Beloit College biologist Ken Yasukawa thinks that the concept of instinct resulting from epigenetically encoded learning in ancestors is not all that revolutionary. This enhanced ability to learn about a certain feature in the environment could, theoretically, become instinctual by being cemented epigenetically over multiple generations, says Pravosudov.
Even though he did not cite Baldwin, Barron freely acknowledges that what he and Robinson propose borrows from his ideas. The framing of instinct as ancestral behaviors that were learned and encoded through epigenetic mechanisms, Queen Mary University of London ethologist Lars Chittka admits, will forever be seductive to citizens and scientists alike.
Read More. Ten Minute Sabbatical. Stern DL. Evolution, development and the predictable genome. Peromyscus burrowing: a model system for behavioral evolution. Semin Cell Dev Biol. Natural courtship song variation caused by an intronic retroelement in an ion channel gene.
Natural variation in a neural globin tunes oxygen sensing in wild Caenorhabditis elegans. Quantitative mapping of a digenic behavioral trait implicates globin variation in C. Detecting natural selection in genomic data. Annu Rev Genet. Sommer RJ. The future of evo-devo: model systems and evolutionary theory.
Darwin C. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray; Book Google Scholar. Evolution of multiple additive loci caused divergence between Drosophila yakuba and D. PLoS One. Download references.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Richard Benton. Reprints and Permissions. Arguello, J. BMC Biol 15, 26 Time and again, Ken Miller has debated creationists, intelligent-design advocates, and others who deny the reality of evolution.
In The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will , Miller makes the opposite case—that evolutionary theory proves our special place among life on Earth—by pulling from biology, paleontology, philosophy, and neuroscience.
What Miller has done, to paraphrase his editor, is write an evidenced-based pep talk for the human species. Here, I ask Miller about the biggest ideas in his book, such as reconciling evolution with consciousness and free will, avoiding evolutionary overstatements, and tricks for maintaining friendships with ideological foes.
DJ Neri: I want to get into two major issues that you spend a lot of time in the book talking about: free will and consciousness. These are two big, challenging, and controversial questions.
Harris, who has a background in neuroscience, makes a very well argued and persuasive case against any idea that there is some sort of spooky process going on in the brain that defies the laws of chemistry, physics, and the cell biology of connections of the brain. As a cell biologist myself, I completely agree with that. First of all, I want to make that very clear. So in effect, if I were to swallow his arguments hook, line, and sinker, I would not be me.
I would simply be a collection of atoms whose every action and every moment was simply determined by the pre-existing state of those atoms and molecules. I think Sam Harris sees free will as an essential component of Western Abrahamic religious faith, to which he is certainly hostile in a very reasoned way.
Therefore, any hint that free will might be genuine somehow is an apologia for religious faith, which Harris would regard as nonproductive.
But my concern about an abnegation of free will is that it threatens science. The reason is that the very idea of science itself is predicated on the faith—if you want to call it that—that we human beings can be independent judges of empirical data in a properly designed and controlled experiment. When you get right down to it, if we truly lack free will, then we lack the independent judgment required to drive science forward.
There are several passages in his book that struck me as profoundly ironic. One of those is a passage where Harris basically says how much better our lives will be if only we realize that we lack free will. There is a very curious set of passages towards the end of the book.
I think as he concluded this short book, Dr. Hawking says if we ever do arrive at a final theory that can explain not only the origin of the universe but the behavior of the universe at every moment since then, and we are truly deterministic beings, it would mean that theory itself would determine the way in which we arrive at the theory and how, therefore, would we know whether the theory were true? Therefore, evolution is not the enemy of free will. Evolution, if free will exists, is actually its creator.
DN: Relatedly, you argue, contra Thomas Nagel or Raymond Tallis , that the explanations of conscious thought can be explained by science, that consciousness itself could have evolved. KM: Consciousness is really an interesting question, and until I waded into it I had no idea how contentious the field was.
But boy, I do now. One of the things that tells me is that consciousness is going to be argued about for a long time. And boy did that subtitle catch me. And if consciousness is inexplicable, then the neo-Darwinian theory of nature is wrong, which has always struck me as a stretch. Evolution is not the enemy of free will.
The reason for that is, Nagel says, that neo-Darwinism claims to be able to explain the evolution of everything about us, including consciousness.
That reliance on instinct undoubtedly saved human lives, allowing those who possessed keen instincts to reproduce. So for human beings, no less than for any other animal, emotions are the first screen to all information received. Today businesspeople are often trained to dispense with emotions in favor of rational analysis and urged to make choices using logical devices such as decision trees and spreadsheets.
But evolutionary psychology suggests that emotions can never fully be suppressed. That is why, for instance, even the most sensible employees cannot seem to receive feedback in the constructive vein in which it is often given. Because of the primacy of emotions, people hear bad news first and loudest.
Managers should not assume they can balance positive and negative messages. The negatives have by far the greater power and can wipe out in one stroke all the built-up credit of positive messages. In fact, because of the primacy of emotions, perhaps the most discouraging and potentially dangerous thing you can do is to tell someone he or she failed.
Be careful, then, of who you put in charge of appraisal systems in your organization. These managers must be sensitive to the emotional minefields that all negative messages must navigate. Loss Aversion Except When Threatened. Human beings who survived the harsh elements of the Stone Age undoubtedly tried to avoid loss. After all, when you are living on the edge, to lose even a little would mean that your very existence was in jeopardy. Indeed, when the circumstances felt safe enough, that is very likely just what they did.
We can see this same kind of behavior in children; when they are securely attached—confident that an adult will prevent any harm from coming to them—they can be quite adventurous.
But when harm looms, such behavior evaporates. Their descendants, with this genetic inheritance, would therefore also be more likely to avoid loss. Sometimes our ancestors lived below the margin, with barely enough food to get by and no secure shelter. Or they experienced a direct threat to their lives from a predator, a natural disaster, or another human being. There are no historical records of what Stone Age people did in such circumstances, but it stands to reason that they fought furiously.
And certainly those human beings willing to do anything to save themselves would be those that lived to pass on the genes that encoded such determination. Thus, we are hardwired to avoid loss when comfortable but to scramble madly when threatened. Such behavior can be seen in business all the time. Their instinct is to take risks as soon as losses start to mount. A stock starts to fall and they double up their positions, for instance. That said, experienced traders know how damaging these instincts are; and rules and procedures that force them to cut their and let their lossess and let their profits run.
But without such rules and procedures, human nature would most likely take its course. Consider what happens when a company announces impending layoffs but does not specify which people will lose their jobs. In these situations, people will do almost anything to save their jobs and avoid the pain of such loss. How else can you expain the kinds of leaps in productivity we see after a company makes usch an announcement?
By another dynamic emerges when a company announces that entire divisions will close. The people affected—those who cannot escape the loss—do the unthinkable. They scream at their bosses or perform other acts of aggression. Instead of acting rationally, they flame out in a panic to survive. On the Savannah Plain, these desperate efforts apparently paid off. But a flaming out when feeling desperate is hardly a blueprint for survival in the modern organization.
Besides being aware that people are hardwired to act desperately when directly threatened, managers must heed another message. Both are risky behaviors. Indeed, any kind of change is risky when you are comfortable with the status quo. And evolutionary psychologists are not surprised at all by the fact that, despite the excellent press that change is given, almost everyone resists it—except when they are dissatisfied.
But what of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who have made a high art form of bet-the-company behaviors? Evolutionary psychology would tell us that these individuals are the type of men and women who over the millennia have sought thrills and lived to tell about them. Human behavior exists along a continuum. On average, people avoid risk except when threatened. But imagine a bell curve. At one end, a small minority of people avidly seek risk. The vast majority fall in between, avoiding loss when comfortable with life and fighting furiously when survival requires them to do so.
Managers would do well to assume that the people with whom they work fall under the bell of the continuum. Perhaps the most concrete take-away from this contention is that if want people to be risk takers, frame the situation as threatening. The competition is goinig to destroy us with a new product.
Or, our brand has lost its cache and market share is slipping fast. On the other hand, if you want people to eschew risk-taking behaviors, make sure they feel secure by telling them how successful the business is. That advice does raise a question, however. What if you want people in your organization to be creative, to explore new ideas, and to experiment with different approaches to business? After all, most executives want their people to be neither outlandish fantasists nor mindless robots.
The happy medium is somewhere between the extremes. What is a manager to do? They will see this as empty rhetoric; in fact, instinct will tell them that making mistakes involves loss possibly of their jobs. Sadly, evolutionary psychology brings this managerial quandary to the surface but cannot solve it. Effective managers need to be adept at the very difficult task of framing challenges in a way that neither threatens nor tranquilizes employees. Confidence Before Realism.
In the unpredictable and often terrifying conditions of the Stone Age, those who survived surely were those who believed they would survive. Their confidence strengthened and emboldened them, attracted allies, and brought them resources.
In addition, people who appeared self-confident were more attractive as mates—they looked as if they were hardy enough to survive and prosper. Thus, people who radiated confidence were those who ended up with the best chances of passing on their genes.
The legacy of this dynamic is that human beings put confidence before realism and work hard to shield themselves from any evidence that would undermine their mind games. Countless management books have been written extolling the virtues of confidence; they cleverly feed right into human nature. Given their biogenetic destiny, people are driven to feel good about themselves. But if you operate on a high-octane confidence elixir, you run into several dangers.
You neglect, for instance, to see important clues about impending disasters. You may forge into hopeless business situations, assuming you have the right stuff to fix them. The truth is, even with self-confidence we cannot control the world. Some events are random. Or ask any young M.
Perhaps that it makes sense sometimes to challenge human nature and ask questions such as, Am I being overly optimistic? Yes, you can train people, teach them about different ideas, and exhort them to change their attitudes. But evolutionary psychology asserts that there is a limit to how much the human mind can be remolded.
The theory of evolutionar y psychology is complex, and its implications equally so. But below is a summary of some points that evolutionary psychologists would make to managers tr ying to understand human behavior. Classification Before Calculus. The world of hunter-gatherers was complex and constantly presented new predicaments for humans. Which berries can be eaten without risk of death? Where is good hunting to be found? What kind of body language indicates that a person cannot be trusted?
In order to make sense of a complicated universe, human beings developed prodigious capabilities for sorting and classifying information. In fact, researchers have found that some nonliterate tribes still in existence today have complete taxonomic knowledge of their environment in terms of animal habits and plant life. They have systematized their vast and complex world.
In the Stone Age, such capabilities were not limited to the natural environment. To prosper in the clan, human beings had to become expert at making judicious alliances. They had to know whom to share food with, for instance—someone who would return the favor when the time came.
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