Updating the Software of Social Evolution to Patch the Kin-Recognition Bug

Natural Reward Podcast

In this episode, my brother Jon and I discuss my work on the evolution of kin recognition. Jon is a software engineer and likes to put my arguments in terms of debugging software. For many years, the mere finding of kin recognition in nature was taken as prima facie evidence of W. D. Hamilton's theory of "inclusive fitness." A large paradigm was built on the teleological assumption that kin recognition is evidence of the final cause of "inclusive fitness maximization." A major anomaly to this paradigm called "Crozier's paradox," analogous to a software bug, suggested that kin recognition could not evolve for directing altruism to kin. When I finally resolved Crozier's paradox almost 30 years after it first appeared, the implications were extremely disruptive. As Jon would put it, much of the "software" of social evolution came to depend on the assumptions that led to Crozier's paradox. By questioning these assumptions, my theory implied that social evolutionists had misunderstood the adaptive basis of kin recognition, incorrectly tested Hamilton's rule, and misinterpreted Darwinism. Particularly, social evolutionists had misinterpreted Darwin's theory as teleological and tried to justify this teleology with generalized mathematical equations, like inclusive fitness or generalized versions of Hamilton's rule. Jon and I discuss how that theorists rejected my work because it did not conform to their prior expectations about what "general theory" is supposed to be, even though it yielded novel predictions for the genetics and evolution of kin recognition that were upheld by 50 years of evidence. We end this podcast with a brief discussion of the differences between scientific peer review and open software forums that allows "bugs" to persist in science. This episode is essential listening for anyone who wants to know what is wrong with science today. References and notes for this episode can be found at the natural reward blog.