From genes to religion, and back: A review by Bernard Crespi: Levels of Selection in Evolution. Edited by Laurent Keller. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1999. 272 pp. ISBN: 0 691 00703 9 (Cloth) $59.50; ISBN: 0 691 00704 7 (Paper) $16.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During my last meeting with W. D. Hamilton, he told me of his new theory for the origins of religions. By his hypothesis, many religions were started by persons who were able by force of personality to persuade or cajole members of a social group into becoming more co‐operative among themselves, through enhancement of within‐group unity. Some of the resulting increase in available group resources would be funnelled to the religious leaders, and the lion’s share remained with the newly devout, so all benefit. Natural selection among religions then promotes assimilation at best, or annihilation at worst, of competitors while, within religious groups, outspoken heretics are burned in this world and quiet ones presumably roast in the next. This book has as its goal the analysis of how such conflict and co‐operation between and within levels of selection has given rise to genes, cells, multicellular organisms and social groups, and how the properties of these units, be they transposons, cancer, egg‐laying hymenopteran workers or religious beliefs, have been shaped by multilevel selection. The book begins with overviews of multilevel selection theory (Reeve and Keller, and Leigh), and ends with a review of selection among cell and species lineages (Nunney). In between, we learn about current theory for the origin of life and cells (Szathmáry), sex and multicellularity (Michod), co‐operation among insects (Keller and Reeve) and culture in humans (Maynard Smith), and how in each case conflicts have almost miraculously given rise to new, integrated levels and forms of biological organization. We marvel at the running battles and uneasy alliances and truces between the genes in genomes (Pomiankowski), the two sexes (Lessells), parents and offspring (Godfray), vertebrates in social groups (Kitchen and Packer) and species in communities (Herre), each a consequence of genetic conflict and confluence of interest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".