26/11 and 'Beyond revenge'

26/11 has happened and I still write about  Science and Psychology.

It has been a week of introspection in which I have been questioning myself and whether by doing science blogging I am doing my bit as a responsible human being. Perhaps I will move on. But while I'm at science blogging let me discuss the topic about which the science blogosphere has been relatively silent.

Today, I have started reading Michal McCullough's "Beyond Revenge" and I want to discuss ideas from it. The decision to read the book at this juncture stems from the immense feelings of outrage that have been seething within and paradoxically without any overt war-mongering desires or ill-will towards the state that continue to let its soil be used for terrorist activities. Of course forgiving the citizens of that state was never an issue for the ordinary citizens do not foment violence and wars- it is the state or the alleged 'non-state' actors that are the real culprits; but I strangely feel a desire to forgive even them and give them a  second chance. But I cannot just forgive and forget. at least not this time. This time the world has to change to create the conditions whereby forgiveness is the norm and revenge an exception.

But let me not digress. Let me go straight to reviewing "Byond Revenge" . I have just read the introduction and the first chapter so let me share with you Mculloughs main thesis.

As per him there are three angle or truths to the revenge story:

• Truth #1: The Desire for Revenge Is a Built-In Feature of Human Nature
  
• Truth #2: The Capacity for Forgiveness Is a Built-In Feature of Human Nature
  
• Truth #3: To Make the World a More Forgiving, Less Vengeful Place, Don’t Try to Change Human Nature: Change the World!
  

I've decided to the last, viz change the world, but perhaps not in exactly the same way that Michale may have intended. Let me elaborate what Michael means by the three truths:

The desire for revenge isn ’ t a disease to which certain unfortunate people fall prey. Instead, it’s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it was adaptive in the ancestral environment in which the human species evolved .

I believe it is important to pause here and think over whether the perpetrators of 26/11 were themselves pathological or just normal ordinary people subjected to un-normal propaganda and state help to turn into monsters.

Its also important to acknowledge our own feelings of anger and outrage as vengeful feelings towards those who indulge in such heinous crimes; but it is heartening to note that Indians have largely turned their anger into constructive channels - towards lapses in security and towards insensitivity and callousness of politicians. It is heartening to note that the anger and revenge has not been mistakenly directed towards the citizens of a state or towards a community. I salute my fellow Indians for what they have done with their feeilngs of outrage and revenge.

Next truth Micahel elaborates as follows:

The capacity for forgiveness, like the desire for revenge, is also an intrinsic feature of human nature — crafted by natural selection — that exists today because it was adaptive in the ancestral environment in which the human species developed .

Forgiveness as per him is normally activated with friends and family; but India has always thought 'vasyudhev kutumbkam' or the 'whole world is my family'. India perhaps has been an epitome of forgiveness and perhaps will rightly remain so. I'm not just talking about India as a nation-state, I am talking about India as a civilization which has a unique honor of never committing aggression or getting involved in a war unprovoked. India has absorbed all erstwhile aggressors in its fold and today everyone lives as one community- one nation- one family. No heinous acts of aggression and terror make Indians turn towards each other. The need for that forgiveness instinct to continue is perhaps the greatest today. And believe me when I say that the common Indian citizen, still has no hard feelings towards the state who's soil is being used to foment terror on its territory.

The next truth he talks about is:

To forgive a stranger or a sworn enemy, we have to activate the same mental mechanisms that natural selection developed within the human mind to help us forgive our loved ones, friends, and close associates. To encourage more forgiveness in our communities, and on the world stage, we must create the social conditions that will activate those mechanisms .

This is what he means by changing the world. Creating conditions such that even enemies/ strangers seem like friends. Its heartening to note that partly as a result of state initiative, but largely due to initiative of non-state actors in India, like the media, we have been successful in creating a 'world' in which the ordinary citizen of Pakistan is not seen as an enemy. TV programs like 'the great Indian laughter challenge' on Star One have been able to make the ordinary Indian realize that there is much more in common that he shares with the Pakistan citizen than just a sub-continent. These non-state actors of my country, be it the film and music industry or NGOs have been working to foster stronger ties and the results are for all to see. For the first time, I do not hear war cries towards Pakistan , just a desire to eliminate the terror camps operating on foreign soil perhaps by very targeted and specific strikes. Is that asking too much? Is ensuring one's safety and taking preventive measure condemnable and will still be viewed as punitive and vindictive action by western and Pakistani media. Only time will tell whether the non-state actors in west and Pakistan have been creating their 'world' as per what template.

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Primate Evoloution: stage I: prosimians and predation

In my last post  I hinted at how primate evolution may be an example of eight stage evolutionary process in action and today I'll try to support my first prediction that the prosimian stage evolution was dominated by predatory concerns.

Prosimian evolution and branching within the primate order took place 55 million years ago or a bit earlier, near the beginning of the Eocene Epoch. These first primates , it is safe to assume were nocturnal just like today's prosimians like lemurs, bushbabies, tarsiers etc are. Why they were nocturnal remains a question to be answered. Species turn nocturnal usually to avoid predation by day predators. Crypsis  is the mechanism that even today is used by prosimians to avoid predation.

It is instructive to note here that though predation in primates has not been considered a big force, in pro-simians it is important. A whole book Primate anti-predator strategies  has been written which focuses more on pro-simian anti-predator strategies than on other primates. It is testament to the fact that predation was/ remains important for prosimian evolution. Here I quote from the preface of the book:

The impact of predation on the morphology, behavior, and ecology of animals has long been recognized by the primatologist community (Altmann, 1956; Burtt, 1981; Curio, 1976; Hamilton, 1971; Kruuk, 1972). Recent thorough reviews of adaptations of birds and mammals to predation have emphasized the complex role that predation threat has played in modifying proximate behaviors such as habitat choice to avoid predator detection, degree and type of vigilance, and group size and defense, as well as ultimate factors including the evolution of warning systems, coloration, and locomotor patterns (Thompson et al., 1980; Sih, 1987; Lima & Dill, 1990; Curio, 1993; Caro, 2005).

We have conducted research on nocturnal primates for more than ten years. Immersed as we have been in the literature of nocturnal primatology we recognize a spectrum of diversity amongst the nocturnal primates in their social organization, cognitive behavior, and ecology (Charles-Dominique, 1978; Bearder, 1999; M¨uller and Thalmann, 2000). Our studies on tarsiers and lorises showed that these species were highly social and that resource distribution was not sufficient to explain why they defied the supposed “stricture” of being solitary (Gursky, 2005a; Nekaris, 2006). Furthermore, our animals defied another supposed “rule” — namely, that all nocturnal primates should avoid predators by crypsis (Charles-Dominique, 1977). Even recent reviews of primate social organization and predation theory included one-sentence write-offs, excluding nocturnal primates from discussions of primate social evolution on the basis that crypsis is their only mechanism of predator avoidance (Kappeler, 1997; Stanford, 2002).

An analysis of the mammalian literature shows this type of generalization to be crude at best. Small mammals are known to have extraordinarily high rates of predation, and a plethora of studies of rodents, insectivores, and lagomorphs, among others, have shown that predation is a viable and powerful ecological force (Lima & Dill, 1990; Caro, 2005). Furthermore, although researchers have long considered it critical to include prosimian studies in a general theoretical framework concerning the evolution of the order Primates (Charles-Dominique & Martin, 1970; Cartmill, 1972; Oxnard et al., 1990), a pervading view contends that prosimians are too far removed from humans for the former’s behavior to shed any light on the patterns of behavior seen in anthropoids (Kappeler & van Schaik, 2002; Stanford, 2002).

However, an excellent review by Goodman et al. demonstrates the dramatic effect predation can have on lemurs, and it remains the most highly quoted resource on lemur predation, despite that it was published in 1993. Studies of referential signaling aid in dispelling the view that prosimians are primitive and not worthy of comparison with monkeys and apes (Oda, 1998; Fichtel & Kappeler, 2002). A handful of studies further reveal that prosimians are not always cryptic and may engage in social displays toward predators (Sauther, 1989; Sch¨ulke, 2001; Bearder et al., 2002; Gursky, 2005b).

Leaving for the time-being the fact that prosimains too engage in social behavior as a defense against predation, and sticking to the traditional view that crypsis best defines their defense mechanism, the thing to be noted is the relative abundance of predatory strategies on prosimian evolution. A whole book has been written keeping that in mind!!

So my thesis is that for the very first stage of evolution when a leap was made, prosimains got left behind, still struggling with predation; while the common ancestor of new world and old world primates somehow solved/ reduced the problem of predation and became diurnal and maybe started living in large social groups and thus exhibiting social defenses against predators. This evolutionary successful completion of the first developmental/ evolutionary task of avoiding predators, then enabled these ancient primates to focus their energies on finding food and thus from insectivores become fruit-eating and move towards a rich diet and focus on acquisition of resources. but that takes us to stage II marked by focus on food and the new world monkeys. More on that later!

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Guest Post: Matters of the Monkey Mind

I was recently contacted by a reader of this blog, who wanted to do a guest post on The Mouse Trap, and I thought why not! Guest posts allow those who might not have their own blog to start getting familiar with the Media and for those who already have their blogs, an exposure to a new audience. As long as science blogging wins I don't mind publishing posts on my blog, which are not authored by me, though I'll typically like to restrict the Mouse Trap to my own musings. So if you want to do a guest post on the Mouse Trap, you are welcome, but the theme has to fit in with the overall theme of the mouse trap.

Without much ado, I'll now publish the first guest post on Mouse Trap. Do send me in your feedback, as to whether it is worth doing guest posts here , and whether you liked this one.

What follows is a guest post by Sarah Scrafford.

The human mind is extremely complicated – we can never say for certain why people act the way they do. Some of us are even confused about our own actions, and there are times when we don’t know why we did certain things and other times when we regret the things we do the moment they’re done. And there are times when the mind is like a monkey, jumping randomly from one thought to another till you don’t know where one begins and the other ends. While some people emphasize the importance of a steady mind that’s able to focus, there are times when monkey minds are ok and even desirable, and that’s when:

• Emotions rule: When you’re upset and tend to think with your heart rather than your head, you’re bound to do something stupid if you’re not careful. But when your mind jumps from one thought to another with not much time to dwell on one emotion alone, it’s kind of therapeutic and prevents you from acting blindly upon your emotions.
• You need to forget: In my book, the greatest ability of the human mind is the one to forget – hurts, disappointments and failures. Without this ability, we would all be nervous wrecks without an ounce of positivity in our blood. Love affairs gone sour, the death of a loved one, or a humiliation that we’d rather not think about – these are all things that we want to leave behind in our past as we move into the future. When the mind is capable of moving rapidly from one emotion to another, one thought to another, it’s easy enough to forget these negative things.
• You’re bored and need mental stimulation: An active mind allows you to live out fantasies, in your imagination, of course. So if you’re bored and need to entertain yourself but are stuck without a laptop, phone or even a book, daydreaming is the next best thing to do. Thinking of positive make-believe scenarios has an uplifting effect on your mood, and you feel good about yourself.
• You need to multitask: Not many people are able to multitask efficiently without any major mistakes being made. And the ones that do are the ones who are able to change thought processes very quickly or even run thought processes that are parallel. Being able to control your thoughts, even though there are a large number jostling for attention in your mind, is a good thing when you’re trying to handle more than one job at the same time. Of course, efficiency increases with the mundane nature of the jobs, but some people are able to process both simple and complicated tasks simultaneously.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of Radiology Technician Training. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

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Get Enchanted with the Enecpehalon # 59

Ionian Enchantment has published the 59th edition  of the brain carnival Encephalon and it contains some of the best blogging from the usual suspects.

I found the new technique of cooling a brain region to slow the neural activity (spike rate I believe) and thus to deduce as to which particular brain region in songbirds is associated with Rhythm very fascinating. Girrlscientists at Living the Scientific Life does a great job of describing the study.  Greg at Neuroanthropology discuses the work of Andy Clark with reference to massive modularity and innate/learned controversy and concludes that a middle-of-the-road neuroconstructivist approach is the best.

Other cool stuff includes new findings that some cognitive auditory abilities may be enhanced in late Huntington disorder and a writeup of the hallucinatory states induced by Ganzfiled procedure.  There is more cool stuff, so go and have a look!

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Primate evolutionary tree: a case of eight stage evolution leading to humans?

I have been looking at primate evolution and taxonomic tress for quite some time and am aware that different scholars parse the same tree in different ways, specifically people try to avoid being anthropocentric. I , on the other hand , will focus exclusively on the primate tree as it relates to humans and try to to show that it might be a living proof of the eight stage theory of evolution/ development.

First let me show you a popular way of portraying the primate tree from Philadelphia Inquirer's Going Ape website.

Now, let me show you an alternative classification (just slightly different from this, but based on cladistics) . It is hard to see the figure (I've lost the original full -kleght versions), but the idea is that the first level branching happens at the level of suborder, then infraorder, then family etc within the order of primates.

Here is a similar diagram from the The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond.

It is instructive to note that here barnching within primate tree is as follows:

1. Suborder branching: Prosimians: I hypothesize that prosimian evolution be driven by first adaptive problem that of hiding from / avoiding predators. (lemurs etc)
   
2. Infraorder branching: Platyrrhine (flatnosed) or New World Monkeys: I hypothesize that these would be most adventurous of all and would be focussed on finding food and resources, having mastered the predation problem. Maybe the main factor here would be their range size etc. This family is as opposed to Catarrhine (down-nosed) or Old World primate to which humans belong.
3. Superfamily branching: Cercopithecoidea: Old World Monkeys. Lets say we focus on old world monkeys here. The hypothesis is that they would be specialized for forming alliances and territorial hierarchical behaviors. This superfmaily is as opposed to hominoidea superfamily.
4. Family branching: Hylobatidae or Gibbons: the hypothesis is that Gibbon evolution may be driven by parental investment conflicts. this family is as opposed to Hominidae to which humans belong.
5.  Subfamily branching: Ponginae or Orangutans :  Orangutan evolution may be driven by kin selection concerns.
6. Tribe branching: Panini or gorillas: Gorilla evolution may be driven by theory of mind considerations. Maybe the driving force behind gorilla evolution is reading others mind and we would find good evidence for the same in gorillas. 
7. Species branching: pan of chimpanzees and bonobos and humans: may be driven by communication or language concerns. Of course language or communication in Humans is phenomenal; but may be of equal importance for the other two also.
8.   This species may be a branching of humans later on along sexual selection lines or assortative mating considerations along the lines of Elois and Morlocks.

I am not a primatologists and the above appears too simplistic and fishy to me; but is there evidence for any of the  hypothesis presented above; if so do let me know! Meanwhile I will be on the lookout for any confirmatory evidence!!

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Intentionality: autism research and implications for schizophrenia

Edouard Machery at the Experiments in Philosophy blog writes about a study he conducted with Zalla that found that people with Aspergers syndrome were deficient when it came to identifying purely instrumental desires and the actions resulting from them as intentional actions.  but to understand all that we have to understand the concept of purely instrumental desire. This is best done with the free-cup and extra-dollar cases that Machery has constructed to illustrate this phenomenon:

The Free-Cup Case

Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, ‘I don't care about a commemorative cup, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?

The Extra-Dollar Case

Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that the Mega-Sized Smoothies were now one dollar more than they used to be. Joe replied, ‘I don't care if I have to pay one dollar more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie and paid one dollar more for it. Did Joe intentionally pay one dollar more?

You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. So do most people.

Machery likes to analyze the different actions involved in getting a smoothie in terms of their causal structure as well as their valence for the subject (positive valence means actively desired; while negatively or neutrally valanced meaning that one would not like that action to take place normally, but might indulge in if it is instrumental and an intermediate step towards archiving of an ultimate desire.

Thus, in the extra dollar case  quenching thirst is the ultimate desire, buying a smoothie an instrumental desire, while shelling an extra dollar though negatively valued is still a purely instrumental desire as it is requisite for fulfilling the ultimate desire. Thus, normal people would consider paying the extra-dollar as intentional as it was due to an action due to a (purely) instrumental desire.

In the free-cup case, again the ultimate desire is to quench the thirst, the instrumental desire is to buy a smoothie, and the free cup that one gets is neither desired ultimately or as (purely) instrumentally as a menas towards an end. In simple words it is not desired at all and I would like to name it as co-incidental desire as opposed to instrumental desire (because having a special edition cup may still have some valence for joe, though he doesn't actively desire it. Normal as well as Aspergers people deemed getting the free cup as non-intentional.

Where the Aspergics differed was in the extra dollar case. They still thought that paying the extra dollar was non-intentional and Eduoard theorizes that this may be due to inability of those with ASD to consider acts which are merely means towards an end  as having an intentional quality.

I might not agree with the specific theorizing of Machery, but I agree that people with ASD have deficits in intentionality and I have been shouting this from rooftops for quite some time now. I also assert that Schizophrenics have too much concept of intentionality. I would not be surprised if a schizotypal, schizophrenic population was given these above two scenarios and it was found that a co-incidental desire like getting a free-cup was also deemed to be an intentional actions. One could come up with strange rationalizations and explanations and believe that though he just wanted to quench his thirst he went to this vendor only because he also wanted a free cup.  This would be an extreme case of Magical Thinking, but I wont be surprised to see schizophrenics attributing more intentionality than is done by normal people.  I hope someone does the experiment and lets me know! Edouard are you listening?



EDOUARD MACHERY (2008). The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Philosophical and Experimental Issues Mind & Language, 23 (2), 165-189 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00336.x

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Badcock on Edge: the imprinted gene theory of ASD/ PSD

This edition of Edge features an article by Christopher Badcock, about the imprinted gene theory of Autism Spectrum disorders and the psychotic spectrum disorders that he has been developing with Crespi.  It is a must read and has been very nicely done.

He goes on to list the differences between autism and psychosis in a tabular form and then extends this to list the differences between mentalistic and mechansitic cognitions.

Autism/Asperger's syndrome	Psychosis/Paranoid schizophrenia
gaze-monitoring deficits	delusions of being watched/spied on
apparent deafness/insensitivity to voices	hallucination of and hyper-sensitivity to voices
deficits in interpreting others' intentions	erotomania/delusions of persecution
deficits in appreciating shared-attention/groups	delusions of conspiracy
theory of mind deficits	magical ideation/delusions of reference
deficit in sense of personal agency/episodic memory	megalomania/delusions of grandeur
literalness/inability to deceive	delusional self-deception
pathological single-mindedness	pathological ambivalence
early onset	late onset

Mentalistic Cognition	Mechanistic Cognition
psychological interaction with self and others	physical interaction with nature and objects
uses social, psychological, and political skills	uses mechanical, spatial, and engineering skills
deficits in autism, augmented in women	accentuated in autism, augmented in men
voluntaristic, subjective, particularistic	deterministic, objective, universal
abstract, general, ambivalent	concrete, specific, single-minded
verbal, metaphoric, conformist	visual, literal, eccentric
top-down, holistic, centrally-coherent	bottom-up, reductionistic, field-independent
epitomized in literature, politics, and religion	epitomized in science, engineering, and technology
‘pseudo-science': astrology, alchemy, creationism	‘hard science': astronomy, chemistry, Darwinism
nurtured: culturally- and personally-determined	natural: factually- and genetically-determined
belief-based therapies: placebos, faith-healing, psychotherapy etc.	physical effect-based therapies: drugs, surgery, physiotherapy, etc.

He lists down some of the other arguments that I have made viz the fact that Valproic acid exposure in childhood/ pregnancy causes Autism, while valproic acid is used for treating psychosis. Overall it is a very interesting read and a must read.

He also tries to address the mCDD (or simultaneous occurence of Autism and Schizophrenia) in his article, though I find that part the least convincing. Here is what he has to say:

The model appears to rule out anyone suffering from an ASD and a PSD simultaneously, and such co-morbidity does appear to be rare—but is not unknown. However, I know of cases of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder who also show unmistakable signs of ASD during their non-manic phases. Indeed, I have research on one individual who suffers from severe gaze-aversion, autistic deficits in a sense of self and social anxiety most of the time, but who becomes comfortable with other people during manic episodes when his sense of self hypertrophies into megalomania with the feeling that he is the returned Jesus Christ! Furthermore, there is evidence of both ASD and PSD in Newton and Beethoven, and incontrovertibly so in the Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash. Here the theory predicts that the ASD must come first (typically in childhood) and leave a permanent savant-like basis later built on by hyper-mentalistic tendencies to produce an unusually broadened and dynamically-balanced cognitive configuration: that of true genius.

I find this fascinating and agree with Badcock that the theory leads to many predictions and all these are testable; so we are witnessing a new paradigmatic shift in our understanding of these neurodevelopmental disorders and further experiments would definitely lend more credence to this theory in my view.

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The eight major evolutionary transitions

Regular readers of this blog can vouch for my fascination with the eight stage  theories and would no doubt be sympathetic when I report my exhilaration of finding that none other than Maynard Smith himself has proposed that there are eight major evolutionary transitions till date in the evolution of life. Maynard Smith and  Szathmary in their book The Major Transitions in Evolution had proposed for the following eight transitions :

More details are available at this wikipedia page . now I , independent of any knowledge that this has already been proposed by Maynard Smith as back as in 1995, a few days ago had come up with similar eight transitions in evolution of life forms . Of course there are some differences, but the important thing to note is the similarities(great minds think alike) and of course my model is far more accurate and realistic than Maynard smiths who I believe leap from multi-cellular organisms to humans quite arbitrarily leaving all the phylum in between un addressed.

I'll now briefly note the similarities and also highlight the dissimilarities in our approaches:

The first three stages are identical (first description of Maynard Smith stage and that is followed by my description in a few days ago post) :

1. Transition from Replicating molecules to "Populations" of molecules in compartments
1. Co-Evolution of genes and proteins/ amino-acids

2. Transition from Independent replicators (probably RNA) to Chromosomes
2. Evolution of the chromosome or two strands of DNA

3. Transitions from RNA as both genes and enzymes to DNA as genes; proteins as enzymes (Prokaryotes)
3. Evolution of a simple unicellular prokaryotic-bacteria-like cells

In the fourth stage I differ a bit from Maynard Smith, in that I propose for an intermediate archea type life-feom evolution while they jump straight to prokaroyotes)
4. Trasition from Prokaryotes to Eaukaryotes
4. Evolution of simple unicellular Archea-like cells

In the fifth stage they stress the importance of sex. I stress the importance of organalles, mitochondria and nucleus (specialized cell structures) instead.
5.Transition from Asexual clones to Sexual populations
5.Evolution of simple uni-cellular Eukaryotic like cells

In the sixth stage they move directly to multi-cellular organisms while I introduce intermediate colonies. I believe their fifth stage sexual populations are a substitute for my colonies (both map to protists)
6. Transition from Protists to Multicellular organisms — animals, plants, fungi
6.Evolution of simple colonies of cells (first animal phylum: the porifera or sponges)

In the seventh stage they make a leap and go directly to full-fledged solitary individuals (animals, plants fungi) while I take a more conservative approach and introduce multi-cellular organisms now from colonies.
7. Transition from Solitary individuals to Colonies with non-reproductive castes
7. Evolution of multi-cellular organisms with digestive tracts (second animal phyla coelenterate)

In the eighth and final stage they leap from primates to humans while I stay with multi-cellular organisms but introduce a CNS for the first time.
8.Transition from Primate societies to Human societies with language, enabling memes
8. Evolution of multi-cellular organisms moving towards a CNS( bilaterality) (third animal phyla :Ctenophora (Comb Jellies)):

I believe that after multi-cellular organisms they have made big leaps (which may be justified in some contexts), but I have worked more on micro level and believe that we can gain much more by studying the intermediate phyla too. The important thing to note is the common evolutionary and taxonomic approach and the guiding principles as outlined below for each transition:

Maynard Smith and Szathmary identified several properties common to the transitions:

1. Smaller entities have often come about together to form larger entities. e.g. Chromosomes, eukaryotes, sex multicellular colonies.
   
2. Smaller entities often become differentiated as part of a larger entity. e.g. DNA & protein, organelles, anisogamy, tissues, castes
   
3. The smaller entities are often unable to replicate in the absence of the larger entity. e.g. Organelles, tissues, castes
   
4. The smaller entities can sometimes disrupt the development of the larger entity e.g. Meiotic drive (selfish non-Mendelian genes), parthenogenesis, cancers, coup d’état
   
5. New ways of transmitting information have arisen.e.g. DNA-protein, cell heredity, epigenesis, universal grammar.
   

Hat Tip: Shared Symbolic Storage blog

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