Thanks Stephen,
I hoped for some sort of answer like that. If Eisenhower was the president for the Age of Collective Reasonableness, and Reagan wa the president for the Age of Noble Selfishness, and Trump is the president for the Age of Anarchy, what is next? How does a complexity theorist plan his way out of this one, baby? Inquiring geezers want to know. What do the ants have to say? I want to say that we ants should all get together and think this through, but that is, of course, exactly what a geezer from the ACR would say. I do despair. Nick From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin Sent: Saturday, August 9, 2025 8:36 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection IS a metaphor. Nick writes: > I moved to Santa Fe 20 years ago to confront The Enemy – Complexity, which > made nonsense of the idea making a best guess for the future and planning for > it collectively , calmly, and rationally. Nick — you came to Santa Fe to “confront The Enemy – Complexity,” but I’ve always admired how that move was also a reach to extend the individual into the group. Your framing of evolution beyond the lone actor fits naturally into complexity’s home territory: the study of collective dynamics. Complexity challenged the civic ideal you grew up with — that we could make our best guess about the future, then plan together calmly and rationally around stable facts — by showing: * The world is nonlinear — small perturbations can cascade. * Prediction decays fast — best guesses expire before guiding long-horizon plans. * Feedback loops are short — conditions shift before consensus can form. >From the Victorian lens of the forward-propagating individual — the gene, the >photon, the solitary actor — the unit of selection is the forward-propagator >itself, competing with only a once-in-a-lifetime reproduction as feedback, >with everything else treated as downstream consequence. But complexity might instead be the handshake of duals — like the mutual adjustment of fireflies flashing in unison or pendulums entraining to a common rhythm — where coherence emerges from continuous exchange, not solitary advance. This shift is much like physics’ move from solid state (crystal order, replication) to condensed matter (emergent phenomena, reproduction) — the very distinction Eric Smith draws between systems that merely repeat and systems that generate novel, coherent forms. This spirit runs through the science: * Stuart Kauffman’s autocatalytic sets — molecules persist as part of collectively closed webs of reactions. * Harold Morowitz & Eric Smith — life’s core metabolic cycles may emerge as planetary-scale solutions to channel geochemical energy flows; selection might happen at the network level, not molecule-by-molecule. * Afred's Hübler’s ball bearings — conductive spheres collectively grow to dissipate massive charge gradients more effectively. * Per Bak’s self-organized criticality — critical states are properties of the network, not any single grain or fault. * Ilya Prigogine’s dissipative structures — ordered patterns like Bénard cells exist only through system-wide throughput of energy/matter. Physics offers a parallel in Feynman–Wheeler absorber theory, where interactions are bidirectional handshakes between advanced and retarded waves, settling into a self-consistent exchange. Carver Mead’s Collective Electrodynamics carries this into the macroscopic: electrons act as part of a global configuration, not as isolated particles. It’s the same dynamic in my favorite ant foraging model: food-seekers diffuse “nest” pheromone outward, nest-seekers carrying food diffuse “food” pheromone outward; each biases its walk along the other’s field. The shortest-time path emerges from the handshake between complementary propagations, not from any one ant “deciding” the route. Seen this way, complexity might not be the death of rational planning — it could be pointing us toward a different design target: the coherent configuration. We're still on the lookout for our “Carnot” to formalize these principles. And for me, that search has been shaped by the voices in this group — especially yours. Your probes have been part of the collective dynamic here, and I’ve been heavily informed by them. For that, I’m grateful. -Stephen On Sat, Aug 9, 2025 at 4:55 PM <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Ok, but I am not done with my infernal questions. The way you pose your question, I cant help thinking that you know the answer. You and I could recite fo one another the thousand ways in which we know that humans are groupish. We know that people can make sacrifices for the good of groups of all sorts, some of which are incorrigibly abstract. We know that humans identify with the fate of other humans to the extent that they will put aside their own good fortune for that of an iconic figure. We know the people are capable of appalling group nastiness. There is no savagery like the modern army, sitting around in an anonymous office bloc in New Jersey lobbing missiles at wedding parties in Iraq. So what is the question concerning human groupishness . What is it beyond these facts that you need to know and what will change when you come to know it. One question you might be asking yourself is “Am I justified in keeping any money I earn beyond the median income of my fellow citizens. The answer is almost certainly, “No”. Knowing that and knowing that I am damned well not going to give it away, what next?” One of the hardest projects to take on is the discovery of one’s own hankerings. Glen, Jon, and DaveW have been very good at exposing mine. Make American Rational Again. Return to the genteel rationalism of the Deweyan 1950’s where every town had a town meeting and every discussion was “informed” by the “facts.” (And we were all cheerful racists instead of the guilty racists that we are now.) That I have grown up and helped to create a world in which nobody knows anymore what a fact has been like living my worst childhood nightmare. I was head of our planning board for three years in the early 70’s where I learned that small towns are the scariest, least rational places on the face of the earth. When we moved in from California, marginal hippies, the town could not rest before it was decided whether we were Catholics or Protestants. What???!@!! Sorry, I am ranting. I moved to Santa Fe 20 years ago to confront The Enemy – Complexity, which made nonsense of the idea making a best guess for the future and planning for it collectively , calmly, and rationally. The idea that people should build businesses models on destabilizing the present and then swooping in and pillaging until one has established an irrevocable monopoly on the future just seems WRONG to me. I loved the idea of American exceptionalism. But lo and behold, we were exceptional in only one respect. WE had discovered destabilization as a business model. Drop by, plant a lethal virus, wait a few years and then return (with your slaves) to a “virgin” land populated only by a few desperate savages. Let the rape of the virgin begin. Calm down, Nick. These are my commitments, and I cannot escape them. What are yours? Nick From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp Sent: Friday, August 8, 2025 4:21 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection IS a metaphor. Nick, Too good to miss — I’m in. Lead me into the jungle of group selection, especially the human variety. What I’m after: a clear, simple (but not dumbed-down) take on what group selection in humans is, and why it might explain our behaviour better than individual selection alone. Happy to start at the very beginning — dawn of the argument, cave paintings, whatever you think works. And yes, send me that Famous Great Amateur reading list. I promise to read it with respect… and just enough suspicion to keep it fun. On Fri, 8 Aug 2025 at 17:05, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Hi, Pieter, Let me be a George to you as you explore this topic. I will try to respond off hand, quickly, and unself-consciously as you think along. I think this whole topic is fascinating both substantively, and historically. The literature seems to track (or lead?) the Zeitgeist so precisely from post war peace-nikery (Wynne-Edwards), to the revanchist academic Reaganism (Williams-Dawkins), to chaos (evodevo). It's really hard to take the whole argument seriously once one begins to understand how complex and multi layered are the mechanisms by which parents do and dont resemble their children. One of the tools to thinking straight is to own up to one's hankerings before one dives into the literature. What are you hoping to find? Post war peace-nikery was covertly deistic, hoping to find that there was some sort of over arching regulatory agency that would keep the species and the planet safe. Academic Reaganism said good luck with that! Success is virtue. And then evodevo, the bull in the china shop of that whole argument. I recommend reading the biologist, Sean B. Carroll, (not the physicist), Endless forms most beautiful, and The making of the fittest. It's really hard to take the whole argument seriously once one begins to understand how complex and multi layered are the mechanisms by which parents do and dont resemble their children. That there is any resemblance at all begins to seem like some sort of miracle. Or perhaps just momentum. One hankering that misleads us is naturalism, the idea that we can find some sort of MORAL guidance in the way things are. Is the opposite hankering, existentialism? The belief that what makes humans special is their power to CHOOSE. You should remember that I am not a philosopher and am, in fact, an amateur in all things. "Any time you want to explore this issue, I am here ready to help. Would you like suggestions of articles to read by that Famous Amateur, Nick Thompson? " signed, ChatNST On Fri, Aug 8, 2025 at 5:19 AM Pieter Steenekamp <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Thanks, Nick. Just like you struggled to get your head around entropy, I’m battling to wrap my mind around how the basic but very powerful mechanism of evolution works in human groups. I can easily understand individual human selection, or even group selection in swarming insects where only the queen has babies. I think I’ll take a page from your book and work with George to help guide me through this learning journey. Every now and then, I might check in with you and others here for a chat or to ask a question. The only catch is that I’ve just started a really exciting AI project, so I might not have much time for my group-level evolution journey — but I’ll try to keep it going. On Fri, 8 Aug 2025 at 03:40, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Thanks Pieter, Sorry I have taken so long to get back to you. If FRIAM ever started a journal, it should be called “the emperors new clothes”. We are not committed to anything if not to the validity of an “amateur’s” perspective. As people will be quick to tell you, mine has always been of that sort. If I read you carefully, the position you take is that laid out in Dawkins The Extended Phenotype – that the genes are the basic unit of selection. But as Dave Wilson has been pointing out for years, Who made that decision? For one thing, as epigenic studies have made clear, when one looks in detail, it is really hard to find a thing that is exactly the gene. For another, that decision runs the risk of confusing the the thing that is selected with the forces that are selecting it. Whatever level you care to calculate the impact of selection, it is differential group success that is driving selection or it is not group selection. And if it is differential group success that is driving selection, then it is group selection. I think you might quite enjoy The Extended Phenotype. For a whild ride, have a look at Elliott Sober and D. S. Wilson’s Reintroducing Group Selection to the human behavioral sciences. There is a wonderful metaphor in there about two riders riding three horses. It was the article that broke the tide for me. I had been totally up Dawkins ass for the preceding 20 years. Here is the citation, courtesy og George Patrick Tremblay IV Wilson, D. S., & Sober, E. (1994). Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17(4), 585–608. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00036104 en.wikipedia.org+15philpapers.org+15 <https://philpapers.org/rec/WILRGS?utm_source=chatgpt.com> …. Nick From: Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Pieter Steenekamp Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 12:55 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Group Selection IS a metaphor. Nick, I'm genuinely impressed. Honestly, I feel a bit out of my depth trying to respond meaningfully on this topic. So please take my reply in the same spirit I’d expect a response from my 10-year-old grandchild when debating computer programming with me. The gap between your understanding of evolution and mine feels about that wide. That said, I’d still like to offer a response to your group selection argument—fully aware that it may come across as amateurish, and I'm okay with that. Here's the question I’m grappling with: Is the following valid? Genes as the Unit of Selection: Modern evolutionary theory generally views genes as the primary unit of selection. Natural selection acts on individuals, and the success of an individual is ultimately determined by the genes they carry. Group Selection as a Modifier: Group selection can be seen as a process that influences the expression of genes. For example, if a group-level trait (like cooperative behavior) is advantageous, then genes that promote that behavior will be favored, even if those genes also have individual-level costs. On Wed, 6 Aug 2025 at 00:12, Prof David West <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Nick, I wish to embody the fear of being dragged away from what you think you are supposed to be doing, to be engaged in the topic you raise in your paper. I have read the paper before and, as then, I find it meritorious, well written, and reasonable in argument. I am, basically, convinced. However; two points: First, your use of the concept, "metaphor," is the way that I use the term, in a manner that glen pointed out is inconsistent with the literal definition of the term. I speak of metaphor when there is some thing of which I think I know something and I have a suspicion that some other thing might be of the same ilk. I use what I think I know to craft a 'model', one that suggests particular points and particular relations that, if my suspicion is correct, will have direct analogs in the unknown thing. I check them out individually and in combinations and, if substantiated, confirm my suspicion. If unconfirmed, the metaphor is refuted. This seems to me to be what you are doing in the paper, albeit it more abstractly and academically. Please correct me if wrong. Second, and here is the real time sink, would it be possible to make your ideas concrete, real groups with actual history and demonstrated differential "success." If you were amenable to such a conversation, I would propose the Mormons as a test case. One of 20 or so "religions"/"societies" to emerge from the "Burnt Over District" of western New York. The only one still extant. Disproportionately successful, (in material and social terms), to their neighbors. Smith was living in a two-story New England style home while down the road, Abe Lincoln, was living in a log cabin with mud floor. A schism immediately after Smith's death, with the Reformed LDS barely evident while the main group flourished. (Last time I checked, Mormonism and Sokka Gokai, in Japan, were the two fastest growing religions.) In Utah there was a concerted effort to spawn multiple small groups by sending out colonies. Because each group was originally "seeded" with four or five families, you get a strong genetic/heritance component as well as "traits." (It is still possible to identify what part of Utah someone is from (especially females) by their physical appearance.) Some interesting "adaptations" at the trait level, e.g., when Smith was alive blacks were included in the community and held the priesthood—something that Missourians, at the time, could not abide. Brigham Young 'suspended' (restored in 1978 with the admission that the suspension was not for theological, but merely political reasons) black priesthood membership and gave up polygamy (de jure only) to appease the Federal Government and avoid a second martyrdom. davew On Tue, Aug 5, 2025, at 1:10 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Dear Colleagues in FRIAM, Sometimes, if I am going to get anything done, I just have to ignore Friam, and keep my head down, and work at the thing I am working at. It always seems, on that occasion, that you-guys dangle in front of me some enticing topic so I must scream and put my fingers in my ears to keep focus on my work. So it was that when I decided I must fish or cut bait on entropy or it would take me to my grave, that almost immediately you-guys started not one but two conversations close to my heart: on the centrality of metaphor to science and on the group selection controversy. A couple of decades ago I brought those two interests together in a paper called “Shifting the Natural Selection Metaphor to the Group Level. There are two things about this paper that make it salient for me. The first is that I think it is the best paper I ever wrote. The second is that for each of the two people whom I most hoped to reach when I wrote it, D. S. Wilson and Elliott Sober, it is a piece of crap. In it, I try to show that the problem with metaphors is not with their use in scientific thinking: on the contrary, it is with their ill-disciplined use. Metaphors need to be worked in a systematic way, not simply flung out in a gust of poetic exuberance. This lesson I try to teach by working the natural selection metaphor in a systematic way to show that if it had been treated seriously in the first place, the whole dispute about group selection might have been avoided. Thus the paper is not only arrogant, but meta-arrogant. Nothing is more pitiable than the retired academic who would do anything to have anybody read his moribund essays. But, alas, I simply am such a person. So, I am attaching a copy of the paper in the hope that it will have some value to you within the context of your two discussions. Mumble, Nick -- Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. 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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ -- Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. 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