I would look back to works like Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation for an answer to this question. If you think of psychological traits as strategies being played by competing sets of genes - then it pays to try explore the space of possibilities to look for new strategies to play to one's advantage. The bigger and faster the environmental (including social) changes are happening, the more it pays to look for new angles to maximize private gains within that environment. Since we're living in particularly tumultuous times relative to the span of human evolution, it pays to look far and wide for social/psychological niches to exploit within the social environment.
For some traits, possibly including schizophrenia, it's likely just a matter of zygosity. Having one copy of a particular variant may be advantageous (e.g., make you smart) while two copies make you schizophrenic. The homozygous disadvantage may - from an evolutionary standpoint - be a price worth paying, since, if we think of it as a dosage effect, a variant that is 'safe and effective' when there are two copies may do nothing much when there's only one copy, and as population geneticists will tell you, a mutation with no fitness advantage when heterozygous is highly unlikely to succeed, since it requires two people with it to mate and produce a homozygous offspring.
With complex traits resulting affected by many different loci, one inevitably ends up with a continuous distribution, and the 'optimal distribution' in terms of producing the highest avg. fitness population will still consistently produce a good many individuals who are suboptimally extreme, and the population doesn't necessarily converge to everyone having the same genotype because the homozygote disadvantage discourages the allele frequency of the beneficial variants from getting too high.
This was a great podcast. The most striking part for me was Patterson's "non-expertise" and their discussions about how corrupted many institutions currently are. Are we at a point where not being an expert, but being diligent and curious is at a higher premium than ever due to this sclerosis? I'd rather read the Zvi than the WHO. I can't think of a single "institution" I trust more than the distributed cognition framework we have in podcasts, blogs & now substack.
Maybe I misread or didn't read closely enough, but I liked Hanania's essay. I thought it was very much in the same vein as Meghan McArdle's book the Up Side of Down. The message being that everyone should be taking a lot more good risks, those not involving drugs and potential prison or death, instead of fearing failure and taking few to none. I didn't view the PUA thing as negative because I read it more as Hanania using this tool in a way not necessarily intended and instead using it to overcome his anxiety and neuroticism that might stem at least in part from his Asperger's syndrome. His own experience and mentioning of exposure therapy squares exactly with everything I know and runs counter to the trend of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and coddling anxieties. My understanding is that exposure therapy is actually the most effective treatment for PTSD.
‘Evolution plays a mixed strategy when, instead of giving everyone identical traits, it gives different traits to different people.’
Evolution is not a giver, it is an observation. Environment is the determining factor. Continual genetic mutation, an accident of cell division, produces new organisms with new characteristics, and therefore multiple coexisting variants.
Darwin: those organisms with characteristics best suited to their environment will be more successful at reproduction. Different variants will live side by side during this process; the least adaptable may not necessarily disappear, but usually do. Environments change over time meaning emergent mutants are best adapted, old mutants replaced. A characteristic which gave an advantage in the past, may be retained but redundant in a changed environment.
A current case - SARS CoV 2: this is a coronavirus variant (one of millions) with mild to unnoticeable symptoms in 99.5% of the population. This makes it best adapted since it does not immobilise its vector of transmission compared to other coronavirus (4 of which cause 10% of Colds) and respiratory virus. It is particularly unnoticeable and non-fatal in young people who are most mobile. That it is incapacitating or fatal in elderly and sick people doesn’t matter to the virus, because these people are immobile anyway and poor vectors of transmission. SARS CoV 1 was much more agressive, causing serious symptoms and fatalities in people infected, immobilising them. For this reason it was maladaptable and disappeared quickly - it couldn’t spread. It is curious how ‘fast-spreading’ has been equated with more dangerous, when it is the fact that it is least dangerous that facilitates that fast spreading.
Changing environment. Use of mRNA ‘vaccines’ to mimicking a short peptide chain (so-called protein spike) in the SARS CoV 2, imprinted the immune systems of large proportions of populations with this without exposing them to the whole virus. This meant versions of the virus with close but not quite the same peptide configuration caused immune systems to produce immune agents for the original virus but which did not tackle the particular infecting version. This version was then the most adapted to its environment and flourished. This gave us the ‘break out’ Omicron variant. However, although it was supposed Omicron was a mutation of the original SARS CoV 2, examination of its genetic material suggests it is in fact from a related evolutionary branch of the virus - not direct descendant - and has been in circulation for some time prior to the current crazy, but so mild and just one among many, it hitherto went unnoticed. Being mild, and with immune systems producing ineffective agents in response to it, it flourished being best adapted to its environment and became dominant. It is only now noticed because of the obsession with testing. In fact mRNA treated, particularly boosted individuals are up to five times more susceptible to Omicron infection, hospitalisation and death. This has caused Moderna to rush out a new mRNA treatment incorporating Omicron material. This will in due course allow another break out variant for the same reasons. Antigen imprinting, particularly vaccine induced, has been known and understood for decades. But all scientific knowledge and understanding was discarded in March 2020. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is now apparently unknown except by a few.
When a genetic trait gives a sufficient evolutionary edge and the luck works out*, that trait becomes fixed in the population by a process called a selective sweep. The individuals with the trait outcompete the individuals without until eventually everyone has the trait. Traits like congenital blindness are very rare because eyesight is such a useful trait that those without it couldn't compete in the ancestral environment. Diversity in a genetic trait just means that there are many variants, none of which is sufficiently beneficial to sweep the gene pool (in the particular environment).
* Presumably many individuals with beneficial mutations died in before the age of 5, as roughly half of all children did in the ancestral environment. Such mutations were lost to us.
Evolution doesn't have "strategies." Unlike humans and higher animals, evolution doesn't make choices or decisions.
Evolution is a two-step mechanism: variation (e.g., genetic mutation) + environmental filter (survival and reproduction).
Traits, which we observe, either increase the chance of producing viable offspring ("fitness"), or bundle with traits that improve fitness, or formerly conferred fitness (but now persist as residues that don't undermine fitness).
I understand that Arnold Kling knows all this better than I do, and that talk of evolution's "strategies" is mere shorthand for ease of expression. But casual observation suggests that the shorthand fosters conceptual slippage and misconceptions in broad discourse about evolution.
"Some people are very inclined to conform to the norms of those around them, and some people are inclined the other way. Why would evolution want both types of people around? A plausible answer is: if there were too few conformists, then society would probably fracture; but if there are too many conformists, then bad cultural norms would stick around too long."
Continuing on with the anthropomorphizing of biological evolution (for narrative benefit), I am skeptical of the group selection arguments presented here. My understanding of evolution is that it "sees" relative fitness of conformity on genetic progeny. It does not "see" society or "care" about whether it fractures. Nor does it "care" or "see" whether a bad norm would stick around, unless we define bad as less immediate ancestors.
In other words, I (and I believe most evolutionary biologists) am very skeptical of group selection narratives for biological evolution, (less so for cultural evolution, which is an entirely different topic).
I wasn’t going to say anything, but changed my mind. I know this isn’t a religious blog, but the assumption that Joseph Smith was schizophrenic because he claimed to have visions is very dismissive of religious experience, especially given that half of the US claims to have had a “religious or mystical experience” according to Pew Research. More of my thoughts, including a link to the Pew research here (obviously, don’t click if you don’t want a religious perspective): https://trocb.blogspot.com/2022/03/transcendence-and-physicalism.html
Be very careful of any argument that relies on group selection to explain why a trait spreads through a population. You first need to explain why it would be selected in individuals within the group. (Elsewhere, Weinstein argues that it's better to think in terms of lineage selection, but that's a long and subtle debate among evolutionary biologists.)
So here's a possible explanation for the mixed strategy. You're going to have multiple children, but your genes don't know what environments they will eventually be in. Sometimes it's better (in terms of reproductive fitness) to be agreeable, and other times disagreeable. Sometimes it's better to be conformist, and other times to try something creative and novel. So your genes roll the dice a bit with each child, and your children get somewhat different personalities. That increases the probability that at least one child will be a good fit for their environment, and that your lineage will persist.
Some of these issues are likely a matter of evolutionary mismatch - they would not exist, or would be much rarer, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Certainly contemporary anxiety is an artifact of modern social environments. Schizophrenia is likely to be as well (pointing out a genetic component for schizophrenia is no more an argument that it is "primarily" genetic than is pointing out that there is a genetic component to type 2 diabetes). The contemporary social environment is at least as different from the social environment of evolutionary adaptation as contemporary diet and physical activity patterns are different from hunter gatherer lifestyles.
According to game theory, pure strategies only work in perfect information games. In the real world, you'd expect mixed strategies to outperform pure strategies in the long run.
When dealing with evolutionary psychology theories, take each argument with a grain of salt. If you are taking a serious dive, get one of those big boxes of Kosher salt so you don't run out. Most evolutionary psychology theories are just-so stories, especially those dealing with humans. Most of human behavior is learned. Consider the genetic diversity of people who have learned to speak a complex language like English or Mandarin and that the same genes allow one to learn either or both. The ability to learn may be genetic, but the behavior frequently is not.
One shouldn't discount the limitations on possible evolutionary outcomes that come from physical structures on available mutations. To use a colorful example from a nice essay I read a while back, there's a reason zebras haven't evolved built-in machine guns to fend off lions, and the reason isn't that this wouldn't be adaptive.
The answer to your question could simply be that the underlying physical processes of mammal brains are too stochastic for a pure strategy to be possible.
The talking point used to be “Born that way,” but now the culture has shifted and it’s something more like “How do you know you aren’t if you haven’t tried it?”
2) I am very skeptical of evolutionary psychology and group selection narratives beyond the trivial truth that if something works well for one successful group it will likely be adapted by other groups. Too often ev psych is just a non-falsifiable narrative used to give a scientific-sounding facade to someone’s personal opinions. We shouldn’t be afraid to call it what it is - pseudoscience. I wrote about a particularly bad case here: https://trocb.blogspot.com/2022/02/pseudoscience-edward-dutton-and.html
"I see the PUA mindset as cultivating the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sociopathy"
Then you, like many people, don't understand it, and are relying on facile stereotypes instead of working towards greater understanding: PUA is cultivating social awareness, social skills, and the ability to forge connections among people. Connection is hard and most people are bad at social skills.
My own work covers these positive, pro-social areas.
Your whole model of schizophrenia is misguided. Schizophrenia should be understood as a Darwinian disease--that means that it reduces fitness. In other words, schizophrenics reproduce less. How then does schizophrenia--a mostly genetic disease--then even exist? It results from new and ongoing mutations that make one's brain not work correctly. These fitness-reducing mutations get slowly purged from the population over time, due to the reduced reproductive capacity of schizophrenic individuals.
I would look back to works like Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation for an answer to this question. If you think of psychological traits as strategies being played by competing sets of genes - then it pays to try explore the space of possibilities to look for new strategies to play to one's advantage. The bigger and faster the environmental (including social) changes are happening, the more it pays to look for new angles to maximize private gains within that environment. Since we're living in particularly tumultuous times relative to the span of human evolution, it pays to look far and wide for social/psychological niches to exploit within the social environment.
For some traits, possibly including schizophrenia, it's likely just a matter of zygosity. Having one copy of a particular variant may be advantageous (e.g., make you smart) while two copies make you schizophrenic. The homozygous disadvantage may - from an evolutionary standpoint - be a price worth paying, since, if we think of it as a dosage effect, a variant that is 'safe and effective' when there are two copies may do nothing much when there's only one copy, and as population geneticists will tell you, a mutation with no fitness advantage when heterozygous is highly unlikely to succeed, since it requires two people with it to mate and produce a homozygous offspring.
With complex traits resulting affected by many different loci, one inevitably ends up with a continuous distribution, and the 'optimal distribution' in terms of producing the highest avg. fitness population will still consistently produce a good many individuals who are suboptimally extreme, and the population doesn't necessarily converge to everyone having the same genotype because the homozygote disadvantage discourages the allele frequency of the beneficial variants from getting too high.
This was a great podcast. The most striking part for me was Patterson's "non-expertise" and their discussions about how corrupted many institutions currently are. Are we at a point where not being an expert, but being diligent and curious is at a higher premium than ever due to this sclerosis? I'd rather read the Zvi than the WHO. I can't think of a single "institution" I trust more than the distributed cognition framework we have in podcasts, blogs & now substack.
Maybe I misread or didn't read closely enough, but I liked Hanania's essay. I thought it was very much in the same vein as Meghan McArdle's book the Up Side of Down. The message being that everyone should be taking a lot more good risks, those not involving drugs and potential prison or death, instead of fearing failure and taking few to none. I didn't view the PUA thing as negative because I read it more as Hanania using this tool in a way not necessarily intended and instead using it to overcome his anxiety and neuroticism that might stem at least in part from his Asperger's syndrome. His own experience and mentioning of exposure therapy squares exactly with everything I know and runs counter to the trend of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and coddling anxieties. My understanding is that exposure therapy is actually the most effective treatment for PTSD.
‘Evolution plays a mixed strategy when, instead of giving everyone identical traits, it gives different traits to different people.’
Evolution is not a giver, it is an observation. Environment is the determining factor. Continual genetic mutation, an accident of cell division, produces new organisms with new characteristics, and therefore multiple coexisting variants.
Darwin: those organisms with characteristics best suited to their environment will be more successful at reproduction. Different variants will live side by side during this process; the least adaptable may not necessarily disappear, but usually do. Environments change over time meaning emergent mutants are best adapted, old mutants replaced. A characteristic which gave an advantage in the past, may be retained but redundant in a changed environment.
A current case - SARS CoV 2: this is a coronavirus variant (one of millions) with mild to unnoticeable symptoms in 99.5% of the population. This makes it best adapted since it does not immobilise its vector of transmission compared to other coronavirus (4 of which cause 10% of Colds) and respiratory virus. It is particularly unnoticeable and non-fatal in young people who are most mobile. That it is incapacitating or fatal in elderly and sick people doesn’t matter to the virus, because these people are immobile anyway and poor vectors of transmission. SARS CoV 1 was much more agressive, causing serious symptoms and fatalities in people infected, immobilising them. For this reason it was maladaptable and disappeared quickly - it couldn’t spread. It is curious how ‘fast-spreading’ has been equated with more dangerous, when it is the fact that it is least dangerous that facilitates that fast spreading.
Changing environment. Use of mRNA ‘vaccines’ to mimicking a short peptide chain (so-called protein spike) in the SARS CoV 2, imprinted the immune systems of large proportions of populations with this without exposing them to the whole virus. This meant versions of the virus with close but not quite the same peptide configuration caused immune systems to produce immune agents for the original virus but which did not tackle the particular infecting version. This version was then the most adapted to its environment and flourished. This gave us the ‘break out’ Omicron variant. However, although it was supposed Omicron was a mutation of the original SARS CoV 2, examination of its genetic material suggests it is in fact from a related evolutionary branch of the virus - not direct descendant - and has been in circulation for some time prior to the current crazy, but so mild and just one among many, it hitherto went unnoticed. Being mild, and with immune systems producing ineffective agents in response to it, it flourished being best adapted to its environment and became dominant. It is only now noticed because of the obsession with testing. In fact mRNA treated, particularly boosted individuals are up to five times more susceptible to Omicron infection, hospitalisation and death. This has caused Moderna to rush out a new mRNA treatment incorporating Omicron material. This will in due course allow another break out variant for the same reasons. Antigen imprinting, particularly vaccine induced, has been known and understood for decades. But all scientific knowledge and understanding was discarded in March 2020. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is now apparently unknown except by a few.
When a genetic trait gives a sufficient evolutionary edge and the luck works out*, that trait becomes fixed in the population by a process called a selective sweep. The individuals with the trait outcompete the individuals without until eventually everyone has the trait. Traits like congenital blindness are very rare because eyesight is such a useful trait that those without it couldn't compete in the ancestral environment. Diversity in a genetic trait just means that there are many variants, none of which is sufficiently beneficial to sweep the gene pool (in the particular environment).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_sweep
* Presumably many individuals with beneficial mutations died in before the age of 5, as roughly half of all children did in the ancestral environment. Such mutations were lost to us.
Evolution doesn't have "strategies." Unlike humans and higher animals, evolution doesn't make choices or decisions.
Evolution is a two-step mechanism: variation (e.g., genetic mutation) + environmental filter (survival and reproduction).
Traits, which we observe, either increase the chance of producing viable offspring ("fitness"), or bundle with traits that improve fitness, or formerly conferred fitness (but now persist as residues that don't undermine fitness).
I understand that Arnold Kling knows all this better than I do, and that talk of evolution's "strategies" is mere shorthand for ease of expression. But casual observation suggests that the shorthand fosters conceptual slippage and misconceptions in broad discourse about evolution.
"Some people are very inclined to conform to the norms of those around them, and some people are inclined the other way. Why would evolution want both types of people around? A plausible answer is: if there were too few conformists, then society would probably fracture; but if there are too many conformists, then bad cultural norms would stick around too long."
Continuing on with the anthropomorphizing of biological evolution (for narrative benefit), I am skeptical of the group selection arguments presented here. My understanding of evolution is that it "sees" relative fitness of conformity on genetic progeny. It does not "see" society or "care" about whether it fractures. Nor does it "care" or "see" whether a bad norm would stick around, unless we define bad as less immediate ancestors.
In other words, I (and I believe most evolutionary biologists) am very skeptical of group selection narratives for biological evolution, (less so for cultural evolution, which is an entirely different topic).
I wasn’t going to say anything, but changed my mind. I know this isn’t a religious blog, but the assumption that Joseph Smith was schizophrenic because he claimed to have visions is very dismissive of religious experience, especially given that half of the US claims to have had a “religious or mystical experience” according to Pew Research. More of my thoughts, including a link to the Pew research here (obviously, don’t click if you don’t want a religious perspective): https://trocb.blogspot.com/2022/03/transcendence-and-physicalism.html
Be very careful of any argument that relies on group selection to explain why a trait spreads through a population. You first need to explain why it would be selected in individuals within the group. (Elsewhere, Weinstein argues that it's better to think in terms of lineage selection, but that's a long and subtle debate among evolutionary biologists.)
So here's a possible explanation for the mixed strategy. You're going to have multiple children, but your genes don't know what environments they will eventually be in. Sometimes it's better (in terms of reproductive fitness) to be agreeable, and other times disagreeable. Sometimes it's better to be conformist, and other times to try something creative and novel. So your genes roll the dice a bit with each child, and your children get somewhat different personalities. That increases the probability that at least one child will be a good fit for their environment, and that your lineage will persist.
Some of these issues are likely a matter of evolutionary mismatch - they would not exist, or would be much rarer, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Certainly contemporary anxiety is an artifact of modern social environments. Schizophrenia is likely to be as well (pointing out a genetic component for schizophrenia is no more an argument that it is "primarily" genetic than is pointing out that there is a genetic component to type 2 diabetes). The contemporary social environment is at least as different from the social environment of evolutionary adaptation as contemporary diet and physical activity patterns are different from hunter gatherer lifestyles.
I've written about this here,
https://flowidealism.medium.com/evolutionary-mismatch-as-a-causal-factor-in-adolescent-dysfunction-and-mental-illness-d235cc85584
According to game theory, pure strategies only work in perfect information games. In the real world, you'd expect mixed strategies to outperform pure strategies in the long run.
When dealing with evolutionary psychology theories, take each argument with a grain of salt. If you are taking a serious dive, get one of those big boxes of Kosher salt so you don't run out. Most evolutionary psychology theories are just-so stories, especially those dealing with humans. Most of human behavior is learned. Consider the genetic diversity of people who have learned to speak a complex language like English or Mandarin and that the same genes allow one to learn either or both. The ability to learn may be genetic, but the behavior frequently is not.
One shouldn't discount the limitations on possible evolutionary outcomes that come from physical structures on available mutations. To use a colorful example from a nice essay I read a while back, there's a reason zebras haven't evolved built-in machine guns to fend off lions, and the reason isn't that this wouldn't be adaptive.
The answer to your question could simply be that the underlying physical processes of mammal brains are too stochastic for a pure strategy to be possible.
1) Homosexuality is not a great example of natural selection, because the heritability is so low. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/there-is-no-gay-gene-there-is-no-straight-gene-sexuality-is-just-complex-study-confirms )
The talking point used to be “Born that way,” but now the culture has shifted and it’s something more like “How do you know you aren’t if you haven’t tried it?”
2) I am very skeptical of evolutionary psychology and group selection narratives beyond the trivial truth that if something works well for one successful group it will likely be adapted by other groups. Too often ev psych is just a non-falsifiable narrative used to give a scientific-sounding facade to someone’s personal opinions. We shouldn’t be afraid to call it what it is - pseudoscience. I wrote about a particularly bad case here: https://trocb.blogspot.com/2022/02/pseudoscience-edward-dutton-and.html
"I see the PUA mindset as cultivating the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sociopathy"
Then you, like many people, don't understand it, and are relying on facile stereotypes instead of working towards greater understanding: PUA is cultivating social awareness, social skills, and the ability to forge connections among people. Connection is hard and most people are bad at social skills.
My own work covers these positive, pro-social areas.
Your whole model of schizophrenia is misguided. Schizophrenia should be understood as a Darwinian disease--that means that it reduces fitness. In other words, schizophrenics reproduce less. How then does schizophrenia--a mostly genetic disease--then even exist? It results from new and ongoing mutations that make one's brain not work correctly. These fitness-reducing mutations get slowly purged from the population over time, due to the reduced reproductive capacity of schizophrenic individuals.
I do not see how evolution could preserve homosexual tendencies among men. Therefore, I think it has another cause--namely, an infection of some kind causes an immune response similar to that seen in narcoleptics. (See: https://www.narcolepsy.org.uk/resources/what-causes-narcolepsy#:~:text=The%20cause%20of%20narcolepsy%20is,throat%20or%20flu%2Dlike%20infection.) Except, instead of the immune system attacking a particular kind of neuron in your hypothalamus that regulates the release of hypocretin, the immune system attacks cells in the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the hypothalamus (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexually_dimorphic_nucleus). However, this specific prediction is speculative on my part.
Your mixed strategy model does apply to conformity though!