe left-handedness is just a random variant that does not affect survival at either an individual or a group level.
EAS can figure out when single-gene mutations that are bad, and it can work on selecting those out. But a lot of traits are not single-gene based, and traits themselves are multidimensional. Suppose that we think in terms of an input-output matrix or a production function in which genes are inputs and traits are outputs. My sense is that the relationship between the inputs and the outputs is so complex that not only can we not figure out that relationship, but evolution cannot figure it out, either. So maybe there are some “bad” genetic combinations that get selected out, but there are plenty of genetic combinations that are far from optimal that do not get selected out.
Suppose that I have a combination of genes that is far from ideal for survival. But a lot of those genes overlap with genes that are ideal for survival, so evolution cannot be sure what to keep and what to discard. Furthermore, even though my combination of genes is “bad,” it is not so bad that I am unable to survive and reproduce. So “bad” combinations of genes can persist, and you cannot say that merely because a gene has persisted it must have some survival value. Same with traits.
So I am arguing against Eric’s inclination to see everyone as having good traits, and the rest of us should work to see the gifts that others have. I think instead that some people who just seem stupid or lazy are in fact stupid or lazy, due to a combination of the genes they inherited and the random adverse events that occurred during gestation. (One of my main takeaways from Kevin Mitchell’s Innate is that lots of bad things can happen during gestation.) EAS is not going to get rid of their traits or their genes. They are entitled to human dignity, but we should not set them up for failure by claiming that they really can perform great feats with the right encouragement.
Culture also affects selection. The person you want to mate with in an agricultural society may differ from the person you wanted to mate with in a hunter-gatherer tribe, so one can imagine culture changing the gene pool over time. In the last 20 minutes or so of the podcast, Eric argues that developments such as birth control and economic forces have affected sexual preferences. If so, then obviously this is a rapid cultural change, not a biological evolutionary one.
As an aside, I think that Eric and I share the trait of being disagreeable, and that it happened to work for us. He felt a strong need to prove himself to the educators who doubted him, and that was a powerful motivator for him. Similarly, when I was forty, I was tired of people saying that I was a visionary who could not implement anything, and that motivated me when I started my business. I decided that in order to succeed I needed to network, and I did more of that than I have ever done before or since. That helped make me lucky.
But being disagreeable and wanting to prove yourself to people who doubt you is hardly a guarantee of success. If it were, then the struggling students that Eric wants to champion might do better if their teachers are doubtful rather than supportive.
Eric’s view reminds me of that of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Law of Compensation.
Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else
I do not think that the genetic/gestation lottery is as fair as that. Some defects are just defects. And some excesses are just advantages.
“I do not think that the genetic/gestation lottery is as fair as that. Some defects are just defects. And some excesses are just advantages.” – Right, and everything in the post related to this claim is right.
But I don’t think this is right: “My sense is that the relationship between the inputs and the outputs is so complex that not only can we not figure out that relationship, but evolution cannot figure it out, either”
“Pressure And Time.” With enough pressure and time, a river can carve canyons, a tectonic plate can raise mountain ranges, inches of slow becomes glaciers, and glaciers can grind jagged mountains smooth.
In statistics, there’s a world of difference between “cannot” and “better than nothing”, even if it’s only an imperceptible, tiny bit better than nothing.
Let’s say you have a population that is 99.3% A and only 0.7% B, and you have a weak statistical filter such that if you apply it to a population, the proportion of B only improves by 0.1%. That’s a terrible filter, especially it’s costly every time you do it.
But, so long as this filter is better than nothing, if you set up thousands of them in a cascade, you can get to arbitrarily high fractions of B, all the way up to 99.9% if you need to.
And that’s how we enrich Uranium for reactors and bombs, and that’s how evolution changes allele frequencies for complex traits, even when the benefit of any particular variant are weak, and even when there are bad side-effects and costly trade-offs to it (as with sickle cell resistance to malaria).
If evolution couldn’t figure it out, we wouldn’t observe relatively quick changes in group averages for traits or allele frequencies in response to particular selection pressures. But we do. It all depends on how severe the selection is, and how many iterations of generations it has been operating.
For example, consider that there are at least several dozen genetic variations that are much more frequent in Inuit peoples than in other groups, which in aggregate have substantial effects on polygenetically-influenced aspects of metabolism which in turn enhance one’s ability to thrive on diets where most calories come from certain fats.
Or consider artificial selection in animal husbandry or horticulture, and the relatively rapid and incredible increase in the expression of desirable traits we can get just by picking the offspring that have above-average expression of those traits and breeding them with each other. If evolution applies only 1% of that selective pressure, it still only needs more time to get similar results.
[Since you throw in a discussion of credentials, I will say, I’m thoroughly credentialed in this discussion]
Selection acts at many levels, but in different ways per level. The one thing on which selection cannot act is ‘traits’ per se. Selection can only act on things that reproduce and die/disappear. It can act on stretches of DNA, segments of DNA, certain kinds of protein folding patterns, organisms, populations that become more than one population, etc.
The identification of the relevant ‘traits’ of a reproducing ‘thing’ on which selection can act is about causation – simplifying the selection process to ‘major factors’ we can identify, discuss, engineer rationally, etc. This discussion becomes complicated rapidly by issues of identification and naming (spandrels, chins, etc); also about trade-spaces between the traits you choose to name (including the value of extremes, at times), about system dynamics – the fact that the process of selection is incomplete most of the time, and is facing patchy, changing environments, which a single population might span – so that some combination of diversity and maladaptation is preserved.
Getting the foundations right doesn’t necessarily make the subsequent discussion easy; population thinking, causation, etc are hard.
Kling’s says:
Gould and Lewontin call these Spandrels:
For those who haven’t encountered “spandrels” before:
When four arches hold up a dome, they have to be fitted together. One way creates a triangular surface, a “spandrel” at the four corners where the arches meet (a nice picture is here). It was soon realized that this “spandrel” could be filled with religious imagery. But, say, Gould and Lewontin, that was not the “purpose” of the spandrels of San Marcos. They came into being for quite a different reason, simply to help hold the dome up. Similarly, they argue, lots of what living things have didn’t happen for the reasons they exist today. In fact, they may not even have any direct purpose–today or when they began.
The paper was part of an anti-adaptationist campaign that Gould and Lewontin and a number of left-leaning biologists were conducting at the time (the two ran a seminar at Harvard called “Marxian Methods in the Biological Sciences”). They were worried that “adaptationist” arguments sounded too much like arguments for existing capitalism. “Adaptationist” arguments say that living things are the way they are because their characteristics are good for them; they help them survive. There is even a hint that “they have to be that way”. Far from it, said G & L. (Gould is famous for arguing that if you rewound the tape of life and then sent if forward again, you wouldn’t get the humans of today; in fact, you might not get anything even close.) Similarly, capitalism was hardly the way things have to be, nor in any sense an optimum.
“Adaptationist” arguments also tend toward what Gould attacked as “biological determinism”, that we are limited by our genes, that various schemes to improve social arrangements or to fix people are not possible, may even be harmful. As lefties, this was anathema to them.
Exactly, but with one caveat: the genome also codes for emergent properties associated with gene expression but none of the current statistics use these, only proteins/enzymes and their alleles. I am fond of the title of Bret Weinstein’s (Eric’s brother) doctoral thesis “Evolutionary Trade-Offs: Emergent Constraints and Their Adaptive Consequences” (PDF). “Emergent Constraints” is a good description of the problems that occur during gestation and Eric’s focus on learning disorders (i.e. neurodivergent).
Wheat is genetically defective in that it has a non-shattering rachis. Wheat, a cereal in the family of grasses, should normally have a brittle rachis that shatters to spread the seeds. This defect is good for humans and thus began the domestication of wheat.
The main differences between the wild forms and domesticated wheat are that domesticated forms have larger seeds with hulls and a non-shattering rachis. When wild wheat is ripe, the rachis—the stem that keeps the wheat shafts together—shatters so that the seeds can disperse themselves. Without hulls, they germinate rapidly. But that naturally useful brittleness doesn’t suit humans, who prefer to harvest wheat from the plant rather than off the surrounding earth.
From a spiritual perspective, that defect is by design and a sign of divine providence. That and cattle that are docile and don’t have horns. That combination which led to what anthropologists call the “wheat-beef people”, from which we are all descended.
Wheat is symbiotic with humans, definitely. It has traits that make it so!
I think one gene leads to survival and that gene generates many offspring, but related genes. The gene changes generally follow the migrations from south to north and back. The working genes get spread around by slavery going back to way before biblical era.
I appreciate Kling’s focus on evolution and genetic aspects of this discussion but I couldn’t stop thinking about my moments of frustration with the podcast host. These two men represent extremes in math and language orientation. Eric Weinstein is well represented in part 1 on gender in Charles Murray’s “Human Diversity” but I don’t know what to make of Tom Bilyeu. The book clearly explains the differences between Eric and a highly intelligent woman like his sister-in-law Heather Heying but I don’t know how to explain Bilyeu’s mind and preferences compared to a smart language oriented woman like Meghan Daum.
You ought to read Cochran and Harpending’s *10,000 year Explosion* (Joe Henrich likes this book, if that matters). They argue evolution has sped up the last 10,000 years and has a big impact on history.
Evolution works just fine on polygenic traits. But yeah, mutations happen a lot. Most mutations are bad. Some are neutral. Very few are good. Old fathers introduce the most mutations into their offspring, and look at what happens. The rates of autism and schizophrenia are higher. Mutations are generally bad for brain function, since that is a complex organ. Look up mutational load.
Yes, culture influences selection. If a small group of people right now refuse to use birth control, what will happen over time? As Tyler says, solve for the equilibrium. Selection is happening right now relatively rapidly right now. The concept popularized by Taleb–Lindy–applies to a lot of arrangements at the moment. They do not seem Lindy. Will female careerism will eventually die? If they keep having few kids, yes.