Value Competition

Neuroscience and Ideology--Sources

Jost, Amodio, and Phelps on ideology and psychology;

Blank on the policy implications of neuroscience;

Lieberman review essay on neuroscience and political cognition;

Cunningham faculty profile--reference to 2005 paper

Reductionism and Reverse Reductionism

A reductionist sociobiological project of explaining sociology and psychology in terms of biology lacks appeal to social scientists concerned with their own discipines.  By contrast, a reverse-reductionist value competition project of explaining pyschology in terms of democracy in the form of competition within the brain has potential to gain support from political scientists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists.

Sociobiological Modelers

I've been reading/dipping in Evolution: the First Four Billion Years, a collection of essays and encyclopedia entries edited by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis.  What follows is a partial list with notes on major figures in the field who seemed from their brief bios to combine sociobiology/evolutionary psych or work relevant to it with optimality modeling of some kind; omitted are people like E.O. Wilson, Dawkins, Hamilton, and Trivers whom I've already got some kind of line on:

 1.  Richard Alexander--Darwin and Human Affairs (1979); The Biology of Moral Systems (1987); UMIch emeritus--morality as indirect reciprocity; level and type of tech unclear from bio;

2.  Luigi Cavalli-Sforza--Cultural Transmission and Evolution (1981); The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Population in Europe (1984); Stanford emeritus--in addition to the distribution of genes work I associate him with, C-S has modelled cultural transmission; level and type of tech unclear;

3.  John Gillespie--The Causes of Molecular Evolution (1991)--uses mathematical models to contend that variable environments strongly affect molecular evolution, thus countering "neutral theory"; no direct connection to social behavior; high tech;

4.  Motoo Kimura--The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution (1983)--the flip side and predecessor of Gillespie; uses math to advance neutral theory, i.e., the idea that most DNA changes are random rather than adaptive; high tech;

5. George Williams--Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966)--criticism of group selection, progress, increased complexity claims--level and type of tech unclear.

A Master Theory of Human Nature?

There won't be one.  Why not evolution/evolutionary psychology?  It's the best for explaining how we came to be what we are as a species, but its reliance on natural selection, nicely as it works for biology, jibes poorly with the normative analysis of human culture and individual choice.   Why not economics?  It's the best for modeling the alignment of incentives, but its reliance on rationality, nicely as it works for some major aspects of human behavior, jibes poorly with a normative analysis of human nature.  Furthermore, economicswill not explain how we arose as a species in the way that evolution can.  Finally, why not a future science of value competition with tentacles in all of the social sciences?   It could be the best at modeling and describing irrationality and rationality together, but it will not do as well as economics does in explaining economic markets nor as well as evolution does in explaining how we came to be the creatures that we are. 

Evol-Econ

Is a value competition model of optimal and suboptimal individual incentives closer to evolutionary psychology or to economics?  It's closer to economics in that economics is comfortable with models in which competitive markets lead to optimal and suboptimal incentives.  By contrast, evolutionary theory, good as it is in modeling situations in which the incentives of the part are misaligned with the interests of the whole, seems to me lacking in an analytical analogue to Smith's invisib le hand and its successors.  On the other hand, value competition is closer to evolutionary psychology in that that field lacks the commitment to consistent, well-ordered preferences that characteries economics.