Posted on 06/29/2006 4:40:30 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
Whether you’re a free-loading virus or a meat-stealing monkey, selfishness pays. So how could cooperators survive in a cheater’s world? Thomas Flatt, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown, was part of a group that created a theoretical model that neatly solves this dilemma, which has stumped evolutionary biologists and social scientists for decades. The trick: Keep the altruists in small groups, away from the swindling horde, where they multiply and migrate.
It’s a truth borne out in biology and economics: Selfishness pays. Viruses can steal enzymes to reproduce. Tax evaders can take advantage of public services to survive and thrive. And, according to game theory, the cheats win out over the altruists every time.
Yet cooperation is a hallmark of human society, allowing for the creation of everything from the local grange to the United Nations. Cooperation can also be found in the animal world. Lions hunt in packs. Ants and bees create colonies. So how could cooperation evolve in a cheater’s world?
It’s a paradox called the “tragedy of the commons,” a conflict between individual interests and the common good that has stumped scientists for generations. Now a trio of researchers, including a Brown University biologist, has created a unique theoretical model that can explain the rise of cooperation. Under their model, altruists not only survive, they thrive and maintain their numbers over time. The work appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
“What’s exciting about our approach is that is so simple and so general – in principle it can be applied to explain cooperation at all levels of biological complexity, from bugs to humans,” said Thomas Flatt, a postdoctoral research associate in Brown’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “It’s also exciting because cooperation is a critical notion in so many disciplines, from biology to sociology. Yet its existence and persistence doesn’t always make sense. Now we have a new mechanism that explains when cooperation can work.”
Timothy Killingback, a mathematician at the College of William & Mary, led work on the model. It’s based on public goods games, a staple of game theory and a simple model of social dilemmas.
Under the typical public goods game, an experimenter gives four players a pot of money. Each player can invest all or some of the money into a common pool. The experimenter then collects money thrown into the pool, doubles it and divides it amongst the players. The outcome: If every player invests all the money, every player wins big. If every player cheats by investing a just few dollars, every player reaps a small dividend. But if a cooperator squares off against a cheater – with the altruist investing more than the swindler – the swindler always gets the bigger payoff. Cheating, in short, is a winning survival strategy.
Under the new model, the team introduced population dynamics into the public goods game.
Players were broken into groups and played with other members of their group. Each player then reproduced in proportion to the payoff they received from playing the game, passing their cooperator or cheater strategy on to their offspring. After reproduction, random mutations occurred, changing how much an individual invests. Finally, players randomly dispersed to other groups, bringing their investment strategies with them. The result was an ever-changing cast of characters creating groups of various sizes.
After running the model through 100,000 generations, the results were striking. Cooperators not only survived, they thrived and maintained their numbers over time. The key is group size.
“In our model, you can get groups of different sizes – and cooperators seem to flourish in smaller groups,” Flatt said.
“In these smaller groups, the high investments of cooperators begin to pay off. Cooperators have a higher level of fitness, so they reproduce at higher rates. This allows them to get a toehold within a group, then dominate it, then send their offspring to spread their altruism elsewhere.”
The model created by Killingback, Flatt, and Jonas Bieri, a Swiss population biologist and computer programmer, is unlike any other. It relies solely on population dynamics to explain the evolution of cooperation. Most other models assume more complicated mechanisms such as kin selection, punishment and reciprocity. Some of those mechanisms require cognition, so those models can only be applied to humans and higher-order animals.
The paper is available online or may be downloaded in pdf from the June 22, 2006, issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: BiologicalSciences.
The Swiss National Science Foundation and the Roche Research Foundation funded the work.
Yup! I would have made it too, had I not skimmed the article first.
In Before Toilet Paper? Right stuff for this stuff.
Here is one little article...
http://www.grange.org/history.htm
And one more article...
http://www.wa-grange.org/grange_different_fraternity.htm
Nice...I had not seen that before...
This model might have some bearing on reality if "altruism" ("cooperation") were a heritable trait. Alternatively, if there were some other mechanism that assured a high probablity of offspring of "cooperators" also being "cooperators" themselves, this might just make sense.
I don't know what kind of traits might be involved, so I'll speculate. One, a greater tendency for group bonding, and two, a lowered tendency for hair-trigger aggression. That might do it. But I'm just guessing.
What is this Freakonomics? First I see the reference to it on a baby name thread, now this¿
I'm sure if that factor was thrown in it would shift even more toward the cooperators.
But it's neat to see these results showing with the fewer criteria used.
bump
Thanks for the ping!
Its a book, written by an economist on some oddball kind of studies. One study said that people who cheat get ahead at work.
Another one claimed that abortion for the last 30 years lead to the drop in crime, for which Bill Bennett was attacked when he repeated it on his radio show.
It's a microwave-type oven using gamma rays to heat food. Originally, it was pronounced "G-range," but over the years it was simply shortened to "grange." Because of the inherent dangers, such devices were kept in separate buildings, or "grange halls."
</asshole dad mode>
A little clarification is in order. My father used to come up with stories like this to mess with his kids' heads. For instance, he had me believing The Wizard of Oz went from black and white to color after the first 16 minutes because the crew ran out of black and white film.
I basically do the same thing to my kids nowadays (the infamous "beach leach" comes to mind).
"They have no intellect."
Oh crap, let's hope that isn't a key evolutionary factor for the survival of the Democrat.
I am confused. Is the United Nations an example of people working cooperatively together for the common good or of a bunch of a parasites whose sole goal in life (other than picking up a taxpayer funded paycheck) is to prevent the fruits of liberty and capitalism from being spread throughout the world.
Below is a common model of cooperation brought into question its ends and means.
Proclaiming to save persons and society from running headlong to destruction politicians and bureaucrats create about 3,000 new laws and regulations each year. State government create their own barrage of laws and regs each year.
Yet, how is it that for more than a hundred years, without the "benefit" of the next year's new laws and the laws in subsequent years that persons and society increasingly prospered? How do we increasingly prosper to day with out the "benefit" of new laws and regulations yet to come next year, five years and fifteen years from now?
Also, with the increasing mountain of laws virtually every person breaks the law several times a year. How is it that with all that lawlessness that persons and society have not run headlong over the cliff-edge to destruction? Not to mention that if it were physically possible to apprehend every lawbreaker -- including judges, lawyers, police, prosecutors, bus drivers, grocery clerks etc. -- next week, society would come to a screeching halt -- driving it over the cliff-edge.
Capitalism and the workers that fuel it are the host. Politicians and bureaucrats are parasites living off the host. They leech just enough to gain unearned paychecks, prestige and power. Sure to not so encumber/drain the host where it reduces its production of goods and services beyond that which would leave the parasites to perish. For the parasitical elites cannot produce much needed, life sustaining necessities.
Politics is not the solution. Politics is the problem.
Calling it bizarre would be an understatement. It's lethal. It's the anti-civilization.
Rational and honest principle is strength -- an asset. Irrational and dishonest principle is weakness - a liability.
[“In our model, you can get groups of different sizes – and cooperators seem to flourish in smaller groups,” Flatt said]
If their claim is true that this property is applicable to human sociology, then this might explain why a communal or "communist" philosophy works fine when it's limited to a handful of people (like family groups) but fails when the numbers increase to more than a few dozen.
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