Chutzpah alert

Not that Ridley doesn’t richly deserve bashing, but jeez, now we’ll get yet another of those delightful libertarianism threads…

Just because they’re in charge doesn’t mean you have to pretend they’re right. Well, unless your job depends on it; alienation and all that.

Thanks Matt, I was going to point that out but couldn’t be bothered. Perhaps it’s Dawkinsite in the sense of “pop-science authors I don’t like”?

Make sure you’re not drinking anything (although you might need something handy afterwards) as you read the prologue

To my intense regret I played a part in one phase of this disaster as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, one of many banks that ran short of liquidity during the crisis. This is not a book about that experience (under the terms of my employment there I am not at liberty to write about it). The experience has left me mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, yet passionately in favour of markets in goods and services. Had I only known it, experiments in laboratories by the economist Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatic ally prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all. Speculation, herd exuberance, irrational optimism, rent-seeking and the temptation of fraud drive asset markets to overshoot and plunge – which is why they need careful regulation, something I always supported. (Markets in goods and services need less regulation.) But what made the bubble of the 2000s so much worse than most was government housing and monetary policy, especially in the United States, which sluiced artificially cheap money towards bad risks as a matter of policy and thus also towards the middlemen of the capital markets. The crisis has at least as much political as economic causation, which is why I also mistrust too much government

[excerpted as part of favourable WSJ review]

Dawkins played a very important role, within the evolutionary biology community as well as popularly, in championing the work of Williams and Hamilton. When he started, fuzzy group-selectionist thinking was very popular even among biologists and Williams was largely ignored. It’s in good part thanks to Dawkins that anybody arguing for multi-level selection nowadays is compelled to try to make careful, rigorous arguments (whether or not one accepts them is another matter.) I would say that this more than makes up for memes. ;)

Mrs Tilton, I suspect you are misremembering “Origins of Virtue”. It constantly repeats the libertarian refrain.

Neil, Mrs Tilton,

It’s his early writing (The Red Queen’s Race, Genome) that is largely free of politics and is useful science writing. He does come down against government attempts to restrict genetic testing, but that’s a position shared with many perfectly respectable people.

Irrelephant @9,

you’ve fallen into the consumer trap of confusing the package with the contents … Dawkins may be a very good popularizer of science, but he is an awful scientist

As I wrote nothing about Dawkins’s work as a scientist as opposed to popularizer, you’ll excuse me if I fail to see the relephance of your comment. I do note, though, that the “meme” thing was not, SFAIK, in anything peer-reviewed but rather was in effect an extended aside in one of his better-known popularizations. Doubtless your judgement is based on intimate familiarity with Dawkins’s contribution to the professional literature, and there I am happy to defer to you and any other working scientists with a view on the matter.

Neil @12,

you are misremembering “Origins of Virtue”. It constantly repeats the libertarian refrain

I daresay you’re right, but I haven’t read that one. What I have read of Ridley’s are The Red Queen, Genome and Nature via Nurture. And, as I said, there is almost nothing I recall from those works that could have been called libertarian preaching, and the very few instances I recall were things that I (and, I hope, any other liberal) would find congenial but a law-&-order right-winger would not.

But I don’t wish to come across as an apologist for Ridley. I wish Northern Rock hadn’t gone tits, but since it did, I am filled with Schadenfreude to see Ridley and his smug stupid theories looking silly. I just don’t see that smugness or those theories informing the books of his that I’ve read. In any event, I prefer the other M. Ridley, the one always being mistaken for Matt. Decent basic text on evolution, and Mendel’s Demon, though it pushes the envelope of “popular” science, was enormously interesting.

But it doesn’t seem to matter what we do, the conservatives are in charge. In the USA, I think for another decade.

Only for one more decade? This seems wildly optimistic to me, unless you know something about 2020 that the rest of us don’t.

To see Dawkins take memes seriously, read his forward to The Meme Machine.

Also, I can’t help but point out his support, generally tacit but sometimes explicit, of Evolutionary Psychology in the Cosmides-Buss-Pinker vein. It’s not a coincidence that when speaking at the University of Texas in support of The God Delusion, he was hosted by the psychology department.

#21 is entirely on point here – Ridley’s chairmanship of Northern Rock is an example of Lamarckian rather than Darwinian evolution, in that “being chairman of Northern Rock” was an acquired characteristic and MR inherited it, with significant generational variance in styles of chairmanship.

‘Also, I can’t help but point out his support, generally tacit but sometimes explicit, of Evolutionary Psychology in the Cosmides-Buss-Pinker vein. It’s not a coincidence that when speaking at the University of Texas in support of The God Delusion, he was hosted by the psychology department.’

Yes. While I generally admire Dawkins’ stance on religion, and on the whole I think he is on the side of the angels (sic) it seems to me he would do well to train his bullshit-ometer (which is so finely tuned when it comes to, say, 20th century post-war French philosophy) to also detect the pungent whiff of crap that not infrequently comes from the direction of Evolutionary Psychology.

The (London) Sunday Times’s review did mention Ridley’s Northern Rock role.

‘The Cosmides-Buss-Pinker vein’.

This is a bit like saying ‘jazz in the Coltrane-Torme-Dean Martin vein’ (okay, not a great analogy). Cosmides does science; Buss and Pinker (when he is doing evo psych) do pop science. I think the worst you can accuse Cosmides and Tooby of is dubious overextension of their claims and bad judgment in the company they keep. They wipe the floor with Fodor in the most recent exchanges.

Really, is Fodor still at it? I thought he had put his methodological solipsism in practice by now. A pity he didn’t.

I really like the pseudonym “Irrelephant”; it is something that will – verifiably – stick in people’s minds ;-)

Anyhoo, it’s good to see that the vital principle is still strong in all of ye, when it comes to meme bashing.

In the good old days, the aristocracy claimed that giving them free reign was good for the country for various reasons, most centered on their god-given position and their natural superiority.

Is “give us free reign because of the invisible hand and Freedom” an improvement in argument, or a step backwards?

I note even Monbiot seems to assume that all creatures have a basically selfish nature thanks to natural selection, but that, having “gone global”, humans need government to fulfil the role once played by smaller community oversight in our ancestors lives.

Its been a few years since I tore through a pile of pop-sci books on evolution (Dawkins, Gould, Goodwin [i]et al[/i]), so I can’t claim deep knowledge of where the theory is now, but… it seems to me that this assumption that even apparent altruism is informed by individual selfishness is self-evidently wrong.

Species, not individuals, evolve. And that means that compulsions that are life-threatening to the individual but may help preserve the genetic stock of their close kin can be preserved through selective pressure.

It seems quite obvious examining eusocial insects like bees and ants, which exhibit quite suicidial tendencies in defense of hive or colony. I’m thinking about honey bees in Japan, for instance, that pile onto hunting wasps in a ball 10 bees deep, so that their body heat cooks the wasp, and the bees immediately in contact with it, to death.

And while more subtle mechanisms may be in play for most social mammals, it strikes me as obvious that some similarly suicidal-in-service-of-the-community compulsions must exist in social primates, especially when it comes to protecting the young. Watching a golden hyena mother facing off against a male lion about 3 times her size while defending her pups, its difficult to imagine how the compulsions that inform that behaviour arose to ensure the mother’s survival, as opposed to her genetic stock.

Yet even the way Monbiot describes the argument, it sounds like he thinks Ridley is right on the point that natural selection leads inexorably to unopposed compulsion to individual self-preservation (“humans are inherently selfish”) and that any apparent altruism is really just some “win-win” strategy for achieving that.

But if its accepted that any compulsion to lay down your life or suffer permanently debilitating harm in service of others is “true” altruism, then it just seems bloody obvious to me that no, we are not “inherently selfish” in every way and have some truly altruistic compulsions.

I mention this of course because it seems to be an essential premise of a lot of utilitarian thinking, especially of the (modern) libertarian and Randian stripe.

Rand’s sophomoric attempt to bridge the is-ought gap, for instance, rests almost entirely on the false assumption that all individual organisms are inherently selfish, and thus fails to appraise the nature of living things correctly, before even falling apart in the logic.

Farren: I don’t think there is any reason for you to suppose that Monbiot actually understood what Ridley was talking about, or that he is representing it accurately. He is an able writer, but a careless reader and a bad journalist. (And, for this reason, a frequent guest in the Corrections and Clarifications column.)

Jack @38,

Farren Hayden @ #34

Species, not individuals, evolve. And that means that compulsions that are life-threatening to the individual but may help preserve the genetic stock of their close kin can be preserved through selective pressure.

Its good to see group selection coming back into intellectual fashion, after the long reign of dogmatic Darwinian individual selectionists.

Why do you imagine that Farren’s second sentence describes group selection?

Nice to see both Hayden and Strocchi exhibiting what I mentioned earlier- the kind of extremely fuzzy thinking that prevailed pre-Williams. Given that as a matter of simple algebra the effect of gene-centered selection vastly outweighs effects at any higher level in most situations, it should come as no surprise that biologists long ago stopped being satisfied with such primitive hand-waving. Contemporary models of multi-level selection are a lot more analytically sophisticated than that, and unlike our friends above they make no attempt to claim that group selection is the dominant mode of evolution (an obvious nonstarter to anyone with any grasp of population genetics), only that it can be important in certain situations, most particularly the evolution of social behavior.

By the way, the “orthodox” view is not that “individuals” evolve (that would already be selection at a higher level) but that genes evolve. Dawkins is an admirably clear exponent of the reasons for that view. If you want to disagree with him, reading him with actual understanding is a good place to start.

‘Evolution is mostly random’.

No. You mean mutation. Evolution by natural selection is the opposite of random, as Dawkins has tirelessly pointed out.

@41-42: yep, we love our Dawkins and we’re not going to be bullied into denying it.

That’s really the best you can do? Wow.

I wonder what it is about evolutionary biology that makes it so uniquely attractive to so many people as a subject on which to bloviate on the basis of no actual knowledge. For those who actually want to know more, there’s a pretty decent Wikipedia article on group selection which is a good starting point. Suffice it to say that even its most ardent advocates among actual biologists regard it as an emergent phenomenon in certain specific situations, not a primary mechanism of evolution.

As a Libertarian myself I find Matt Ridley’s actions hypocritical. In his earlier books he wrote about how modern states are “corpocracy” a mixture of democracy and crony capitalism. I think he’s right about that. But, he accepted the position of Chairman of Northern Rock. He was happy to take part in crony capitalism himself.

I don’t find it convincing that he’s discovered the Minskyian business cycle theory of Vernon Smith, or the Austrian business cycle theory after leaving Northern Rock. In his earlier books he mentions Vernon Smith and F.A.Hayek often.

That said, I think his books are very good.

One can only applaud Ridely for carrying out rational optimism in his own pursuit of his own profit motive. Right?

> In the good old days, the aristocracy claimed that giving them free reign was good for the
> country for various reasons, most centered on their god-given position and their natural
> superiority.
>
> Is “give us free reign because of the invisible hand and Freedom” an improvement in
> argument, or a step backwards?

This “Aristocracy” argument is interesting…

In my view the consumer sovereignty provided by a free market is something quite different to an aristocracy. The “invisible hand” is quite real. Markets give each particular group role; land owners, capital owners, labour providers and consumers some influence. But, each must cooperate with the others and must compete.

I realise that the leftists here disagree with that view. Their view is that the rich, the capital owners and managers would have too much power compared to others and would form an Aristocracy.

But, what is the actual alternative that the left offers? The normal alternative is suggests is the big state. But, how is this really any different? Ayn Rand pointed this out when criticising JK Galbraith. The big state takes decisions from the masses and a group within the state makes them instead. Such a setup is a form of aristocracy itself – neo-feudalism or red-toryism. The aristocracy is selected by things like civil service examinations, by being promoted through into important government jobs and attainment of influence in the halls of power. Depending on the specific system it could be tempered by democracy, but each important decision can’t be made by democratic authority.

So, leftists can’t really oppose “Aristocracy” because what they suggest is a form of aristocracy. Really, the leftist argument is that the left-wing form of aristocracy is better than the right-wing form that would supposedly become much stronger if there were freer market.

Steve @41

As I said, I haven’t kept up to date, but your comments about “fuzzy thinking” on my part demand a response.

I’m an analyst/developer by trade and wiled away no small amount of my teen years writing cellular-automata style, trait-propagation simulations for amusement. I’ve seen group selection occurring in simple simulations. There is nothing fuzzy in my thinking at all.

The tone of your response suggests that you think my post was some kind of challenge to the idea of the selfish gene. It was nothing of the sort. Rather, it was a suggestion that selfish genes while inevitably produce some altruism in social species that last long enough.

And the Wikipedia article I did found did not reflect your disdain for the idea. In fact it said group selection has made a minor resurgence recently with better models and much of the criticism which caused its retreat in the sixties was because of poor models.

And I think anyone who trivialises the role of group (or kin) selection must have a hard time explaining the behaviour of species like Arabian babblers.

The tone of your response suggests that you think my post was some kind of challenge to the idea of the selfish gene.

No, I simply get just as tired of nonscientists trying to tell scientists their business as I do of the likes of Matt Ridley prostituting science in the service of a political agenda.

Steve LaBonne, I don’t think your view of evolution is really very different from Matt Ridley’s. Have you read his books?

I don’t know or care anything about Monbiot nor have I mentioned him. I thought I was very clear indeed about what I think of ALL extrapolations from biology to politics.

I’m an analyst/developer by trade and wiled away no small amount of my teen years writing cellular-automata style, trait-propagation simulations for amusement. I’ve seen group selection occurring in simple simulations. There is nothing fuzzy in my thinking at all.

Yawn. Many computer types like to pontificate ignorantly about evolutionary biology. You’re hardly special.

In my experience amateurs who presume to take sides in intra-scientific controversies never actually understand the side they’re opposing. It’s irritating even to those who are on the side they’re supporting.

@Steve

Firstly, I was criticising Monbiot, not you, so why “I simply get just as tired of nonscientists trying to tell scientists their business”?

Secondly, you appear to be attacking a straw man. I too abhor the habit of extrapolating from biological nature to ethics or ideology.

And yeah, programming attracts a lot of asperger’s sufferers who are inclined to think they’re experts in every other field, but that doesn’t invalidate anything I’ve said. BTW, I’m an autodidact with 150+ IQ last time I was tested and spent upwards of 20 years of my life reading up to 3 science (OK admittedly pop-sci mostly) books a month. I’ve read every book by Dawkins I could get my hands on, the last being “The Ancestors Tale”. I know how cells are structured, the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms, how DNA codes for different proteins. I’m not some antisocial geek kid who swallows every crackpot idea on the Internet and regurgitates it in the comments sections of other people’s blogs, so I object to being handwaved away as a pig-ignorant amateur, even if Im not an academic.

How about taking a little time out of your day to outline for someone who’s I assure you is quite capable of understanding your hifalutin science-talk why group selection is such a crappy idea and why, for instance, examples like the behaviour of the Arabian babbler do not beg for group-selection or kin-selection-type explanations?

Do you teach? Because your arrogance is quite appalling and must be a hindrance to teaching.

No, things aren’t getting better for most humans. That’s one of the biggest fallacies of the right’s argument. Millions of humans die each year because of poverty and the worldwide increase in inequality. Millions die because of the loss of access to clean water and the massive increase in diseases due to man-made pollution. Millions of children die due to easily preventable sicknesses each year.

Because of nearly unrestrained capitalism, more than a third of our wildlife is gone in just the last 35 years. Our fish stocks have declined by 90% in just the last few decades. According to the World Wildlife Federation, we exceeded the earth’s capacity to meet our demand for its resources in the 80s, and will literally need two entire earths to support those demands, if present trends continue, by 2030.

Of course, present trends won’t continue. The developing world will start to consume at higher levels. Right now, the rich nations consume some 80% of all resources, though they have less than 20% of the world’s population. America is the chief culprit, of course, as we have less than 5% of the population, but consume more than 25% of the world’s energy, create more than 25% of its pollution, and 33% of its trash.

In short, America and the rich countries are burning up natural resources and destroying life for future generations, and poorer nations aren’t even in the picture yet. And people in poorer nations live shorter lives if they do survive beyond the age of five. Even in America and in Europe, there is a huge difference in health and longevity patterns between the rich and the poor.

It makes me ill when I read right wing triumphalism about how capitalism has supposedly improved lives overall. There is zero evidence to support such a conclusion, unless one wants to focus on the upper class, or unless one wants to call a DVD player “wealth.” In reality, with the huge increase in inequality worldwide, quality of life, health metrics, and longevity rates are actually in decline for all but the rich or the upper middle class.

Chris,
I think we agree that massive modularity has failed. Nevertheless Cosmides & Tooby have produced impressive evidence for some psychological adaptations. I said they do science; that’s consistent with embedding the results in a faulty framework. Plus if you’re going to link to Mixing Memory, you owe us your readership an update.

#68 It’s worth point out that David Buller, in his book Adapting Minds, re-analysed the empirical data of Cosmides et al, and decided that the evidence for ‘some psychological adaptations’ is less than overwhelming. Indeed, CT did a piece on this very subject a while back.

Regardless of whether or not one accepts this, however, it is unquestionably true that ‘massive modularity’ has failed as a serious research programme.

http://www.amazon.com/Adapting-Minds-Evolutionary-Psychology-Persistent/dp/0262025795
https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/06/evo-psych-factoids/

“Read Matt Ridley’s “The Origin of Virtue”. Monbiot has got his argument all wrong. Ridley agrees with group selection, that’s most of what the book is about”

Have we read the same book? Ridley goes out of his way to dismiss group selection in that book. He also distorts Kropotkin’s arguments in Mutual Aid in order to create a straw man for his propertarian ideology.

Ridley’s book is a bit of a joke, self-contradictory (because it is so ideologically driven). At one point he invokes “the tragedy of the commons” to explain how altruism does not work then, later, to attack nationalisation he remembers that the commons were not unmanaged! Sad, really, but such is the power of ideology.

I discuss Ridley (and lots of other misunderstandings of Kropotkin) in my introduction to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid

And I should note that Ridley is NOT a libertarian (in the grand tradition of Kropotkin and other anti-state socialists). He is a propertarian and a Thatcherite.

Mrs Tilton @ 71

As I said at the outset my understanding of the topic comes from books by Gould, Dawkins, Goodwin and Margulis, along with Scientific American articles and biology books passed on by friends who actually studied it at varsity. I’m not an academic.

So I wasn’t actually aware, coming into this discussion, that “group selection” was a term of art. I’ve read a fair amount about “kin selection”, but haven’t encountered or don’t remember “group selection”.

Someone appended that label to my original musing and I thought “OK, if that’s what its called…” at which point Mr LaBonne went into affronted scientist mode and not only assumed I was defending a particular set of ideas I hadn’t really heard of before but further assumed, as you apparently do, that I thought demonstrating fundamental altruism in human nature is a necessary precondition for arguing that that niceness should be reflected in political policy. I don’t

On the first point, just googling a little made me realise that Inclusive Fitness pretty much covers most of what I was trying to articulate and on the second, my only reason for speculating on the question of niceness in human nature is because other people employ the fundamental, biological and total selfishness of human nature as a premise on which their political philosophy rest appear to be employing a false premise. I recognise this thinking as a kind of naturalistic fallacy and reject it on those grounds. I just happen to also reject the idea that we are a totally selfish species and that is an inevitable consequence of natural selection.

I can’t help feeling I’ve been totally misread here.

Farren @74,

I can’t help feeling I’ve been totally misread here

To a degree you have been, but only because you’ve been totally miswriting here.

As you’ve now discovered, what you’ve been referring to as “group selection” is, rather, inclusive fitness, something very different. To be fair, it sure can look a lot like “the good of the species”, and as Steve LaBonne noted upthread, consensus evolutionary theory routinely invoked group selection until the 1960s. Hamilton’s pair of papers on the evolution of social behaviour — you’ve probably heard of them described as explaining why worker bees forgo reproduction to assist their mother in producing more sisters, but that was just a dramatic example of a general principle — are incredibly tough going (they were for me, anyway). But Williams ‘s Adaptation and Natural Selection is very accessible to the laity (among whom I too am numbered). His prose doesn’t sing like Dawkins’s or Gould’s can, but he writes clearly and explains lucidly, and the book is worth looking into if you don’t know it yet.

I agree with you that using evolutionary theory (whether of a “group-selectionist” or “gene-centric” sort) to justify political structures is a very bad idea. The thing is, just about everybody would agree with you on that. Certainly Dawkins does; he has stated repeatedly that a society organized along “evolutionary” lines would be horrific. So on that note, you’ve been bashing away at selfish genes of straw.

“Certainly Dawkins does; he has stated repeatedly that a society organized along “evolutionary” lines would be horrific.”

Except that Dawkins is assuming that “evolution” and co-operation and ethics are mutually exclusive. That is NOT the case. As Dawkins himself has noted at times, our ethics have an evolutionary basis so a society organised along “evolutionary” lines does NOT preclude co-operation, mutual aid, altruism and such like.

Indeed, Trivers makes the point “very agreeable feature of my reciprocal altruism, which I had not anticipated in advance, was that a sense of justice or fairness seemed a natural consequence of selection for reciprocal altruism. That is, you could easily imagine that sense of fairness would evolve as a way of regulating reciprocal tendencies.” As such, our sense of fairness, justice and ethics are just as much a product of evolution as our selfishness, injustice and so on. Dawkins, at times, forgets this and paints nature as purely “red in tooth and claw.”

Of course, I must point out that Kropotkin had anticipated this back in Mutual Aid 70+ years previously:

“Moreover, it is evident that life in societies would be utterly impossible without a corresponding development of social feelings, and, especially, of a certain collective sense of justice growing to become a habit . . . And feelings of justice develop, more or less, with all gregarious animals.”

As Kropotkin was well aware, evolution can favour co-operation as much as competition. In short, that mutual aid gives an evolutionary advantage to those individuals which practice it. It also produces our sense of fairness and justice, it lays the basis for ethics and altruism.

Kropotkin was also well aware that we can ignore all this and act in ways which horrify — by exploiting and oppressing others. The difference between him and Dawkins is that Kropotkin consistently recognised the evolutionary basis for our ethics while Dawkins invokes it occasionally while usually uttering Spencer-like assumptions that we are driven purely by individualistic competition and “nice” behaviour is somehow non-“evolutionary”

Dawkins is assuming that “evolution” and co-operation and ethics are mutually exclusive
[citation required]

I think this is a bit strong. Even if evolution leads to cooperation under some circumstances, that doesn’t mean that a society organised along evolutionary principles would necessarily be a pleasant one, because not all cooperation is necessarily evolutionarily rewarded, and some fairly horrific actions are also rewarded by evolution.

Have we read the same book? Ridley goes out of his way to dismiss group selection in that book.

He dismisses group selection at the higher level, at the level of the species and large conglomerations such as rook colonies. However, he agrees with the idea at the level of the family, such as bees, ants, mole rats, mongooses and so on.

If I understand Farren Hayden’s argument correctly then it’s similar.

He also distorts Kropotkin’s arguments in Mutual Aid in order to create a straw man for his propertarian ideology.

I haven’t read Kropotkin so I’ll take your word for it on that. He also get’s Hayek’s arguments muddled up, or possibly distorted, elsewhere in his book.

Ridley’s book is a bit of a joke, self-contradictory (because it is so ideologically driven). At one point he invokes “the tragedy of the commons” to explain how altruism does not work then, later, to attack nationalisation he remembers that the commons were not unmanaged! Sad, really, but such is the power of ideology.

In the early chapters of the book Ridley points out the tragedy of commons through various examples. He points to the hunting of mammoths for example.

He then in the chapter “The Power of Property” he goes on to explain how private property and communal property supported by state and private enforcement. He gives the example of Maine lobster fishermen and of the systems of regulating the use of common land. He mentions Elinor Ostrom who recently got the Nobel for working on this.

He then points out that we should not jump to the conclusion that a tragedy of commons type setup must lead to an actual tragedy of commons. He points out that local solutions are possible, and that allowing them is better than nationalization. He goes on to point out how nationalization can cause tragedies of commons by removing existing extra-legal arrangements that worked well.

The point here is that on local levels the tragedy of commons problem can be dealt with by local rules – formal or informal. But, when there is a more non-local tragedy of commons there is a real problem. This is consistent with his view on the evolution of altruism.

Personally, I think it’s pretty reasonable, what do you think is wrong with it?

And I should note that Ridley is NOT a libertarian (in the grand tradition of Kropotkin and other anti-state socialists). He is a propertarian and a Thatcherite.

Well, I’m a “Propertarian” too, that is what Libertarian is generally taken to mean these days.

I can see how an old-fashioned anarchist may not like that use of language though.

Current I’ll give it a gander, although I’m generally hostile to propertarian ideas, I’ll admit :)

Supposedly the Academy had a sign over the entrance: “LET NO MAN ENTER HERE WHO IS IGNORANT OF MATHEMATICS”. It might be an idea, for future posts on evolution, to post a warning: “LET NO ONE COMMENT HERE WHO IS IGNORANT OF THE CONCEPT OF INCLUSIVE FITNESS”. I suspect that would cut this thread to about eight or nine comments, but it would be worthwhile. Some of the comments here are the equivalent of a discussion about War and Peace by people who a) haven’t read it and b) think it’s set during the Second World War.

Tim Worstall @85: I get it — he’s the Old Squire’s Son, returning to take possession of the broad paternal acres (I have read lots of 19th-century novels.) Does the peasantry still touch its collective forelock when he strolls through the village?

The US state that I am familiar with which is still run by an entrenched hereditary aristocracy is not Massachusetts, but Alabama. And a deplorable shithole it is, too.

By the way, I gather from more recent reading (D. Francis thrillers) that in Britain the right accent and bank balance still automatically qualify you to be a Magistrate, with discretionary powers to lock up and/or flog the proletariat. Can somebody clarify that for me?

On the first point, just googling a little made me realise that Inclusive Fitness pretty much covers most of what I was trying to articulate

And what I was trying to articulate is that next time you might want to think about doing that BEFORE you comment. Fair enough?

Yes, certainly we wouldn’t want anyone posting here who isn’t an expert, admits it, and eventually learns something new along the way.

The way you do that is by asking questions, not pontificating.

In any event its somewhat depressing to learn from you that, being part of that tiny percentage of the population outside of your profession that have actually taken the time to read Margulis, Goodwin, Gould and Dawkins, who you say is a great communicator of science, any opinion I express is still “bloviation” on the basis of no actual knowledge. Did I waste my time.

You know Steve once in a blue moon I get called upon to improve the systems of small business owners who’ve gotten hold of some rapid application development tool like Microsoft Access and created some unholy string-and-sticky-tape contraption with it that they use to run their business. As messy as these systems are, as amateur as they appear, it does not fill me with scorn for them or their efforts. Rather, I feel a little affinity to them, because unlike most of the population they have an interest in what I have an interest in, even if they’re not professionals.

TW: Thanks for that. I actually suspected, of course, that that would be the answer.

roac @97,

(The Lord Lieutenant of Northumberland is also the Custos Rotulorum of Northumberland. I did not click on the link to find out what that is as I prefer to fantasize about it.)

Appropriately enough given Ridley’s zoological bent, that ancient Latin phrase means “Keeper of the Queen’s Rotifers” in that county.

Well that was a good one. I almost believed you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custos_rotulorum

I can’t believe that there are people out there who don’t know what custos rotulorum means. Next you’ll be telling me that socage and petty-serjeanty are going out of fashion.

@66

“It makes me ill when I read right wing triumphalism about how capitalism has supposedly improved lives overall. There is zero evidence to support such a conclusion”

It is ironic that an argument about the lack of evidence presents no evidence. The fact that millions of people suffer is neither an argument for or against capitalism. That people use assertions about the suffering of others to advance different political agendas is also a further relevant fact.

Ridley appears to be advancing the argument that the commentariat have adopted a mirror-image to the positivism of the 1950s/60s, a form of cultural pessimism over and above factual analysis, and one that prevents societies from choosing the best policies (just as over-optimism in the previous era also misinformed policy).

As Monbiot – with an equally privileged background to Ridley – is one of the leading proponents of the pessism as progress point of view, it is hardly surprising he finds counter arguments so difficult to accept. However, it is a mark of the man that he reaches so quickly for sloppy ad hominem attacks.

31. Tim Worstall

Ridley is what the KGB used to call a ‘useful idiot’. A guy who promulgates our ideology and helps our cause, but cannot be fingered as being in our employ, who seems a genuine independent thinker.

In that sense, the City and the County go together. The City loves to put figurehead Chairman in charge, who don’t get in the way of the grubby business of financial institutions making lots of money (for their employees and especially their senior executives).

Then the City goes and buys a country estate, and has sherry with the Ridleys of this world.

The elites, as in all power structures, are interlocking. David Cameron just ‘getting a job’ in the City at a very senior level at Carleton for Sir Michael Green. George Osborne and his City career, consultant to Rothschild, etc.

Ridley’s ideology is extremely useful. Just as the Social Darwinists provided useful propaganda cover to the Robber Barons. Or various left wing sympathizers to Stalin and his Gulags.

If the Keeper of the Rolls had come to the attention of Terry Pratchett, he would surely have provided one for Ankh-Morpork, along with a Keeper of the Pies (Custos Tortaram)

Not necessary. Torts are the business of the Lord Chancellor. (Tarts are the business of the Director of Public Prosecutions.)

ajay’s comment @108 is the second best thing to happen today.

The City loves to put figurehead Chairman in charge, who don’t get in the way of the grubby business of financial institutions making lots of money (for their employees and especially their senior executives).

Or, as noted by W.S. Gilbert in The Gondoliers (1889):

I sit by selection upon the direction
Of several companies bubble.
As soon as they’re floated, I’m freely bank-noted;
I’m pretty well paid for my trouble.

“Matt Ridley is a genuine aristocrat.”

Yes.

“I’d have to check, but he is within 150 people in line to the throne, I think (I’m not sure whether the lineage goes offshore before it goes to the Dukes, after Grosvenor/ Westminster?).”

No, absolutely not.

One of the peculiarities of the English aristocracy is that they’ve not really got much blood contact with the monarchy. The Scots are a little different. But the list of heirs is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_British_throne

Roughly, it goes through the obvious members of the current Royal Family, then through inheritance from various Royal Dukes (Gloucester, Kent…..these are very different indeed from the non royal dukedoms) and then veers off to the Norwegian royal family, the Romanian, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Danish etc.

You don’t get to what might be called the traditional English aristocracy until number 350 or so with the Wellesleys (Duke of Wellington…actually, the son, not the current Duke) ….and that’s through the female line, not male. Then it’s back off to the Preussens (Prussia) and you don’t come back to the local aristocracy until the Marquess of Milton Haven at 460 or so (the Mountbattens)…..at 497 we actually get the Duke of Edinburgh through this line in his own right.

After 500 no one’s really keeping count any more. But the remarkable thing is really how little contact (in terms of marriage) there is between the royal family and the aristocracy. The latter tend to think of the former as parvenus to some extent.

The Ridleys, Grosvenor/Westminster, (both reasonably new creations, a few generations each), the more ancient aristocratic familes, the dukes, marquesses, earls and so on, are absolutely nowhere at all on this list (with the couple of exceptions noted above). The inheritance doesn’t go anywhere near the traditional aristocracy….and having worked for a couple of them thank goodness for that.

“Duc de Coutard”: what Bernard-Henri Levy repeatedly fails to do.

115: Aytoun is someone I had never heard of. When I looked him up, I learned that he was a Writer to the Signet, which shows once again that Britain is to quaint titles as Saudi Arabia is to oil.

116: You’re on quite a roll here.

Another baronet…..Jonathan Porritt of Friends of the Earth. Son of one, obviously, but he was oldest son and thus inherited it.