Game Theory Analysis Shows How Evolution Favors Cooperation's Collapse

First time accepted submitter Ugmug (1495847) writes Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin published a mathematical explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Using the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner's Dilemma, they found that generous strategies were the only ones that could persist and succeed in a multi-player, iterated version of the game over the long term. But now they've come out with a somewhat less rosy view of evolution. With a new analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful. The work paints a dimmer but likely more realistic view of how cooperation and selfishness balance one another in nature."

Comments

The Selfish Gene

[MPAB]

This is explained in Dawkins' book. It's an evolutionary stable strategy.

Re:The Selfish Gene

[Anonymous Coward]

This is explained in Dawkins' book. It's an evolutionary stable strategy.

*Sigh* ... there is no such thing as evolution, creation is unchanging, the earth was created 6018 year ago this has been conclusively proven by analysis of scripture you insensitive clod.

Re:The Selfish Gene

[oodaloop]

Praying to God this is just a troll.

Re:The Selfish Gene

[stinerman]

I see what you did there.

Re: The Selfish Gene

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Dawkins book does not preclude other phenomena such as group selection. It's just that things like group selection have not yet been proven or the mechanism persuasively detailed.

However, the genetics surveyed in The Selfish Gene cannot explain things like human civilization, where the level of cooperation goes far beyond anything classical genetics would allow.

We still have much to learn.

Obvious

[BarbaraHudson]

Strategies that are too selfish "kill the host". Or invite retaliatory action. This is the same whether it's a virus like ebola or bad actors in society.

Re:Obvious

[fustakrakich]

Strategies that are too selfish "kill the host". Or invite retaliatory action.

This is why governments must adjust their austerity measures carefully, lest the resulting property damage outweighs the cost savings. Cost/benefit ratios are coldly calculated in all aspects of nature. Accretion vs. dispersal, too much of the first leads to spectacular displays of the second. Always have a camera rolling for such events, first rule of information retrieval.

Re:Obvious

[manu0601]

The problem with austerity measures is that government spending creates activity. Cutting public expenses cuts GDP, which means less tax revenue for the government. Situations where the tax loss is smaller than the cost saving are rares. Most of the time, austerity just kills the economy without any benefit.

Re:Obvious

[marvinglenn]

(Slashdot's Keynesian group think shows through strong in the moderation here.)

Situations where the tax loss is smaller than the cost saving are rares. Most of the time, austerity just kills the economy without any benefit.

I challenge your assersion of that claim.

Additionally I submit that government spending causes the players in the economy to act in a way that benefits them the most in receiving that government spending while supressing their drive to be purely efficient and productive. In the end, we end up with a bunch of players chasing the freebies from the government just because they're free rather than being productive and sustainable.

But you probably won't believe this until this spending kills the host, as the GGP post called it.

Re:Obvious

[manu0601]

Situations where the tax loss is smaller than the cost saving are rares. Most of the time, austerity just kills the economy without any benefit.

I challenge your assersion of that claim.

We have many example of failed austerity policy. What are the success stories?

Re:Obvious

[hawkfish]

(Slashdot's Keynesian group think shows through strong in the moderation here.)

Situations where the tax loss is smaller than the cost saving are rares. Most of the time, austerity just kills the economy without any benefit.

I challenge your assersion of that claim.

Additionally I submit that government spending causes the players in the economy to act in a way that benefits them the most in receiving that government spending while supressing their drive to be purely efficient and productive. In the end, we end up with a bunch of players chasing the freebies from the government just because they're free rather than being productive and sustainable.

But you probably won't believe this until this spending kills the host, as the GGP post called it.

I don't know about groupthink, unless you call empirical evidence "groupthink". Herbert Hoover's response to the great depression, Europe's current austerity programs, Japan's "lost decade", Kansas' economic explosion under Brownback: all of these are evidence - from multiple cultures, time periods and scales - that your theory doesn't work in real life.

Let me guess: Your response will be a variant of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy...

TIt-for-tat fallacy

[Baldrson]

The notion that "tit for tat" is relevant to evolution in the iterated prisoner's assumes that defection is detected -- an unrealistic assumption. The only reliable evolutionary system in which cooperation is sustainable is one in which the replicators (genetic and memetic) share a common fate aka vertical transmission. This is why the meiotic lottery works in multicellular sexual species and it is how symbiosis between species can evolve in ecologies where migration is restricted -- migration being the origin of the evolution of virulence via horizontal transmission. However, since restricting migration is not practical in much of nature, there is an "optimal virulence" in which a replicator tests the limits of its ability to, in essence, "take the money and run", and exploits to that limit.

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[hey!]

What's unrealistic is believing one strategy is always favored by evolution. Evolution tries everything, so you get all strategies tried.

The substantive argument here should be over this question: what is it that makes H. sapiens such a successful species? The vast majority of discourse on this, unfortunately, is tainted by ideological bias.

I think what makes us successful can't be boiled down to one strategy without being simplistic. The minimum number of strategies that's interesting, in my opinion, is two, because realistic strategies have to interact. Personally the two I'd go with would be cooperation and behavioral flexibility, noting especially that behavioral flexibility sometimes works *against* cooperation. People cooperate to build a successful village, but during a disaster having a few selfish bastards who grab what they can and run is good for the survival of the species. But just because a *little* bit of something is good, doesn't mean a *lot* of it is good. So much selfishness people can't cooperate efficiently is too much selfishness. So little selfishness that nobody saves themselves when they can't save anyone else is too much selflessness.

One more thing to chew on: nature doesn't owe you a justification for your behavior, and it's certainly not going to provide you a logically complete and non-contradictory ideology. It doesn't even give us that for arithmetic.

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[doug141]

what is it that makes H. sapiens such a successful species? .

Start with the book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[blue trane]

Of course not, the prisoner's dilemma is a crude model, and those who take it as gospel are mistaking the map for the territory, practicing bad science.

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[dryeo]

what is it that makes H. sapiens such a successful species?

Why assume that H. sapiens is a successful species? We haven't been around very long and it seems as likely we'll screw up our environment through overgrowth as not, especially with how good we've become at developing weapons and our tendency to use them.
Another million years and we can start to talk about us being a successful species, while right now we're just another species that appears to be outstripping the capability of its habitat to support it.

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[rtb61]

The error you make, is claiming that human societies have only just begun to over exploit the environment. Humans have a track record via disappeared societies of selfishly and greedily over exploiting their environments. There any many examples across the whole planet. The difference now is via an increasing percentage of psychopathically greedy and selfish humans, parasitically destroying the societies they are a part of, we have have the opportunity to do it upon a global scale.

Psychopaths will routinely defend psychopathy and there is no IQ limit on the lack of an autonomic empathic response or extreme shallowness of emotions, so psychopaths with doctorates will routinely distort and even fabricate their research to favour personal goals. In this case the continued ability of destructive and parasitic psychopaths to continue to hide amongst their victims and of course to defend their insane behaviour as somehow being normal and in their own insane minds being more evolved even though it more readily aligns with lizard like thinking rather than social mammalian responses.

Human societies evolve along with humans, it is not just the most successful humans but the most successfully human societies. The evolutionary measure of success of course does not measure our short term generational measure of success but will look at thousands even tens of thousands of generations. No matter how great short term success might look, it is still no measure of long term evolutionary success, as measured over hundreds of thousands of years.

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[khallow]

Baldrson, do you still have that decade-old cellular automata code you did studying this sort of behavior? As I dimly recall, two cells would be randomly chosen near one another (with "nearness" an adjustable parameter). They would first communicate (cooperate or defect) and then enable in a Prisoners' Dilemma exchange. There was also some sort of memory, but I don't recall how that worked. I believe there was also a steady, adjustable "rain" of the resource ("food"?) used in the exchange. As I further recall, it showed the power of migration in enabling defection behavior. A number of different strategies were explored such as the defector (who always communicates cooperation and always defects), the tit for tat, the always cooperating agent, and so on.

The results I saw indicated that the ability to migrate was a strong benefit to the more parasitic strategies. The problem was that successful defectors, for example, would eventually cull the local always cooperating population and fill the area with defectors and tit for tats. Meanwhile a region with a lot of tit for tats would eventually build up a population of always cooperators too. With migration, it enabled defectors to move to new, more exploitable populations in the simulation. The most extreme case where CAs could interact anywhere with other CAs led to a global suppression of any population which was susceptible to the defector strategy.

Similarly, the "rain" of "food" was important to the success of defectors. Lots of food was good to defectors, while very thin food supplies led to earlier death of susceptible populations and the resulting inability of defector populations to grow even in the absence of tit for tat CAs.

Re:TIt-for-tat fallacy

[Baldrson]

You are referring to the climatic memetic demographic prisoner's dilemma. The idea there was to try to have the most primitive form of "meme" imaginable: A speech act which could take one of two states "defect" or "cooperate", in the context of a population which may, or may not, repeat memes and which -- independent of repetition behavior -- may or may not comply with the meme it "hears". Tit for tat during iteration of the PD was simulated by allowing a variation in which the behavior (cooperate or defect) was based on what the organism had last experienced, as opposed to what the organism had last "heard". The "climate" was the degree to which the environment provided "food" to make up for loss of points in the PD score keeping.

The notion that one can _reliably_ "experience" defection _as_ defection is what I claim is an unrealistic assumption -- deception being such a central strategy in evolution -- hence tit for tat is a poor assumption.

Matters of Scale

[pubwvj]

This reinforces that scale matters. On the local family / pack basis communism (ultra cooperation) is the best solution. As you move outward in social groups the best evolutionary strategy shifts to socialism and at the most extreme end of the social structure capitalism becomes the best strategy. Neither liberals or conservatives will find this politically correct to their liking but it is real.

Re:Matters of Scale

[blue trane]

Capitalism has outlived its usefulness, time to move on. I suggest Libertarian socialism. Start with a basic guaranteed income for all who want it. Fund it with money creation. The private sector creates on the order of 10 times more money than government; there is plenty of room for government fiscal policy (funded by the Fed, say, at zero cost) to reward altruistic behavior.

Hamilton's rule: rB > C. If government makes the Cost negative, you get rewarded for altruism. Even if you are not related to the Beneficiary.

Re:Matters of Scale

[denzacar]

and at the most extreme end of the social structure capitalism

Capitalism is not a social system - it's an economic system. I.e. It is about making and trading THINGS.
You "win" by making and having more things faster.

Socialism and communism are social AND economic systems. Being SOCIAL they are primarily about benefits of PEOPLE AND/OR SOCIETIES.
You "win" by achieving a satisfied and happy society.

That's why it intuitively works for families and tribes - goals are common and simple.
And why it is a bitch to work in a larger society in which many smaller groups may have conflicting and complex goals.

Re:Matters of Scale

[dryeo]

Capitalism can be a social system, just think about how much more successful a capitalist can be by investing in politicians, laws and changing society to create more profits for the capitalist, often by removing any form of free market.
Ultimately the winners in capitalism are not by being better at making and having more things faster but by making the rules more favourable for the individual (or group) capitalist.
Also consider marketing, where it isn't being better at making things, but being better at selling things, often things that aren't even useful or worse, detrimental to society. Think of pushing opiates as an example.

Re:Matters of Scale

[timeOday]

Capitalism is not a social system - it's an economic system. I.e. It is about making and trading THINGS.

There is no sharp distinction. The very concept of "owning" things is simply the right to tell other people what they can and cannot do - don't take that thing away from here, don't walk on this plot of land, go make me a sandwich. Therefore Capitalism is essentially a system for determining who is in charge and gets to make decisions. To imagine this has no social implications is not correct.

Re:Matters of Scale

[Orgasmatron]

Who modded up this middle school crap?

Capitalism isn't about making or trading. It is about satisfying needs and wants. It is merely the distributed solution to that problem, while collectivism is the centralized "solution".

You may have noticed that solution was in quotes back there. That is because a centralized solution is not possible. First, there is no mechanism to accurately report wants and needs to a central authority. Second, there is no general solution for ranking or ordering those wants and needs. Third, the only way to enforce the central power's decisions is through violence, which around half of us reject.

The distributed solution, on the other hand, works pretty well, to whatever extent people want to implement it. The market is a tool for both finding and reporting on the relative worth and scarcity of things, which is to say, "the price". Also, the decisions are done at the local (individual) level, which is also the only place where a ranking of needs and wants is possible. Further, there is feedback. Those that do well at satisfying the needs and wants of others accumulate control over more resources. Those that do poorly lose their ability to mismanage things.

The reason that collectivism works in families and other tiny groups is because people can identify a small group as "us", and detect and punish cheaters through other social means. Somewhere around 50 to 75 people though, and the trust breaks down, hard.

Re:Matters of Scale

[ClickOnThis]

Capitalism is not a social system - it's an economic system. I.e. It is about making and trading THINGS.
You "win" by making and having more things faster.

And in capitalism, winning means you acquire more power. Which makes capitalism a social system as well.

Re:Matters of Scale

[Kjella]

Actually capitalism has a huge section on utility theory, it's the basis of all bartering and trade. You're a fisherman but you've only got a limited utility of fish for your own use, which is why you're willing to sell fish to buy bread and the baker is willing to sell bread to buy fish. If you got your typical price-quantity curve the utility is the whole area under the curve, which companies try to extract as much as possible of as profit. The difference is that capitalism's utility theory optimizes on the individual level, you spend your money in order to gain as much benefit as possible and society's utility is the sum of the individuals' utility.

Social theories optimize for the whole society and take into account externalities society has to bear the burden of like pollution, littering, congestion, crime and so on, even when it's to the disadvantage of some of the individuals. They fit in the same PQ chart though like this where the social optimum is offset relative to the micro-economic optimum. The issue is that often you end up with quite a lot of wealth redistribution because essential services to the poor have greater utility for society than luxuries for the rich, so while the total goes up it's clearly favorable for some and unfavorable for others.

Then you run into the classic arguments that people change behavior to game the system and in order to not create needy individuals living on welfare you need to reward those who produce value instead, which is countered by arguing that those on welfare need education and opportunities to become net contributors to society and so on. It's not really easy to understand society's dynamics, but as a static snapshot they're not really all that different. It just depends on what "costs" you take into consideration and what you optimize for.

Re:Justifying

[Anonymous Coward]

Rand

Rand's "philosophy" is so full of holes that only a sociopath
or someone with the mind of a child embraces Rand's ideas
wholesale. The sort of people who truly believe in the "fuck you,
I've got mine" position and who are also incapable of understanding that
society has a duty to help those who truly cannot fend for themselves
are the sort who embrace Rand.

Taxpayer's Dilemma

[retroworks]

If no one pays taxes, I live in a lousy infrastructure.

If everyone pays taxes, I live in a nice infrastructure, but had to pay taxes.

If I admit not paying taxes, no one else wants to pay taxes either.

If I make everyone believe in paying taxes, while I secretly do not pay taxes, I benefit from the infrastructure for free.

Dang. Didn't realize this was a Ph.D thesis material!

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[Kvathe]

Sucks relative to what? The infrastructure you truly deserve? It's not perfect but it's better than the nothing we would have without taxes.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[grcumb]

You are assuming a perfect world where taxes are used efficiently, whereas most western government have rather low bang-for-the-buck. At the end of the day, what really happen is more of the realm of "Everyone pays taxes, but infrastructures still sucks".

No, actually. Unless by 'sucks' you mean, works imperfectly, but still better than those parts of the world that did not benefit from my tax dollars.

I say this with the benefit of experience. I've traveled to dozens of countries, rich and poor, and those with solid tax bases have dependably better public infrastructure than those without.

The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[x0ra]

You are assuming taxes are used for infrastructures, whereas if taxes were used only for infrastructures only, taxes would be much lower. The day taxes were used to finance infrastructure are long gone. Taxes are merely a way for politicians to buy their re-election. You vote right, you get power, subsidiaries, regulatory control, either on the business side, or on the unions side. There isn't much difference. Taxes are merely mostly used to buy social peace, have people lives their lives in safe jobs, good retirements, etc. Progress, discoveries, not longer really matter. What matter is stability. Be a there for the daily cash milking, don't make waves. Even health insurance could be criticize as a way to buy back people's irresponsibility. You've been smoking all your life, and now, you cost hundreds of thousands in health care ? Don't worry, we're here to cover for your irresponsibility. You've been irresponsible to ski out of the tracks ? Don't worry, we're here to cover for your irresponsibility. There is no way the system is not gonna go a-wire, as the very existence of the system is pushing people to be more and more irresponsible because, hey, mommy-state is here to back us if we fuck up.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[x0ra]

Read my comment above.

If you can afford to maintain two active war for a decade, you can certainly afford better education for your children... or better infrastructures. Depends where your priorities are. I still maintain that the whole money sank in "defense" (which should really be called "offense") industries would probably have been of much better use locally, might it just be not to put the next few generations in debt.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[x0ra]

No, because it is implying that infrastructure can only be built by public entities. You can not pay taxes, but have decent infrastructures, and you can pay taxes, but still have lousy infrastructure, or no infrastructure at all. An excellent summary on taxes is actually pretty quick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[mabu]

>You are assuming a perfect world where taxes are used efficiently, whereas most western government have rather low bang-for-the-buck. At the end of the day, what really happen is more of the realm of "Everyone pays taxes, but infrastructures still sucks".

Are you on the Internet in America right now?

If so, then the government infrastructure is working quite well. Last time I checked, we had relatively clean water and air, reliable utilities, navigable waterways, weren't being invaded by some foreign army, and have roads from one end of the country to another.

This notion that government is largely errant and irresponsible doesn't jive with reality. The exception does not prove the rule.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[mabu]

How much in taxes do you think you paid last year? $1k? $5k? $50k?

How much of the Interstate that you use daily will that pay for?

Maybe 1/2 an inch of the interstate.

Whine to us all about how government is raping you...

while you enjoy electricity, navigable waterways, the internet, safe food, police protection, fire protection, libraries, schools, parks, national forests, etc.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[x0ra]

Last time I checked, you had no need to be invaded by a foreign army to suffer from unwarranted search and no-knock entry at the force of a stun grenade. Your own government do that for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs9LNAI0nBc

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[omfgnosis]

The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.

This is a more than just a little overstated and misleading (and I am taking the assumption that you are talking about tax policy allowing such; if you're talking about illegal tax dodging, you're off your nut). US infrastructure is in the state it is because of a confluence of gross mismanagement (often intentional); incredibly effective self-destructive propaganda; and a culture of punitiveness, resentment and retaliation; at least as much as it's caused by budget shortfalls. And the whole thing is a dog chasing its own tail, constantly producing reinforcing incentives.

As much as I wish there were budget for the infrastructure and services we actually accept as a society, throwing more money into it will only preserve the services and infrastructure that are functioning and uncontroversial. Which is a terrifyingly small subset, and doesn't even speak to services and infrastructure we have so far rejected.

I'd love to be proven wrong by some miraculous arrival of leadership we don't deserve (or making better of some inevitable disaster, but I couldn't even finish writing that with a straight face), but I'd go so far as to say that the US and all its factors and conditions are basically unmanageable, with nowhere left to go but decline.

Re:Taxpayer's Dilemma

[roman_mir]

Wrong completely, but understandably. You look at the effect and believe it ti be the cause. A wealthy society grows cancer that is government, which steals the wealth, calls it 'taxes', creates a number of monopolies that are government propped and protected, which makes it look like infrastructure only can happen because of taxes.

The reality is that it was the wealthy economy that built the infrastructure, except the government destroyed competition and private initiative, making the infrastructure inefficient.

Poor economies cannot afford as much wasteful building as wealthy economies build due to theft called 'taxes'.

The result is that you are looking at inefficient glitter of a wealthy economy, that is overburdened with theft that is taxes and think that the economy is wealthy from the theft that is taxes. The reality is the opposite from what you believe.

I think it works until it doesn't

[EmperorOfCanada]

Basically cooperation is the best strategy as long as there is also a built in punishment system for the selfish. For instance if a disease wipes out too many hosts then it will fail to spread very quickly. If it wipes them all out then it won't spread anymore.

But evolution often will sacrifice to deal with the selfish. So our immune systems are sitting here primed and ready to have a go against all kinds of invaders; our immune systems are fantastically costly. But in a pristine system evolution might eliminate our immune system and then we would be wiped out by the first disease to come along.

The same with having the police. Police are expensive but we keep them around to deal with those who won't cooperate in ways that we find so egregious that we make laws.

But just as we have seen with our bankers there are those diseases that will subvert our punishment systems to not only ignore them but to actively abuse the us. AIDS would be an example of this (and yes I am saying bankers are as bad as AIDS).

So I would think that if you look carefully I think that what you will find is that what evolution will do is to evolve systems that punish the non-cooperative(bad diseases), reward the cooperative (things like digestive bacteria) and then continue living just fine.

Even within animals that group together there are often many systems for punishing animals that don't play by the rules.

But there is one huge problem with evolution from the standpoint of the individual. It might take a 95% die off for evolution to develop a way to fight off a disease, or the disease might end up being just deadly enough to continuously hurt individuals while not killing enough to drive evolution.

But this is where we might have just jumped some kind of hurdle. We demolished smallpox, we have polio on the ropes, malaria might have a bullet heading its way, and other diseases are lined up in the crosshairs. But taking out diseases to the point of extinction takes global cooperation. In Pakistan they recently killed 4 polio workers which will now probably dissuade polio workers from going back into that area and I suspect that if they were there then polio was there as well.

The key is that when gaming any relationship like evolution there are a huge number of rows and columns to work with. But quite simply we have way too many animals that cooperate in pretty magical ways for it not to be a key evolution friendly solution.

Academic Beclowining

[PopeRatzo]

Just so you know, most of the people doing the work applying Game Theory to Sociology are just jacking off.

Seriously. These are the people who found Psychology too rigorous and got thrown out of the Economics departments for making shit up.

Here, check this shit out. Look especially at the last sentences:

“It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense,” said Plotkin, a professor in Penn’s Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences, who coauthored the study with Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab. “We had a nice picture of how evolution can promote cooperation even amongst self-interested agents and indeed it sometimes can, but, when we allow mutations that change the nature of the game, there is a runaway evolutionary process, and suddenly defection becomes the more robust outcome.”

In other words, "Cooperation works in social systems until I change the rules to get the outcome I want. Vote Rand Paul 2016."

Seriously, Dr Plotkin, do U even Science, bro?

Re:Academic Beclowining

[Anonymous Coward]

This is mainly because people forget that the person who 'invented' game theory ended up being committed to an institution due to actually being a psychopath.

Neither John von Neumann nor Oskar Morgenstern was ever institutionalized. They are the two people credited with "inventing" game theory. You may be thinking of the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind, John Nash. Nash was a prominent early theorist in non-cooperative games. The Nash equilibrium is named after him. Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic, not a psychopath.

Testing game theory through experimentation is much newer. Most of the early work was done purely on a theoretical basis and founded in pure logic. I.e. it didn't try to explain why people did things; it tried to determine how a perfectly logical person should react.

Re:Academic Beclowining

[AthanasiusKircher]

Just so you know, most of the people doing the work applying Game Theory to Sociology are just jacking off.

Yeah, unfortunately... as Master Yoda might say, "Tilting at windmills you are."

The larger context here isn't sociology, it's "evolution." Note that I put that in quotation marks for a reason -- there's a whole network of yahoos out there who spend time thinking up "just so" stories for their pet explanations of some evolved trait. They call it "evolutionary biology" or "evolutionary psychology" or "evolutionary sociology," but a lot of the practitioners do the same crap.

-------------------

Typical day at the office:

"Scientist" X sits at his desk, bored: "Oh, woe is I! I am an evolutionary biologist, but I have too little funding to do any real experiments in my lab. What shall I do?!"

"Scientist" Y, turning suddenly: "Lo, but we can 'do evolution research' without funding. Let us consider a question, like 'How did music evolve in humans and why?' That is a good question."

"Scientist" X: "Yes! Yes! Yes! That is a great question! And since other primates don't really have musical culture in the same way, our 'findings' don't even need to be based on cross-species trends! We can just make up a story, a 'thought experiment,' just like the great Einstein!"

"Scientist" Y: "Suppose one day a mother early hominid descended from her tree and went to gather food. Her infant baby hominid might be sad. Perhaps the mother would sing to let the infant know she was still there!"

"Scientist" X: "Indeed. How I can see them now, in my 'thought experiment'! 'Tis a fantastic tale. Tell it to me again, please!"

"Scientist" Y: "But shan't we publish it now? After all, our 'experiment' has proven the way music could have evolved!"

"Scientist" X: "By golly, you're right. I'm already typing it up. Let's make up a few more stories like that, and publish it as a book on the 'origins of music', and we'll call it 'evolutionary musicology'!"

"Scientist" Y: "Huzzah! Huzzah! We have 'done research'! Our book will sell!"

And, lo -- the book did sell, and others did join this movement. Thence to all the corners of the Earth went the good news of the true story of music's evolution....

-----------

You think I'm joking. The book is out there. There are plenty of random made-up stories about stuff like this, that are supposedly to "explain" how things evolved. Even if the guys you're criticizing here are as bad as you say -- I haven't looked at their research in detail -- they got nothin' on a lot of stuff evolutionary biology people tend to do these days.

(P.S. This post should NOT in any way be construed as attacking the general theory of evolution, which I do not mean to criticize in any way. I'm just criticizing all the awful crap that has begun to accumulate around the field as lots of folks jump on the "Let's plan the 'how could that have evolved' game!" bandwagon.)

Researchers analyse the Prisoner's Dilemma?

[lippydude]

"a new analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful."

Only if there is an unlimited number of new prisoners to dupe, and there is no communication between the two groups. Besides which, all Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates is that in a distorted environment such as a prision, it pays to assume the other prisoners are potentially hostile. In Prisoner's Dilemma the prisoner isn't playing the other prisoner, he's playing the prison guards. If there 'researchers' actually had any experience of a real life working environment, they might have realized this.

Misleading Title

[PJ6]

They set up the experiment to cause cooperation to fail. They tried for that particular result, and got it.

It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense

"Intuitive sense" sounds awfully wishy-washy considering they just pulled the models out of their asses.

Title should read "Game Theory Analysis Shows How Evolution Can Favor Cooperation's Collapse".

Should be prefixed with: CLAIM!

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting idea, but logic dictates that if you try and make the game more favourable for cooperative styles of play, Game theory is utterly destroyed.

To propose a paper where you only test 1 change is cause for concern, in the long run. Game theory is flawed at the onset - only Psychopaths and Accountants answer the question the way the original author intended.

Thus I propose this: studies which are front page on /. which promote selfishism and neglect to tweak the experiment in the opposite direction should be prefixed with "Claim: ".

Thoughts?

Re:Justifying

[x0ra]

Hartzler v. City of San Jose and DeShaney v. Winnebago are not enough for you ?

Re:Justifying

[x0ra]

There is also Warren v. District of Columbia and Castle Rock v. Gonzales, though, not directly quoted in the post.

A study in confirmation bias...

[denzacar]

The entire article could be summed up as "How our confirmation bias made us change the rules until the results confirmed our bias."

In a second analysis, they allowed the payoffs to vary outside the order set by the Prisoner's Dilemma. Instead of unilateral defection winning the greatest reward, for example, it could be that mutual cooperation reaped the greatest payoff, the situation described by a game known as Stag Hunt. Or, mutual defection could generate the lowest possible reward, as described by the game theory model known as the Snowdrift or Hawk-Dove game.

What they found was that, again, there was an initial collapse in cooperative strategies. But, as the population continued to play and evolve, players also altered the payoffs so that they were playing a different game, either Snowdrift or Stag Hunt.

"So we see complicated dynamics when we allow the full range of payoffs to evolve," Plotkin said. "One of the interesting results is that the Prisoner's Dilemma game itself is unstable and is replaced by other games. It is as if evolution would like to avoid the dilemma altogether."

"See? When I change the rules of poker to be like blackjack, the game evolves into a game of blackjack on its own! Fascinating! It is as if evolution would like to avoid the poker altogether."

Where's that "-1 Obtuse" moderation?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I pay for electricity" -- if you live in a rural part of the US, you are able to buy electricity because the government coerced money from consumers and Forced At The Point Of A Gun electric companies to run universal service.

"The police don't protect me, they merely sort out the mess after it happened" -- and the notion that police can identify and apprehend the perpetrator has no deterrent effect whatsoever, eh?

"firemen mostly clean-up the mess" -- you have got to be trolling here.

"I don't have kids, so I shouldn't pay for schools" -- I suppose that's true, if you want to live in a society that's mostly illiterate and ignorant.

"I don't go to libraries" -- I see nothing in your post to make me disbelieve you.

I feel like the old rejoinder "if you don't like government, move to Somalia" is just trite, but holy fuck, you sound like you think Somalia is an ideological paradise. Or Afghanistan. At least there, they've got Top People working to make sure that half the population doesn't get schooling...

Re:Justifying

[x0ra]

Given the recent (post WWII) stance taken by Governments to ERODE "unalienable rights", I doubt you statement has much weight...

Re:Where's that

[nbauman]

I don't need police if I can carry a weapon to defend myself. And yeah, the firemen argument was dishonest from my part. Where can I sign up to carry a gun, not pay the police, not pay for schools, not pay for libraries (I actually buy my books, don't rent them), but pay for firemen ?

Try Iraq, where we destroyed the dictator, his army and police.

You can set up your own gated home behind big walls.

But then the local tribal leader is going to come over with a dozen or a hundred of his followers who can outgun you, and do whatever they want with you.

Re:Justifying

[Sique]

The argument against Ayn Rand's philosophy is Douglas Adams' story of the people from Golgafrincham as told in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Class A people try to get rid of all those people that make their life miserable(*) by insisting on rules and procedures and regulations, and to keep only the serfs and drones just like John Galt who withdraws to his island in an attempt to throw out all those pesky socialists out of his life.

The consequence Douglas Adams points out is that an incomplete society based solely on the egoisms of its members will die out from the next triviality -- in his case the infected telephone.

(*) For Class A values of "miserable"

Re:Justifying

[dunkelfalke]

Simply because true absolutely rational self interest automatically leads to cooperation and socialism which Rand herself vehemently hated. Simply because it is way cheaper and safer live in a society where nobody is left behind and has to resort to violence or spreads diseases around because doctors are too expensive to visit. It also leads to a lot of taxes to pay for the infrastructure that benefits everyone - also a concept that Rand abhorred.
And finally it also leads to non-smokers because smoking is irrational, while Rand... well, you get the idea.

Ultimately, all her "philosophy" is a collection of fairy tales for money nobility wannabes.

Re:Justifying

[TheCarp]

I see what you are saying; and on a simplistic level sure it makes sense to consider but, that is a pretty radical proposition, especially when you would essentially be asking the aristocrats to implement it and enforce it.

It means you are asking everyone to put their complete trust in the system as it will exist. Frankly, I don't see a system I would ever have that level of trust in. It sounds like you just want to be slave to the most powerful and generous master.

Re:Justifying

[blue9steel]

inheritance should be abolished

Registered Libertarian and I agree completely. Much of the philosophy assumes a level playing field to start, inheritance breaks many of the principles espoused.

Re:Justifying

[blue9steel]

It's both really. The problem is that there is a high switching cost so the contract has to get pretty messed up before we're willing to scrap it and start over. In the mean time you have a situation where the contract is only partially voluntary and partially imposed. It's shades of grey not black and white.