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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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]

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

[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.

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.)

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".

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

[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.