The Role of Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software

I just finished reading The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) by the very famous evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson who is the world's expert on myrmecology, the study of ants. Edward O. Wilson also became one of the founding fathers of sociobiology, the explanation of social behaviors in terms of evolutionary biological thought, when he published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson presents a new theory by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and himself for the rise of eusocial behavior in species by means of multilevel selection. Now Darwin's theory of evolution maintains that given a system subject to the natural processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that things will have no choice but to change into new things that are better adapted to the current state of affairs. But for the past 160 years, ever since On the Origin of Species (1859) was first published, people have always had a difficult time with figuring out on exactly what level of organization natural selection works. For carbon-based life, does natural selection work at the level of an entire species, a group of individuals in a species, a sole individual in a species, groups of genes in a species, a single gene of a species or at the level of a single DNA base pair? Softwarephysics agrees with Richard Dawkins' contention that most selection for carbon-based life operates at the level of the individual gene as proposed in his The Selfish Gene (1976). Multilevel selection, on the other hand, maintains that for each individual member of a social species there is a balance between individual selection and group selection. Individual selection encourages the selfish behavior of individuals in order to replicate the genes of each individual in a society, and those selfish behaviors are governed by the selfish genes of the individual. Group selection, on the other hand, encourages the selfless altruistic behaviors of individuals that advance the survivability of an entire societal group. Clearly, the opposing concepts of individual selection and group selection are at odds with each other and have been much debated.

The Social Conquest of Earth covers in detail many observations of eusocial behavior in both certain species of social insects and the human species Homo sapiens and then goes on to explain the rise of such behaviors with the new theory for the rise of eusocial species that differs from the current standard theory. Thus, The Social Conquest of Earth is a very interesting popular book that covers the 2010 paper first published in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson that is available at:

The Evolution of Eusociality
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/

But The Social Conquest of Earth then goes on to expand this new theory for the origin of eusocial behavior in Homo sapiens.

The Evolution of Eusocial Behavior by Means of Multilevel Selection
This new theory for the rise of eusocial behavior can best be summarized by the last paragraph of the above paper:

To summarize very briefly, we suggest that the full theory of eusocial evolution consists of a series of stages, of which the following may be recognized:

1. The formation of groups.

2. The occurrence of a minimum and necessary combination of preadaptive traits, causing the groups to be tightly formed. In animals at least, the combination includes a valuable and defensible nest.

3. The appearance of mutations that prescribe the persistence of the group, most likely by the silencing of dispersal behavior. Evidently, a durable nest remains a key element in maintaining the prevalence. Primitive eusociality may emerge immediately due to springloaded preadaptations.

4. Emergent traits caused by the interaction of group members are shaped through natural selection by environmental forces.

5. Multilevel selection drives changes in the colony life cycle and social structures, often to elaborate extremes.

The main idea of this new theory is that once a group of individuals forms, the group itself can become another environmental factor amongst the many environmental selection factors that select for genes that enhance the survivability of the individual. Being a member of a group that has been selected for genes with altruistic behaviors can certainly enhance the survivability of an individual up to a point. But these altruistic genes necessarily have to be balanced with selfish genes that only benefit the survivability of the individual too. Thus develops the coevolutionary battle between group selection and individual selection that is known as multilevel selection.

The Evolution of Eusocial Behavior by Means of Kin Selection
The more conventional theory for the origin of altruistic and eusocial behavior can also be summarized by the above paper as:

For the past four decades kin selection theory has had a profound effect on the interpretation of the genetic evolution of eusociality and, by extension, of social behavior in general. The defining feature of kin selection theory is the concept of inclusive fitness. When evaluating an action, inclusive fitness is defined as the sum of the effect of this action on the actor’s own fitness and on the fitness of the recipient multiplied by the relatedness between actor and recipient, where “recipient” refers to anyone whose fitness is modified by the action.

The idea was first stated by J. B. S. Haldane in 1955, and a foundation of a full theory was laid out by W. D. Hamilton in 1964. The pivotal idea expressed by both writers was formalized by Hamilton as the inequality R > c/b, meaning that cooperation is favored by natural selection if relatedness is greater than the cost to benefit ratio. The relatedness parameter R was originally expressed as the fraction of the genes shared between the altruist and the recipient due to their common descent, hence the likelihood the altruistic gene will be shared. For example, altruism will evolve if the benefit to a brother or sister is greater than 2 times the cost to the altruist (R = 1/2) or 8 times in case of a first cousin (R = 1/8).

Personally, I have never been a big fan of kin selection and inclusive fitness theory. I know that Orgel's Second Rule states that evolution is much smarter than I am, but I have never been able to see a way for genes to figure out the c/b ratio and the degree of relatedness R for very distant relatives by the standard means of inheritance and innovation honed by natural selection. Yes, taking care of your offspring should have a relatively low c/b ratio for your genes since your offspring have 1/2 of your genes and an R of 1/2, at least if you are the mother. But even so, many species do not do that, and even for those that do, the fathers never really know for sure. When performing the c/b ratio calculation for contacting a very distant relative of apparently very low relatedness R, I just keep thinking about all of those surprised customers on 23andMe commercials who may have found themselves in all sorts of family squabbles at Thanksgiving dinner. However, I can see a way for inheritance, innovation and natural selection to stumble upon the fact that living in a group of similar organisms with a shared gene pool can sometimes improve the survivability of the individual when individual selection and group selection operate in a mutual parasitic/symbiotic manner.

Multilevel Selection Generates Controversy
The above paper generated quite a bit of controversy in academia that got a bit nasty. For example, see the 2011 response by F. Rousset and S. Lion at:

Much ado about nothing: Nowak et al.’s charge against inclusive fitness theory
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02251.x

After reading the above paper, I was taken aback a bit by the level of the academic "Nature, red in tooth and claw" concerning the topic. For an outsider, this violent academic controversy looks very much like two memes in mortal combat fighting to the death. Strangely, I think that Richard Dawkins' concept of Replicators and memes, first expressed in The Selfish Gene, might be key to resolving this controversy and that some of the findings of softwarephysics might help to soothe some of these very troubled academic waters.

From the perspective of softwarephysics, the new multilevel selection model for the rise of eusocial species seems almost self-evident because we see it at work today with the rise of software, echoing James Hutton's "The present is key to the past". The multilevel selection of individual selection and group selection working together in a coevolutionary manner is just a recognition of the fact that there is more than one single form of self-replicating information on the planet and that all of these many forms of self-replicating information are coevolving together. In fact, we now have at least five major forms of self-replicating information on the planet all coevolving with each other. Again, for newcomers to softwarephysics, let me recap the essentials of self-replicating information:

Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.

Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet, as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:

1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software

Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information.

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:

1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.

2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.

3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.

4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.

5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.

6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.

7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.

8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic. That posting discusses Stuart Kauffman's theory of Enablement in which living things are seen to exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions by discovering the “AdjacentPossible” of springloaded preadaptations.

From the above list of common characteristics, we see that a group of individuals could in effect become a form of self-replicating information that skips down through the generations, largely unscathed by time, as a self-sustaining network of altruistic and selfish genes coevolving together in a stable manner that balances both the survivability of the group and the individuals in the group. I know that group selection is frowned upon by many evolutionary biologists but think of a ripple on a still pond. The ripple is a wave of information that persists through time as a disturbance of the behaviors of countless numbers of individual water molecules. There are no genes for ripples, yet ripples do exist as each water molecule responds to the local forces of nature, and ripples could even be used to transfer information. That's how you hear someone speaking. In order to better understand the nature of self-replicating information, it helps to have some understanding of the nature of information in general with the understanding that the concept of information is still a bit fuzzy. Please see The Demon of Software, Is Information Real?, and Some More Information About Information.

The important thing to keep in mind is that all of the five major forms of self-replicating information now on the planet are also coevolving together in a parasitic/symbiotic manner. For example, standard DNA viruses and transposons are examples of parasitic DNA that are coevolving with all of the other carbon-based life forms on the Earth, from bacteria all the way up to the most complicated multicellular organisms. Retroviruses, like the AIDS virus, are examples of parasitic RNA that are also coevolving with all forms of carbon-based life. Prions are examples of geometrical configurations of certain organic molecules self-replicating and coevolving with all of the other forms of carbon-based life too. And now we have the memes and software coevolving too on many levels.

Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software
Currently, the memes are the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. Over the past 200,000 years, the memes residing within the neural networks of Homo sapiens have cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide that its predecessors had previously sequestered in the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors. But now that software is seemingly on the rise, like all of its predecessors, software has entered into a very closely coupled parasitic/symbiotic coevolving relationship with the memes. Currently, software is created by the programming memes to be found within the minds of programmers and is replicated by the minds of end-users in a parasitic/symbiotic manner that then allows many other memes to self-replicate. This will likely continue for the next 20 - 50 years until software is finally able to write itself. For more on that please see The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity. In the meantime, software currently evolves in a multilevel fashion that takes advantage of both individual and group selection processes. Programmers are now called developers so I will use that terminology going forward. Developers are broken up in IT departments into tribes of 5 – 30 developers working under a single chief, or IT application development manager. Each application development tribe of 5 – 30 developers is a semi-isolated population of developers, dedicated to supporting a number of applications, or possibly, a small segment of a very large application like Microsoft Word. But to fully understand how individual and group selection processes are run in these development tribes please see How Software Evolves.

The memes are still the most dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet and have formed a very strong parasitic/symbiotic relationship with software. The memes foster the evolution of software by supporting and funding software development, and software is now responsible for replicating most memes. In the modern world, beyond personal word-of-mouth communications, memes can now only self-replicate with the aid of software, and the poor memes in our heads have become Facebook and Twitter addicts. Since all forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that cannot think, they cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over a planet, and they certainly do not need to do so to be successful. The blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection have never required a designer to take over a planet in the past and will not need one in the future either.

So we are now living in one of those very rare times when a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance. For biologists, this presents an invaluable opportunity because software has been evolving about 100 million times faster than living things over the past 78 years, or 2.46 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941. The evolution of software over that period of time is the only history of a form of self-replicating information that has actually been recorded by human history. In fact, the evolutionary history of software has all occurred within a single human lifetime, and many of those humans are still alive today to testify as to what actually had happened, something that those working on the origin of life on the Earth and its early evolution can only try to imagine.

The Need to Revive Memetics in Sociobiology
In The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson goes on to apply the new multilevel selection theory for the rise of eusocial behavior to the rise of eusocial behavior in human societies using the same five steps that are proposed to bring forth eusocial behavior in social insects. I think that such an analysis could benefit greatly by reviving the recently discarded science of memetics. For more on that please see How to Use Softwarephysics to Revive Memetics in Academia and Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:

Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes

Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge.

I think that memetics was discarded prematurely by sociobiologists because, deep down, humans simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. In everyday life, this is a very useful delusion as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness but it is an impediment that has seriously affected many scientific disciplines. Susan Blackmore pointed out in The Meme Machine (1999), that we are not so much thinking machines as we are copying machines and that it was "memetic-drive" that was responsible for creating our extremely large brains, and also our languages and cultures as well, in order to store and spread memes more effectively. Similarly, it was the relentless demands of software over the years for more and more CPU-cycles and memory that provided the "software-drive" that was responsible for the rapid advance of computing hardware. For a brief history of the effects that "software-drive" had on the prodigious advances of computing hardware, see the last half of Did Carbon-Based Life on Earth Really Have a LUCA - a Last Universal Common Ancestor?. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore also goes on to point out that the memes at first coevolved with the genes during their early days, but have since outrun the genes because the genes could simply not keep pace when the memes began to evolve millions of times faster than the genes. The same thing is happening before our very eyes to the memes, with software now rapidly outpacing the memes. Software is now evolving thousands of times faster than the memes, and the memes can simply no longer keep up.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston