Selection beyond the organism

The strategy of looking for broken symmetry and order parameters [1] might be extended to consideration of layered complexity, i.e. when layers of complexity are built on one another, with a focus specifically on "in/out" symmetries associated with gradients or boundaries (like inside and outside the atmosphere of a planet, or inside and outside the closed bilayer membrane of a biological cell). It seems that this approach is not yet well recognized by biologists.

One result is that in multi-celled animal communities which treat one's offspring differently from other offspring of the same species, a real physical "gene-pool lifeform" finds itself undergoing natural selection on a level above that of skin-bound organisms. In human communities which treat one's culture differently from other cultures, real physical "idea-pool lifeforms" also find themselves undergoing natural selection, along with the natural selection processes already underway for organisms and gene-pools.

Although biologists may not yet describe gene-pools and idea-pools as physical lifeforms, their analysis is moving in that direction. Beyond Richard Dawkins' "selfish-gene" language (which confusingly suggests that building blocks have motivation), David Sloan Wilson at SUNY Binghamton has done a great deal of creative investigation on the key role of group selection in human as well as multi-celled animal communities. A close look at the (now classic) 2010 paper [2] on eusocial animal communities by Martin Nowak et al suggests, in fact, that these communities may be modeled (to first order) as evolving on a single-level as pure gene-pool lifeforms i.e. with individual organisms serving as moving parts.

For example, a male grizzly that kills the offspring of a prospective mate has a symbiotic relationship with a gene-pool lifeform that does not look to serving other families of the same species. Similarly, there are folks today who have an unexpectedly strong symbiotic relationship with an idea-pool lifeform that does not look to serving other human cultures. Does that ring any bells? After all, as illustrated at left, getting attention is how ideas replicate!

In human communities, the order parameter that we've been promoting for a while [3-5] is a kind of activity-layer multiplicity, where we consider just six layers of subsystem correlation-buffering i.e. those that look in and out from the boundaries of skin, family, & culture. One might frame these activities e.g. as fitness/wellness, friends/mentors, relatives/family, community/politics, traditions/culture, and profession/science.

Human individuals are unlikely to excel in buffering subsystem-correlations in all six layers, which of course is why institutions are important to help us keep all layers intact. We have shown that random layer assignments (after all we probably don't want everyone to be good at everything even if it was a choice) lead to a (geometric) mean activity-layer multiplicity of e^(29/20) ~ 4¼ out of 6. This is something that we probably can manage, if we get our act together.