http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy-Weinberg

The other thing to keep in mind is that evolution works as a movement through nucleotide space over a fitness landscape. The fundamental flaw in much of Dawkins work is his reliance on a biologically unrealistic definition of a "gene". Sure, if you go with his definition of genes then logic can tell you all sorts of things about evolution that aren't necessarily true.

Slavery is a more recent example of this, if you are aggressive you will be killed, but keep your head down at the chance exists to reproduce. And most people alive today have some slaves/peasants ancestors.

Today we end up with some suicides, but that's rare enough it might not outweigh the benefit when that feedback loop stays on track so you avoid jail etc.

> An aggressive alpha male can kill you

What advantage does an "agressive alpha" have over you? Any human can kill any other human very easily. Rock to the head, game over. We're not talking about walruses.

Social power structures of any complexity are a post-agricultural development, and therefore of limited importance to human genes. The social structure in a hunter-gather band of 20 is simple and flat.

Now, there is also good reason to believe that the evolutionary adaptation that pole-vaulted early humans ahead of the other apes was a change in their social structure. However, even if that is true, you also have to remember that humans have spent a much larger portion of their evolutionary lineage as great apes than as modern (or nearly-modern) humans. That is, even if early humans had distinct social structures from their ape cousins, we are bound to have many remnants of the ape social structure left in our genomes.

In other words, depression doesn't necessarily have to have been an adaptation of early humans, it could just as easily have been an adaptation of early primates that humans just haven't had time to get rid of yet!

> the ape social structure left in our genomes

The apes and the gibbons vary dramatically so it seems a bit silly to expect useful common denominator social behaviors applicable to humans. Bonobos and gorillas and orangutans are all very different. And none of the apes are at all comparable to humans in how they make their living. None of them are primarily team hunters.

Looking modern males at the average American high school, biker gang, or hunting party and you will notice social stratification. Humans don't do the Alpha with harem, but young men often fight for levels of dominance. In scripted environments they might fight over academic prowess but simple fist fighting is not that uncommon. And when males fight you get into some basic game theory as to how much energy to expend and damage to risk.

If the systems that cause depression where useful thought human history then removing the possibility of depression may have had serious costs.

PS: Just because the human brain works extremely well does not mean it's elegant.

Edit: Modern hunter gathers have just as much history as we do. Extrapolating how humans lived 500,000 years ago from what we have seen modern bands do is a mistake.

> Looking modern males at the average American high school, biker gang, or hunting party

Well, I say you watch too many B movies. Struggling for social dominance in a hunting party? Really? Nobody fought for "dominance" at any social institution I've been involved with. However, people do all kinds of weird things, much like zoo animals, when caged in unnatural environments like public schools, housing projects, corporate cube farms, and prisons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution granted Homo sapiens are younger than that.

Nobody fought for "dominance" at any social institution I've been involved with. I recall doing this on several occasions in unscripted environments. I don't know if you are male, or if you spent much time unsupervised with groups of 8 - 20 other young men, but it's seemed really common.

This might also be more obvious to those who win these games. And there are edge cases. I recall having 12 people watching me play video games and when my mother asked me to share I offered and got a “we just want to watch” response. This seemed more like a completion to find the best followed by watching the master situation. But it was still odd and even though the observer never saw the dominance play it still happened and if I was less talented we would have kept sharing for longer.

I also recall being a member of a crowd watching the master at an arcade even if nobody watches game play videos. It's also customary to have the person who wins keep the table in pool or fighting games. This is normally less obvious than simply beatings ones chest, but watch how people walk around a body builder some time.

Also, I do not think you could kill me with a rock, unless I were sleeping and you were dropping it from excessive height.

I could kill you with a coffee mug or a bic pen if you were unarmed. In the unlikely event you're unusually strong and alert I'd get my brother to help. Power in a band of humans has way more to do with how many relatives you happen to have than any silly conception of "alpha".

This sums up the old debate: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html

(As a non-biologist, even I know the stature of Maynard Smith, Mayr etc.)

Is there some new development with support for e.g. species-selection, etc?

As another non biologist, I understand that Gould's main contribution was punctuated equilibrium. he thought that the primary driver in evolutionary change was rare and relatively quick changes across a population - the external environment would change, or a new advantageous trait would develop which would transmit rapidly. It also clashes with attempts to determine more gradual models of genetic propagation throughout populations.

As I have asked people to do before,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

I'd love to hear from people who disagree with [insert name of controversial figure here] just why they disagree with that person, not just their party label for that person. It is perfectly possible for a person who has wrong ideas to have other, correct ideas.

Agreed. But here we have an author that researchers in two fields argue are intellectually dishonest in his public writing.

Only experts in the field (or maybe amateurs which read the discussion carefully) can have an opinion.

So do you really want to use your time by reading books about subject X which you know might be have 5-50 percent slanted content to agree with e.g. the Mormon church?

It is not just that you get real information, it is that some of the information you get will be twisted...

Edit: And since it is relevant to your comment, note that someone voted me down but lacked counter arguments... :-)

Marxist... Lewontin, Steven Rose Kamin et al can hardly be described as liberal or right wing... :-)

Can you mention three non-leftwing well known biologists in that camp? One?

The fun part about Gould is the criticism from intelligence researchers. They more or less accuse Gould of misrepresenting the contents of their field -- very similar to how Gould is described by evolutionary biologists...

Edit: I might also add that there were lots of discussion about how new "punctuated equilibrium" really where.

Edit II: First post by a user 460 days old? I am honored! :-)

That, and I thought that the best place I could find on the internet to defend Gould would be in the middle of a thread full of amateur evolutionary psychologists making up stories about why depression came into being. :-)

re your edit II: There was some stuff about this on Pharyngula recently that put it on my mind, and plus the combination of screeching flamewar and biological debate in this makes it pretty interesting reading.

As I wrote, the easiest way to understand is to note that the heavy people of both evolutionary biology and intelligence research agree on Gould's intellectual dishonesty.

(Almost all positive reviews on Gould's book on intelligence came from the extreme left or from non-psychologists.)

The top levels of the intelligence researchers and the evolutionary biologists were incompetent idiots and/or in a conspiracy? (More or less what the creationists argue about evolutionary biologists, by the way!)

It is just not believable.

> when there was real scientific disagreement at stake

It was mainly Gould's public writing that was criticized, not the research.

Note that my previous comments were downvoted by someone that obviously disagrees, but lacks arguments... True believers are sad.