E. O. Wilson, Winston Churchill, and Sewall Wright('s shifting balance theory)

Today I Learned:
1) The famous scientist E. O. Wilson has recently been publically championing group selection as an explanation for the evolution of eusocial animals (bees, ants, naked mole rats, etc). This has been pretty massively unpopular among evolutionary biologists, and is particularly odd because in the 70s, Wilson argued strongly that kin selection was a much better theory than group selection. He has also argued that group selection is responsible at least in part for humanity's success, and that we may be in a transitionary stage on the way to eusociality.

For my part, I think this is romantic nonsense that seems to stem from a conflation of group selection and altruistic, moralistic thinking. Then again, I'm arguing against one of the greatest minds in mondern biology here, so do not take my word for it. Here's an interview with Wilson that involves the topic: http://ift.tt/1KwSnoD

2) Winston Churchill was born ten years after the end of the US civil war, and died in the same year as Malcom X. That's a heck of a lot of change to live through.

Among other things, he was the head of the British admiralty at the time when the British admiralty was a) most of British military power and b) the overwhelmingly most powerful navy in the world; he was kicked out of that post, joined the front lines in WWI, and helped spearhead the invention and deployment of the first tanks; and went on to be the Prime Minister of Brittain during WWII, after warning the world about the dangers of Nazi Germany for a decade.

3) "Shifting balance theory" is an evolutionary theory proposed in the 1930s by Sewall Wright. It proposes that evolution can happen more readily when subpopulations are mostly isolated from each other. Basically the theory says that small, isolated populations can more easily drift between locally optimum evolutionary fitness peaks, and if they find one that's higher than their neighbors, that trait will eventually filter to the other populations and quickly take over.

So far, there is little empirical evidence to support shifting balance theory.