Science in the Triangle

NESCent Catalysis Meeting, coorganized by the Evolution Institute was on November 13-15, 2009 and several of the participants remained another day and came to NESCent on the 16th to report on the meeting in a form of a panel. The meeting and the panel were organized by David Sloan Wilson, professor of evolution at Binghamton University and one of my newest SciBlings. The other panelists were Dennis Embry, John Gowdy, Douglas Kenrick, Joel Peck, Harvey Whitehouse and Peter Turchin.

The main idea of the meeting is that evolutionary theory has something to offer in the realm of understanding human societies and thus shaping policies governing aspects of human activity. In the domain of economics, for example, it appears that the classical economics (i.e., the Chicago School) is unbeatable in the corridors of power. Yet, it is essentially faulty and this has been shown many times, including by numerous Nobel Prize winners in Economics. The idea that humans are rational (and perfectly informed) economic players is just plain wrong. Yet our economic policy is built upon that error. Perhaps developing and using models from evolutionary theory can finally bring the well-past-due overturn of the faulty economics and become the basis for smart, modern economic policies. The work is just beginning.

Perhaps the insights from the study of social and eusocial animals, mainly insects, can inform the discussion about social behavior of humans. How do simple rules for simple brains result in complex behaviors of, for example, bee swarms? Perhaps if we used such simple rules, instead of relying on every individual human being highly intelligent, impartial and rational, we can devise policies that will actually work, in various domains of human activity.

Taking into account multi-level selection models of evolution one can start understanding the differences between small-group societies (e.g, in rural areas) and large-group societies (e.g., in large cities), why those result in diefferent behaviors of individual humans living there, and why the differences between the two types of groups often lead to civil wars (often wars we usually do not see or describe as civil wars due to our own myopia, not realizing that a war between two adjacent regions may, in fact, be a war between the city and the country “mentality” - something quite obviously applicable to the US red vs. blue states, really small-town conservatism vs. big-city liberalism). Why imposing large-group organization (i.e., a President and a Parliament, i.e., a ‘centralized government’ of a unified country) may not work in a country like Afghanistan in which the society was always organized via local kin-and-friend networks - evolutionary theory can open our eyes on such questions.

This group of people, coming from a variety of backgrounds including history, anthropology, ecology, economics, psychology, political science, ethology and evolutionary biology, will try to tackle these and similar questions over the years to come. Interestingly, the meeting was apparently an Unconference (though they have never heard of the term before), with discussions starting some months before the event (I presume online), leading to the choices of topics actually discussed in sessions which were free-style discussions, not speeches.

One of the panelists noted that interdisciplinary meetings are usually excercises in misunderstanding, as each participant brings in different language and different axioms, but not this meeting - people actually made an effort, in advance, to study and learn other people’s perspectives before encountering them in the sessions in real life. This made the meeting, judging from the enthusiasm of all panelists, a resounding success.

This was the first time I ever visited NESCent (though I was excited when I first heard about its founding five years ago) and it was really nice to see Craig McClain and Robin Ann Smith again, as well as to meet, for the first time in real life, John Logsdon who blogs on Sex, Genes and Evolution and has come to NESCent for a nine-year sabbatical.