This View of Life The Central Question of Group Selection Steven Pinker’s essay does not identify the central question that provides continuity for the group selection controversy, from Darwin to the present: How can traits that are “for the good of the group” evolve, when they are selectively disadvantageous within groups? The answer, according to group selection theory, is that format of lab report outcompete other groups, as surely as group-oriented individuals are outcompeted by more self-oriented individuals within groups.
This is the question and potential answer that Darwin posed in words and population geneticists such as Wright, Haldane, Fisher, and Maynard Smith posed in equations.
In the ’s, a consensus emerged that appeared to establish two points: Today we advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay that both of these conclusions were mistaken.
Traits can evolve by between-group selection, despite being selectively disadvantageous within groups. And all evolutionary theories of social behavior that were developed as alternatives to group selection include purchase essays online logic of multilevel selection within their own frameworks.
Sample essay. Being a well-known personality has both positive and negative aspects. However, in my opinion, the benefits of being a celebrity outweigh the negatives.
In other words, they all assume that social behaviors are expressed in groups that are small compared to the total population, the behaviors variously labeled “altruistic” and “cooperative” are typically selectively disadvantageous within the groups and evolve only by advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay of the differential contribution of the groups to the total population.
When it comes to answering the central question originally posed by Darwin, there is no alternative to group selection. Pinker’s essay is centered on a different question: Can a concept of group selection be formulated that is comparable to the concept of gene selection? For Pinker, this is the only way that the term “group selection” makes sense, but it is not the concept of group selection that began with Darwin, was refined by population geneticists, rejected in the ’s, and revived today.
To understand why Pinker would pose such a question, it is necessary to describe the concept of gene selection. Williams wrote Adaptation and Natural Selection [1] in part to explain population genetics theory to a wider audience of biologists. His emphasis on genes as “replicators” as they came to be known is based on the concept of average effects, which is calculated by averaging the fitness of alleles across all individual genotypes and all social and cabinetmeurtin.com contexts.
This “all things considered” calculation predicts which allele will evolve in the total gene pool, which is why Williams called it a “bookkeeping method”. It is also useful for estimating the heritability of a phenotypic trait at the individual level. To see how the concept of average effects figures in a group selection model, consider two alleles at a single locus dissertation thomas berger advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay for an altruistic and selfish trait, respectively.
The population is subdivided into multiple groups. The gene for selfishness is selectively advantageous within groups, but groups with a higher frequency of the gene for altruism contribute more to the total gene pool.
What evolves in the total gene pool depends upon the relative strength of within- vs. If within-group selection prevails, then the selfish allele has the highest advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay effect and evolves in the total gene pool. If between-group selection prevails, then the altruistic allele has the highest average effect and evolves in the total gene pool.
That’s what it means to call average effects a “bookkeeping method” that accounts for whatever evolves in the total population. Thanks first to Williams [2] and then to Richard Dawkins [3], the concept of average effects became popularized as “the gene’s eye view of evolution” and the gene was called “the fundamental unit of selection”.
This is what Pinker calls “gene selection”. It is a useful perspective, as long as the right inferences are drawn from it. In particular, all population genetics models are “gene selection” models when they assume that phenotypic traits are coded by genes. That includes all genetic group selection models. When Pinker asks whether groups can be like genes and group selection can be like gene selection, he is comparing apples and oranges.
Groups were never expected to be like genes in group selection models. Following the rejection of group selection, it was common for authors to treat the concept of genes as replicators as an argument against group selection all by itself. This is wrong, and very few informed evolutionists would make the mistake today.
It is difficult for me to tell whether Pinker is committing this error or whether he has something more nuanced in mind. Pinker also comments on cultural evolution in ways that have little to do with group selection e. In my opinion, Pinker needs to absorb the fact that the advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay of natural selection requires heredity and that genes are a particular mechanism of heredity.
Other mechanisms also create a advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay between parents and offspring. Some of these mechanisms are psychological and cultural [4].
David Queller, often cited as a contemporary critic of group selection, helped to coordinate the much discussed advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay by co-authors [5] to the article by Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson on group selection published in Nature. But Queller, in his response to Pinker’s essay, notes that the days of pitting multilevel selection against inclusive fitness theory are over. Pinker and Nowak et al. Queller compares the two theoretical frameworks to two languages, such as English and Russian, and appreciates that both languages can be useful.
The challenge is to become bilingual and to identify the important issues that can now be addressed within either framework.
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In general, it is a mistake to confuse the issues at stake in current discussions of group selection based on equivalence with the issues at stake during the ’s. If we crudely divide the conceptual space into group selection pro or con and cultural evolution pro or conall four combinations are represented. One way to achieve clarity is by reminding ourselves of the basic question originally posed by Darwin: If a phenotypic trait that benefits whole groups does not maximize relative fitness within groups, how can it be maintained in the total population?
Because this question is posed at the phenotypic level, it is agnostic about the mechanism of inheritance. Inclusive fitness theory and eusociality. Evolution in Four Dimensions: The major transitions of evolution. The Evolution of Eusociality. Multilevel selection is a productive framework for investigating human history. Adaptation and Natural Selection: As he points out, much of this renewal has involved little more than semantic confusion [1, 2], which we must get past in order to address any underlying substantive issues.
The key question should be: In the case of human cooperation, the answer seems to be “so far, no” [3]. Over the last half century, the most productive theories of advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay cooperation—in Cover letter for lead medical support assistant behavioral biology and general social science—have predicted that people will cooperate in individually-adaptive that is, inclusive fitness-enhancing advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay.
These include the evolutionary theories of kin altruism, direct and indirect reciprocity, partner choice and positive assortment, and costly signaling [4, 5], as well as the influential works of Hardin and Olson on group cooperation [6, 7]. These theories have inspired decades of empirical research, much of it cross-cultural, which have produced the following general picture of human non-kin cooperation []. People cooperate, often in groups, in order to acquire individual-level fitness benefits—resources and social status—that they could not acquire via advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay action.
They are frequently deeply interested cabinetmeurtin.com the success of their group, because membership in a successful group can be the best means for an individual to acquire resources and status; as they cooperate, they are preoccupied with whether they are being sufficiently compensated with these rewards. When relatively high contributors to group success are allocated relatively high rewards, members compete to be the highest contributors.
However when rewards are not tied to individual contribution, members are more likely to free ride, especially if they can do so with impunity.
If they perceive that they are themselves being free-ridden, they attempt to curtail their own exploitation; for instance, they simply stop cooperating, or they experience essay on how i spent my sunday sentiment towards free riders in proportion to their own individual vulnerability to being free ridden. When people are able to develop a reputation based on their cooperative behavior, they cooperate more, and when cooperators are given a advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay of social partners, they choose one another and ostracize free riders [].
This doesn’t exhaust the list of relevant findings, but should suffice to make the point. Many commonly-observed cooperative behaviors are uniquely predicted by individual-level theories, whereas few if any seem uniquely predicted by group-level theories. Some observed economic game behaviors—such as cooperation in one-shot, anonymous games—have been claimed as support for unique group selection predictions [8]. However, these claims have attracted a number of criticisms [], not least because of the highly artificial nature of experimental economic laboratories.
It is one thing to induce apparently individually-maladaptive behavior in a lab, but not at all clear that such behavior would be individually-maladaptive under ecologically valid conditions [3]. So the question becomes: To doubt this utility is not to reject multilevel selection theory, which seems vital for explaining the major transitions in the evolution of life [14]. In fact, a multilevel perspective helps clarify why a distinct theory of biological group selection is unnecessary: Groups serve the fitness interests of individuals, so it’s not clear how they could transcend these interests.
It is also unclear, therefore, why we would expect a biological group selection theory to make any predictions that are not already made by an individual-level theory. A multilevel selection perspective can also be useful for thinking about human cultural evolution, although again, it’s a mistake to see culture as something that transcends individual-level biological cognitive adaptations, because culture is ultimately caused by those adaptations.
I agree with some other commentators here that it makes sense to speak of cultural group selection, because human cognitive adaptations generate innovative cultural traits that vary across societies, and some such traits could spread by virtue of being advantageous in the context of between-group competition [15]. However, by using the same terms to describe biological and cultural evolutionary processes, we increase the risk of the two processes being confused with one another.
Therefore, when speaking of adaptation and group selection, it’s essential to specify whether one is referring to the biological cabinetmeurtin.com the cultural kind.
One can accept multilevel selection theory, without accepting that there is a need for a biological group selection theory of cooperation that is distinct from the individual-level theory.
On the contrary, multilevel selection theory helps clarify why the distinct group selection theory is superfluous: Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20, How useful has group selection been?
Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 21, Group selection theories are now more sophisticated, but are they more predictive? Evolutionary Psychology, 10, Cooperation as a classic problem in behavioural biology. A Critical Introduction pp. The adaptationist theory of cooperation in groups: Evolutionary predictions for organizational cooperation. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.
The tragedy of the commons. Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Mutual benefits at all advantages and disadvantage of living in the country essay of life. The evolutionary and biological logic of human cooperation.
In my opinion, the drawbacks of an entrance fee are eclipsed by its benefits in the sense that the income will be ploughed back into operation and development of the museums.
You have outlined what you are going to talk about and at the same time made your opinion very clear.
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This is exactly what you need to do to make it clear to the examiner what you think about the question and also helps them to follow the rest of your essay. A major disadvantage of an admission fee is the possibility of reducing the number of advantages and disadvantage of living in the country essay. Museums house cabinetmeurtin.com and artefacts of great educational and historical value.
If the chief aim of a museum is to introduce the local community, admission should be free to the public and visitors. Take some folk museums in Hong Kong, which preserve historic relics and display folk customs, for example.
Admission to these Research paper numbering pages museums, which are often monuments, is free of charge. If they had charged an entrance fee, many might have turned to other activities.
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
Clear and relevant main reasons and fully developed idea. It was great to see how you took one central idea and developed it fully with explanations and a specific example.
Granted, an advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay fee might have a negative effect on the admission figures, but an income is favorable to museums in terms of operation. Museums feature educational exhibitions at times, and this could not have been done without a sum of money expended on hiring professionals and buying equipment.
The Hong Kong Space Museum, for instance, has monthly exhibitions on different issues and professional docents are employed to take visitors on a guided tour around the museum. Better to make everyone feel advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay a late bloomer than a failed child prodigy. Attitudes There’s one item conspicuously missing from this list: Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial, and less afraid of advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay.
But America has no monopoly on this. Indians and Chinese seem plenty entrepreneurial, perhaps more than Americans. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don’t believe it. I think the problem with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that they lack examples. Even in the US, the most successful startup founders are often technical people who are quite timid, initially, about the idea veterinary parasitology phd thesis starting their own company.
Few are the sort of backslapping extroverts one thinks of as typically American. They can usually only summon up the activation energy to start a startup when they meet people who’ve done it zyadhakim.000webhostapp.com realize they could too. I think what holds back European hackers is simply that they don’t meet so many people who’ve done it.
You see that variation even within the US. Stanford students are more entrepreneurial than Yale students, but not because of some difference in Qualitative risk assessment case study characters; the Yale students just have fewer examples. I admit there seem to be different attitudes toward ambition in Europe and the US. In the US it’s ok to be overtly ambitious, and in most of Europe it’s not.
But this can’t be an intrinsically European quality; previous generations of Europeans were as ambitious as Americans. My hypothesis is that ambition was discredited by the terrible things ambitious people did in the first half of the twentieth century. Now swagger is out. Even now the image of a very ambitious German presses a button or two, doesn’t it? It would be surprising if European attitudes weren’t affected by the disasters of the twentieth century.
It takes a while to be optimistic after events like that. But ambition is human nature. Gradually it will re-emerge. It’s the best place so far, but the sample size is small, and how to insert quotes into an essay apa far” is not very long. On historical time scales, what we have now is just a prototype.
So let’s look at Silicon Valley the way you’d advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay at a product made by a competitor. What weaknesses could you exploit? How could you make something users would like better? The users in this case are those critical essay on nikon camera thousand people you’d like to move to your silicon valley.
To start with, Silicon Valley is too far from San Francisco. Palo Alto, the original ground zero, is about thirty miles away, and the advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay center more like forty. So people who come to work in Silicon Valley face an unpleasant choice: The best thing would be if the silicon valley were not merely closer to the interesting city, but interesting itself.
And there is a lot of room for improvement here. Palo Alto is not so bad, but everything built since is the worst sort of strip development. You can measure how demoralizing it is by the number of people who will sacrifice two hours a day commuting rather than live there. Another area in which you could easily surpass Silicon Valley is public transportation. There is a train running the length of it, and by American standards it’s not bad.
Which is to say that to Japanese or Europeans it would seem like something out of the third world. The kind of people you want to anyabyvivien.com to your silicon valley like to get around by train, bicycle, and on foot. So if you want to beat America, design a town that puts cars last.
It will be a while before any American city can bring itself to do that. Capital Gains There are also a couple things you could do to beat America at the national level.
Third World Economic Development
One would be to have lower capital gains jasper chan thesis caltech It doesn’t seem critical to have the lowest income taxes, because to take advantage of those, people have to move. The lower the rate, the cheaper it is to buy stock in growing companies as opposed to real estate, or bonds, or stocks bought for the dividends they pay. So if you want to encourage startups you should have a low rate on capital gains.
Politicians are caught between a rock and a hard place advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay, however: As Galbraith said, politics is a matter of choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous. A lot of governments experimented with the disastrous in the twentieth century; now the trend seems to be toward the merely unpalatable.
Oddly enough, the leaders now are European countries like Belgium, which has a advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay gains tax rate of zero.
Immigration The other place you could beat the US would be with smarter immigration policy. There are huge gains to be made here. Silicon valleys are made of people, remember. Like a company whose software runs on Windows, those in the current Silicon Valley are all too aware of the shortcomings of the INS, but there’s little they can do about it.
They’re hostages of the platform. America’s immigration system has never been well run, and since there has been an additional advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay of paranoia. What fraction of the smart people who want to come to America can even get in?
I doubt even half. Which means if you made a competing technology hub that let in all smart people, you’d immediately get more than half the world’s top talent, for free. US immigration policy is particularly ill-suited to startups, because it reflects a model of work from the s. It assumes good technical people have college degrees, and that work means advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay for a big company. If you don’t have a college degree you can’t get an H1B visa, the type usually issued to programmers.
Plus you can’t get a visa for working on your own company, only for working as an employee of someone else’s. And if you want to apply for citizenship you daren’t work for a startup at all, because if your sponsor goes out of business, you have to start over.
From fiscal year to fiscal yearfederal funding for these programs plummeted by After a two-year recession, the economy rebounded and continued to grow. Yet while the Reagan administration congratulated themselves on the economic expansion, poor people were still struggling. But Reagan had given poor whites someone to blame for their suffering: He never said she was Black. Bush, and chairman of the Republican National Committee from until his death two years later.
In an unguarded moment that Atwater believed was off the record, he said: This shift was important because Reagan had cut social programs that began with the presidencies of John F.
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Kennedy and Lyndon B. The poverty Kennedy saw was, in part, a legacy of the era of slavery. These programs ultimately helped poor Blacks and poor whites, in both urban and rural areas. What was to keep poor whites from seeing they had lost just as much as poor Blacks? The groundwork had already been laid. Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty. During periods of economic expansion, the bottom 90 percent saw a decline in income gains.
Bythose gains had been replaced by losses. Public assistance programs are easy targets for politicians, thanks in part to the racial advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay introduced by slave owners in colonial America. Politicians, the corporate media, and giant employers like Tyson have continued to drive socioeconomic wedges between poor whites and poor minorities. Working class whites may view economic struggles as temporary setbacks, and see their use of social services as a last advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay.
But politicians keep implying that for minorities, public assistance is a way of life. Yet the message to the white underclass was clear: I was struggling to survive until I could find work. At the checkout line, I shielded my card, and myself, from the people around me.
My story is common and unremarkable, unlike how to write an argumentative thesis paper fictional tale of welfare recipients driving luxury cars and eating lobster every night.
They displayed a unity reminiscent of the weeks following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Carlyle Group was essay na mujhe tum dekho after the luxury hotel where founding members first met in to discuss the creation of a multinational private equity corporation.
Inemployees and advisors of the firm included former U. Under the guidance of this Ohio state essay lineup of Washington insiders and international leaders, the Carlyle Group soon became known for buying businesses related to the defense industry — and tripling their value during wartime.
Defense CEO pay was 44 times that of a military advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay with 20 years of advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay and times that of an Army private in In contrast to wealthy individuals who became even wealthier, those who were sent to do the actual fighting comprised disproportionately high numbers of working class Americans.
More thanveteran disability claims have been registered with the Veterans Administration. Returning soldiers face higher unemployment rates than their civilian counterparts, particularly among male veterans age 21 to Between andthe youngest veterans had an unemployment rate of Veterans struggle to cabinetmeurtin.com proper healthcare in a system ill-prepared for the number of wounded, particularly those with catastrophic injuries and mental health issues that require long-term care.
Private nonprofit organizations have been picking up the slack left by inadequate funding in the federal budget. Who would blame them for being angry? How smart can they be? A poster boy for generations of socioeconomic privilege, Trump joined the New York Military Academy at age thirteen, then studied at Fordham University before transferring to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During the Vietnam War, Trump was Carbon fibre research paper five draft deferments — the first four for education, and the last for medical reasons.
Donald took over The Trump Organization in and restyled the company in his image — a special blend of ego, flamboyance, and rabid ambition. He steered clear of the advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay class and catered exclusively to the rich by buying or building luxury residential properties, office buildings, hotels, casinos, golf courses, and resorts.
Job one for us is to make sure the public sector does a limited job, and no more. Government regulations that stifle ambition are a threat to American dreamers everywhere, but laws that can be used to the advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay of top-of-the-business-world warriors are just fine. Big or small, our government has failed everyone but the wealthiest class. Once in office, they become puppets of the richest ten percent of Americans.
Donald Trump is a business man. Until recently, money and fame were everything to him. He measured his success by his ranking in the Forbes list of billionaires.
Now, Trump wants power and control, too. Like advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay plantation owners who just happened to be politicians, Trump does not need to be bought; he is already rich enough. What if some people did care, but the wealthy pushed them away? Admittedly, in the quest to fight for the oppressed — people of color, women, religious minorities, the LGBTQ community — we often overlook the fact that classism never completely disappeared.
But how can advantage and disadvantage of living in the country essay fighting for social equality include poor whites who see them as the enemy? We are all sides of the same coin, a coin that has been held in the pocket of the elite class since the first settlers arrived in the American colonies.
I am a poor, uneducated, white woman. I fight for racial equality because people of color are not my enemy. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people are not my enemy.
Immigrants and refugees are not what to put in your dissertation introduction enemy. Muslims are not my enemy. Native Americans are not my enemy. Single mothers and fathers are not my enemy. People on Medicare, disability, food stamps, and unemployment are not my enemy.
The homeless are not my enemy. And it turns out that the people of a small Arkansas town in the middle of the Ozarks are not my enemy.
Other poor people are not the enemy, no matter how they look, how they pray, or who they love.
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