What Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn't know what he's talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson's colleagues at Harvard.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/04/17/where_does_good_come_from/?page=full
(Thanks to Osman for sending)
I thought this article was really interesting. I think it's really odd that he is getting so many attacks for changing his opinion after years of research. If scientists never admitted that their earlier ideas were not the best answers, we would never move forward. It is ironic that he happened to be one of the biggest supporters of the opposing theory, but it shouldn't be held against him. His idea of group-selection made a lot of sense. For a lot of species of animals, survival would be difficult if they weren't a part of a cooperative group. There used to be a tv series about meerkats and their entire survival depended on cooperation.
This article was actually pretty interesting to me. I had never heard of the theories on altruism or group-selection and both theories seem to have possibilities to me. Both seem to make sense but if there is little evidence other than math I agree more research needs to be done. I think this is interesting also because you can apply this to humans also and helps us to see potentially why we are at times drawn to group together.
I think this article is kind of funny. I agree that a lot of major scientific discoveries would go through those three stages. A lot of what is being discoverd is radical for it's time and a centeral feature of science as a whole is that we're learning new things all the time, in the hope of eventually coming to a conclusive end to a topic. So I can see where this new theory is coming from, and I agree that it needs more research. What is kind of funny to me is all of the outrage by everyone on how this can't be true. Although I can see why people who spend their whole lifes work on things like the old theory of altruism would get all worked up, I feel like other scientists should be able to look at the evidence and say "ok, lets look at this, lets see if we're wrong." Simply because rediscovery is inherent to science.
This was an awesome article. It just shows how the scientific community is always changing. It was way cool that he was willing to change his mind based on his scientific research. Learning about the patterns of acceptance of a theory; from ignored, hated, and accepted as obvious, was also interesting. Now, I'm no scientific genius but I agree with his current theory much more than his old theory. It makes more sense that we would see insects in nature today that exhibit selfless behavior because they had out survived their counterparts who did not work together and are now extinct. This would totally explain it in evolutionary terms. His old theory is a little wack and I think is anthropomorphism in its thinking. I do not believe that a squirrel thinks to himself, "well, at least half my genes are in my brother squirrel over there, I'll alert everyone to the coyotes presence and be eaten by him, at least 50% of my genes will be passed on." This theory gives animals rational thought rather than simply acting on instinct as most evolutionary thought holds to be true. Honestly, I stopped reading once it got to the mathematical part. I know that's all important, but it's just so boring! I know I didn't look at the hard, 'reliable' proof but these are my thoughts.
I found this article kind of fascinating. It's funny to see how people go into such an uproar when things and ideas in science change- when it's always changing. I never really thought about the altruistic aspects of evolution, but it boggled me a bit while reading the article. It still seems kind of pointless that the animal still self-sacrifices for it's family members because it's still only saving just half of it's genes, and wouldn't an organism rather pass down 100% of them? I guess it's an interesting and controversial thing to think about.