Go. See. Puke.

I know I never shut up about it, but that’s because it’s an important point. Collectivism is based on the false, unproven idea of ‘group selection’. That animals work for the good of their social group or their species, instead of just themselves. There are, however, two situations where you can end up with what looks like a collective:

1) When all the animals in the group are closely related to each other. In this case, what’s good for the group is the same thing as what’s good for you. Because everyone in the group is related to you, by helping them, you’re helping what amounts to a part of yourself. Still not group selection.

2) When an individual needs a group for selfish reasons. Now this is a bit more confusing, but I’ll use one of my infamous hypothetical monkey examples (people who know me in person are running now). So imagine you’re a big strong male monkey. You’d be alpha male if you were in a troop without a problem. What’s going to limit how many babies you have? The number of females in the group. The more females in a group, the more you can impregnate at any one time, the more who will have babies during a given period with you as alpha, etc. In other words, if by your own action you can keep a larger group cohesive, you’ll make a lot more babies. Now, because you’re putting a lot of effort into the maintenance of the group, it can certainly look like you’re doing things for the good of the group. But of course nothing could be further from the truth. You’re doing it for yourself. So you can make babies.

Group selection has never been proven, never been shown to exist. I doubt it ever will. Group selection is prone to all sorts of problems including cheaters, defectors, exploiters, and lazy bastards. Actually the last two aren’t technical terms, they’re terms I use when I talk the politics of the Left and why it will never really work. They’ve been obsessed with group selection, ‘progressivism’, and all those other funny little terms that talk about ‘group consciousness’, or people ‘pulling together’. Unnatural, the lot of it. Many biologists over the years have taken this leftist interest in ‘the collective’ and attempted to search for it in biology, probably most famous among them Teilhard de Chardin. And of course almost every leftist political theorist from Karl Marx onward has attempted to look to nature to justify his belief in people working together ‘for the good of the species’.

This article represents egregious egregiousness on the part of both journalist and study author. An attempt to allow their political ideology to influence their science. In this way it is no different from the transgressions of the Intelligent Design, and indeed the methods both use aren’t too different from the other group.

This next part was probably just a misunderstanding on the part of the journalist:

Writing in the journal Nature today, the team reports that studies of lab-grown yeast populations suggest the benefits of cheating are eventually counterbalanced by the costs. This contradicts classic evolutionary theory, which states that in a competition for common resources the long-term winner will always be the individual acting selfishly rather than the one working as part of a group.

Actually many individuals act in a selfish manner while participating in the maintenance of a group.  If they didn’t, that would mean us sociobiologists have wasted the past 40 or so years.  Which would kinda piss me off.  No, evolutionary theory states that those organisms acting in a self interested manner will leave behind more offspring than those who act solely ‘for the good of the group’ (who will eventually eliminate themselves).  Selfish animals form groups, selfish animals help maintain groups, selfish animals help increase the prosperity of groups.  But they do it because it benefits them to do so.

Now on to study design:

In one corner were the ‘cooperators’, which produce energy efficiently by taking in sugar slowly and fully converting into energy all that they ingest. This method maximises resources available to the group by avoiding any waste.

Against them were the ‘cheaters’, which produce energy rapidly by quickly taking in all the sugar they can and only partially converting it into energy. While this ensures swift energy production for the individual, it is a wasteful method that reduces resources available for the group as a whole.

Before I get any farther I’m going to predict that ‘cooperators’ do better than ‘cheaters’.  And that they’re going to use this as evidence that ‘group selection’ or working for the good of the group or altruism or whatever they want to call it is valid.  They can go screw themselves.

To pre-empt them, I’m going to attempt to discuss the real differences between ‘cooperators’ and ‘cheaters’.  These are single-celled organisms, not exactly the most complex of social creatures.  And as the researchers mention the only thing that was different was how these guys metabolize resources.  The ‘cooperators’ do it nice and slow with a minimum of waste.  The ‘cheaters’ do it pretty dang fast.  Now the difference between these two has nothing to do with group behavior, but the efficiency and amount of waste.    ‘Cooperators’ are more efficient, turning more of the substrate into energy, and producing less waste.  They grow slower, but can grow for a longer period of time.  ‘Cheaters’ can grow faster initially because they metabolize things a lot faster.  But because they are a lot more wasteful, they end up freeing less total energy.  In addition, metabolic waste products are usually poisonous for most organisms.  So ‘cheaters’ are poisoning themselves.

Notice that there was nothing in the above that had anything to do with group living?  It’s simply two alternate feeding strategies, stable slow growth vs. exponential growth followed by a plateau.  What does that have to do with cooperation or cheating?  Nothing.  Bastards.

And he’s about to trot out his little political point:

“This evidence that a cooperative group can resist invasion by exploitative cheats is unexpected and gives us greater insight into how cooperation evolves. This is important because we live in a world in which cooperations exists at every level, from genes working together to build functioning individuals to individuals forming societies.”

The researchers suggest that the ideal organism type would be one that can switch between selfish and efficient metabolism. Dr MacLean adds:

“While microbes are obviously not capable of rational thought, they can change their behaviour rapidly in response to simple environmental cues. The possibility that one type could become both a cheater and a cooperator depending on what’s needed at the time is intriguing. We hope examining social conflict at the level of individual cells will shed more light on this.”

I’m dumbfounded Mr. Teilhard de Chardin, jr.  Dumbfounded.  You’ve tried to define ‘cheater’ as self-interested and ‘cooperator’ as group selectionist, and then tried to prove your point with an irrelevant experiment.  You, sir, I just don’t even know what to say.