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EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

20120206-Malta Venus_of_Malta 2.jpg Evolutionary psychology is a field that was founded in the late 1980s out of the remains of sociobiology. It asset, wrote Sharon Begley in Newsweek magazine “that behaviors that conferred a fitness advantage during the era when modern humans were evolving are he result of hundreds of genetically based cognitive “moduled” preprograms in the brain. Since they are genetic, those modules and the behaviors they encode are heritable — passed down to future generations — and, together constitute a universal human nature that described how humans think, feel and act, from the nightclubs of Manhattan to the farms of the Amish, from the huts of New Guinea aborigines to the madrassas of Karachi."

It is hard to call evolutionary psychology a science since much of it based on logical guesses on what happened in the past with reasoning applied to what is happening day. But I guess it does have some value by offering insights into intriguing questions that can not be studied any other way. Evolutionary psychology is largely used to investigate things like the cognitive processes behind sex and violence — things are difficult to study using conventional means. See Early Man Sex.

Are Humans Naturally Good or Bad?

Scientists have come up with ways to study intuition and calculated analysis as part of a more ambitious goal of determining whether humans are naturally good or bad. Scientists such as Jonathan Haidt of New York University have shown that to moral judgments are often arrived at by how how we feel rather than how we think and that affective parts of our brains generate quick, intuitive, moral decisions while the more cognitive parts are a step behind, requiring anywhere from milliseconds to years to arrive at logical rationales for our gut intuitions. [Source: Robert M. Sapolsky, Los Angeles Times, January 06, 2013. Sapolsky is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University and the author of "A Primate's Memoir," and other books. ^=^]

Robert M. Sapolsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Are people, by nature, kind or rotten? This question has kept philosophers, theologians, social scientists and writers busy for millenniums. A vote for our basic rottenness comes from scholars such as Steven Pinker of Harvard, who has documented how it is the regulating forces of society, rather than human nature, that have brought a decline in human violence over the centuries. A vote for our basic decency comes, surprisingly, from work by primatologists such as Frans de Waal of Emory University, who have observed that other primates display the basics of altruism, reciprocity, empathy and a sense of justice. Those virtues have a long legacy that precedes humans. ^=^

“It's obviously hard to answer the question of what primordial humans were like, since we can't go back in time and study them. But another way of getting at this issue is to study people who must act in a primordial manner, having to make instant gut decisions. Do we tend to become more or less noble than usual when we must act on rapid intuition? Light is shed on this in a recent study by David Rand and colleagues at Harvard, published in the prestigious journal Science, and the research is tragically relevant. The authors recruited volunteers to play one of those economic games in which individuals in a group are each given some hypothetical money; each person must decide whether to be cooperative and benefit the entire group, or to act selfishly and receive greater individual gain. A key part of the experiment was that the scientists altered how much time subjects had to decide whether to cooperate. And that made a difference. When people had to make a rapid decision based on their gut, levels of cooperation rose; give them time to reflect on the wisdom of their actions, and the opposite occurred. ^=^

“Testing a new set of volunteers, the authors also manipulated how much respect subjects had for intuitive decision-making. Just before participating in the economics game, people had to either write a paragraph about a time that it had paid off to make a decision based on intuition rather than reflection, or a paragraph about a time when reflection turned out to be the best way to go. Bias people toward valuing quick, intuitive decision-making, and they acted more for the common good in the subsequent game. In contrast, bias people in the reflective direction, and "looking out for No. 1" comes more to the forefront — something the authors termed "calculated greed." Naturally, not everyone behaved identically in response to these experimental manipulations. Where might differences come from? The authors asked participants a simple question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how much can you trust people whom you interact with in your daily life? And the more trusting subjects were, the more quick, intuitive thinking pushed them in the direction of cooperation. If you view the world as a benevolent place, your rapid-fire, reflexive response in a situation is more likely to spread that benevolence further. ^=^

“Neuroscience has generated a trendy new subfield called "neuroeconomics," which examines how the brain makes economic decisions. The field's punch line is that we are not remotely the gleaming, logical machines of rationality that most economists proclaim; instead, we make decisions amid the swirl of our best and worst emotions. Neuroeconomics, in turn, has spawned the sub-subfield of "the neuroscience of moral judgment." Scientists such as Jonathan Haidt of New York University have shown that we frequently feel rather than think our way to moral judgments; in general, the more affective parts of our brains generate quick, intuitive, moral decisions ("I can't tell you why, but that is wrong, wrong, wrong"), while the more cognitive parts play catch-up milliseconds to years later to come up with logical rationales for our gut intuitions. Thus, it is obviously important to understand what leads intuitive decisions in the direction of acting for the common good. ^=^

“Every parent can tell you that sharing and cooperating are definitely acquired traits for children. Now, kids don't learn to act for the common good through moral reasoning — 5-year-olds don't think, "My goodness, if I act with self-interest at this juncture, it will decrease the likelihood of future reciprocal altruism, thereby depressing levels of social capital in my community." Kids don't learn to care for the well-being of others by thinking — brain development isn't quite there yet. They do so by feeling — imagine how that person feels, imagine how you would feel if that were done to you. ” ^=^

Grandparent Wisdom Helped Modern Humans Flourish

As modern humans evolved and lived longer lives, older family members passed on knowledge and skills to the young. Based on studies of Hadza hunter and gatherer tribe of Tanzania, anthropologists suggest that role played by grandparents was especially important. Robin McKie, wrote in The Guardian: “Thirty thousand years ago, the human species had a senior moment. Numbers of adults reaching the age of 30 began to rise dramatically. Very soon after, there was a significant increase in artistic expression, food production and the creation of complex tools and weapons. According to anthropologist Professor Rachel Caspari of Central Michigan University, there is a connection. The surge in numbers of elderly humans triggered a cultural explosion that established our species as masters of the planet. |[Source: Robin McKie, The Guardian, July 24, 2011]

“Senior citizens were the secret of our success, she argues in the current issue of Scientific American. "Living to an older age had profound effects on the population sizes, social interactions and genetics of early modern human groups and may explain why they were more successful than other archaic humans, such as the Neanderthals," says Caspari. The idea that elderly humans played an important role in human evolution is part of a new appraisal of their role in the success of Homo sapiens. Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah, after studying the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, has proposed that grandmothers must have played an important role in the ascent of Homo sapiens. "Good foraging grannies mean healthy Hadza kids – and that was also true for our ancestors," she said. |=|

“Hawkes argues that when our apeman ancestors were evolving in Africa, females normally died at child-bearing age. Then an occasional female lived a little longer, and would have helped her daughters, when they had their own children, to dig and forage for food. These grandmother-mother pairings thrived, so their genes for longevity would have been passed on. In this way, the slow rise of the senior citizens began. |=|

“But now Caspari has extended the idea. It wasn't granny power on its own that did it; grandfathers played a critical role, she argues, though this change did not occur until relatively recently, around 30,000 years ago. Working with Sang-Hee Lee of the University of California, Caspari studied collections of fossils from different periods of human evolution, including early australopithecine apemen, Neanderthals and the first Homo sapiens to reach Europe. |=|

“By analysing teeth from these ancient human beings, they found they could make convincing estimates of the ages of bodies at death. The researchers found that few made it to the age of 30. For most of humanity's prehistory, dying young was the rule, not the exception. Life then was indeed "nasty, brutish and short", as philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it. |=|

“As evolution proceeded, numbers of those aged 30 or over did increase, but were still relatively modest. The striking change only came when the team looked at Homo sapiens – who evolved in Africa and migrated to Europe around 40,000 years ago – and compared them with their predecessors in Europe, the Neanderthals. "For every 10 young Neanderthals who died between the ages of 10 and 30, there were only four older adults who survived past the age of 30," Caspari states. But for every 10 young adult members of Homo sapiens who died, there were 20 who had reached 30 or older, a significant increase. "The conclusion was inescapable: adult survival soared very late in human evolution," Caspari states. |=|

“It is unclear why so many more Homo sapiens began to live longer. Improvements in food-gathering could have been involved, suggested Professor Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum. Whatever the reason, the effect would have been profound, he stressed. Elders pass on knowledge of poisonous food, the location of water supplies and important skills such as tool-making. "Older people are important in establishing kinships," added Stringer, author of the recently published The Origin of Our Species. "When it came to disputes over access to water holes or to land rich in game, the more elders there were to remember distant relations in other tribes, the easier it would have been to negotiate and share resources. Older people would have been vital to survival." |=|

E. O. Wilson: Human ‘Social Conquest of Earth’

Colin Woodard wrote in the Washington Post: “What are we, where did we come from, and where are we going? For millennia, humans have been pondering these great questions and articulating responses in works of art, philosophical treatises and religious beliefs. We’ve fought wars over whose solution is most correct, persecuted promoters of heresy and celebrated sublime expressions of possible answers by painters, poets and preachers. No wonder; at stake is nothing less than the definition of the human condition. In his new book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” renowned scientist Edward O. Wilson sets out to answer these questions once and for all. Scientific advances of the past two decades, he argues, make it possible to solve the first two, providing the basis for a rethinking of the third. The result is an ambitious and thoroughly engaging work that’s certain to generate controversy within the walls of academia and without. [Source: Colin Woodard, Washington Post, April 13, 2012 +++]

“To build his latest argument, Wilson first sets about exploding an important theory of evolutionary biology that he once championed. The key to understanding the human condition is to understand how our species developed advanced social lives and the altruistic behaviors they require. If evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest — individual selection — how does one explain the self-sacrifice seen among the workers of an ant colony or a bee hive, or in the person who runs into a burning house to save a stranger? The current explanation — kin selection, or “inclusive fitness” — is that altruism evolved among closely related individuals as a way to ensure the survival of the shared portions of their genetic heritage. But Wilson describes in considerable detail how the insect studies on which this theory was built have since been shown to be incorrect. (Many scientists in the field disagree, and dozens have denounced him in letters to the scholarly journals in which he first aired his critique.) +++

20120206-CroMagnon 4.jpg “Instead, Wilson argues that altruism is a result not of individual or kin selection, but of group selection. Charles Darwin himself proposed that a tribe that had many members willing to contribute to or sacrifice themselves for the common good “would be victorious over most other tribes.” Drawing on recent evidence from social psychology, archaeology and evolutionary biology, Wilson builds a compelling and multi-faceted case that Darwin was right. Species that have developed advanced social lives, or eusociality — certain bees, ants, termites and ourselves — have been staggeringly successful and extremely rare. “Our ancestors were one of only two dozen or so animal lines ever to evolve eusociality, the next major level of biological organization above the organismic,” Wilson writes. “There, group members across two or more generations stay together, cooperate, care for the young, and divide labor in a way favoring reproduction of some individuals over that in others.” +++

“Evolutionary competition among ants is best understood not at the individual level but at the level of the colony, a superorganism acting as an extension of the queen’s genome, waging a battle of fitness against other hives. For humans, Wilson argues, the situation is more complex. We’ve become genetically hard-wired to be tribal, to join groups “and, having joined, consider them superior to competing groups.” Our groups — tribes, societies, nations — compete with one another for dominance, but as individuals, we also compete for survival and reproduction within groups via individual selection. +++

“Selfish individuals might beat altruistic ones, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish people.The human condition, Wilson concludes, is largely a product of the tension between the two impulses. “The dilemma of good and evil was created by multilevel selection, in which individual selection and group selection act together on the same individual, but largely in opposition to each other,” he writes. “Individual selection shapes instincts in each member that are fundamentally selfish. .Group selection shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another (but not toward members of other groups). Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. Together they have created the conflict between the poorer and the better angels of our nature.” +++

“Heady stuff, to be sure, and Wilson is just getting started. He builds a case for religion as a byproduct of human evolution, a mechanism for defining and uniting the tribe. As such, it has become “an unseen trap unavoidable during the biological history of our species,”facilitating submission not to God but “to no more than a tribe united by a creation myth.” Our species, Wilson says, deserves better, and he makes a case that morality and honor are also part of our peculiar evolutionary heritage and, thus, can stand on their own.” +++

How Societies Slowly Rise — and Suddenly Fall

Societies grow through slow, incremental change, but their collapse can be sudden and dramatic. That is one intriguing lesson from a recent study of diverse cultures across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands by University College London anthropologist Tom Currie. The research aims to settle a major anthropological debate over whether political systems develop the same way regardless of culture; the results suggest that some aspects of political development are in fact universal. [Source: Andrew Curry, Discover magazine, April 2011]

Andrew Curry wrote in Discover magazine: “To study societal evolution, Currie and his colleagues turned to the tools of evolutionary biology. First they used linguistic similarities to create an evolutionary tree showing the relationships among 84 contemporary cultures, including the complex Balinese society of Indonesia and the indigenous Iban people of Borneo. “It's essentially the same way biologists use genetics to see how species are related," he says.

The researchers then described each society's political structure on a spectrum from loosely organized tribes up to complex states and began testing different models of how they could have evolved to form the present-day tree. The most successful models were those that prohibited the skipping of steps during a society's rise, with each one passing sequentially through all the stages of increasing complexity. But it was possible to fall quickly, devolving from a state to a tribe without hitting intermediate levels on the way down. Biologist Mark Pagel of the University of Reading in England says the finding makes intuitive sense. “Cultural evolution is a lot like biological evolution," he says. “You don't start with a sundial and move straight to a wristwatch. There are a lot of small steps in between."

Theory of Inclusive Fitness

Kristin Ohlson wrote in Discover: “Evolutionary biologists had long looked to inclusive fitness to explain “eusocial” species, those that live in highly connected structures inhabited by many generations at once. Ants, whose colonies are composed mostly of sterile females that care for their mothers’ offspring, are eusocial; so are termites. Humans, with our complex societies and assorted mix of do-gooders, are like eusocial species in certain ways too: Older siblings look after younger ones; we even share a multinational space station with neighbors worldwide. We say things like “I would die for you.” [Source: Kristin Ohlson, Discover, October 25, 2012 /+/]

“Such behaviors had flummoxed no less an authority than Charles Darwin: How could cooperation and other selfless behavior arise if natural selection was all about individuals competing against each other in the struggle to survive? An explanation for all this niceness was proposed in the 1960s by Oxford University biologist Bill Hamilton. Using a mathematical formula that calculates the likelihood of collaboration, he claimed to have proved that cooperative behavior—defined as “I do something for you even though it will cost me”—emerged when individuals fell on their swords to save their relatives’ genes. /+/

“Even if they died, the beneficiaries were the family line and its collective DNA—including their own. And so the theory of inclusive fitness was born. In the nearly 50 years since Hamilton proposed his theory, hundreds of scientists have made careers observing degrees of kinship in termite mounds and anthills.” /+/

Supercooperation

Kristin Ohlson wrote in Discover: In 2010, Martin Nowak, a biologist and mathematician who directs Harvard University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, “threw a firebomb into the sacred heart of evolutionary biology by challenging inclusive fitness, the decades-old theory that martyrs can win in the struggle to survive by protecting their relatives’ genes. The shock waves are still reverberating. [Source: Kristin Ohlson, Discover, October 25, 2012 /+/]

“But Nowak insisted all that work amounted to less than a hill of beans. The mathematics of inclusive fitness were so unwieldy as to be useless, he argued in a takedown of the field’s elite, published two years ago in the journal Nature with his mathematician colleague Corina Tarnita and the legendary sociobiologist E. O. Wilson. Instead, the trait Nowak called “supercooperation” could be better explained by basic evolutionary theory, especially natural selection, which had a mathematical framework of its own. /+/

“In Nowak’s reframing of Darwin’s theory, altruism emerged simply because it gave some individuals an edge in the struggle to survive. The survivors passed the beneficial, altruistic genes to their descendants and so on and so forth until, over time, groups of survivors banded together to form a defensible nest. The motive of any one creature may have been selfish, but extreme cooperation was the happy result. When individuals were forced into the same space (because of the proximity of a food source, for instance), working together in large numbers of cooperative individuals gave everyone a better shot at survival. Kinship and inclusive fitness are much less important than previously thought. /+/

“Without kinship as a pivot point, cooperation could be seen in a broader context, impacting evolution as a whole. In Nowak’s new calculus, cooperation was not merely the product of evolution but an engine, driving the process along with mutation and natural selection itself. “Cooperation is a fundamental principle of evolution,” Nowak says today. “Without it, you don’t get construction or complexity in life. Whenever you see something interesting, like the evolution of multicellular creatures or human language, cooperation is involved.” /+/

“Yet cooperation is tricky. It may be a positive force in the evolution of complexity but is often dangerous for individuals or groups faced with tough choices. When a friend asks for help redesigning her résumé for a job you both want, your help may contribute to a solid friendship, but it might cost you the job. An international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions may help the planet, but the nation that opts out might profit. /+/

“Still, the advantage for rogue defectors is short-term, especially among more advanced species. “Intelligent life comes with destructive power and is fragile in that way,” Nowak says. He envisions that intelligent beings might have evolved many times over the long history of the universe but then destroyed themselves because they lacked cooperative genes. The only ones that could survive were those that, like us, have the urge to get along. If he’s right, the drive toward supercooperation is not just an interesting sideline in the story of evolution. It lies at the heart of why we are here—the kind of real answer his son Philip could appreciate.” /+/

Prisoner’s Dilemma

The prisoner’s dilemma is a a game theory model devised in 1950. Kristin Ohlson wrote in Discover: “The prisoner’s dilemma focuses on the choice between cooperation and selfishness. Superficially it seems quite simple: You and another person have been caught by the police on suspicion of criminal activity and are being held in separate cells. The prosecutor visits each of you separately and offers a deal. If you confess and incriminate your accomplice while he or she remains silent, you will be convicted of a lesser crime, serving just one year in prison while your accomplice serves four. In the parlance of the game, you have “defected” from your friendship. [Source: Kristin Ohlson, Discover, October 25, 2012 /+/]

“If you and your accomplice both refuse the deal and stay true to each other—remaining “cooperators” in the game’s lingo—you will both be convicted of a lesser crime and serve two-year sentences, since the police do not have enough evidence to convict either one of you of the more serious crime. If you both testify against each other—that is, if you mutually defect—then the police will convict both of you for the serious crime but give you only three years, since you provided some evidence. /+/

“Clearly, the best choice for you as an individual is to defect. You get only one year in prison if you rat on your accomplice and he doesn’t rat on you. Even if you both rat on each other, the penalty is three years, not the maximum sentence. It is only the sucker who doesn’t defect while his accomplice does who spends four years in the slammer, the maximum sentence. On the other hand, both prisoners are worse off when they turn on each other than they would be if they both kept silent.” /+/

Adopting the Prisoner’s Dilemma to Evolution

Kristin Ohlson wrote in Discover: “Nowak was fascinated by the prisoner’s dilemma because it provides a mathematical way to study human behavior and, more broadly, the evolutionary costs and benefits of cooperation. Each round of the game generates numbers (the number of years in prison can be considered points), there can be different results based upon different strategies, and all of this can be turned into calculations. With the prisoner’s dilemma, Sigmund said, one could use math to examine the thorniest conundrum of our social lives: how to weigh personal gain against the common good. In 1987 Nowak decided to do doctoral work with Sigmund on the mathematics of evolution. Their focus was the prisoner’s dilemma and its endless iterations, now parsed with computers and math. [Source: Kristin Ohlson, Discover, October 25, 2012 /+/]

“Others had already studied cooperation using the prisoner’s dilemma, notably political scientist Robert Axelrod, who held virtual tournaments in the 1970s. Scientists around the world sent Axelrod strategies for the “prisoners”—instructions for when they would cooperate and when they would defect—to wield in round after computerized round. Each round, the strategies received points; the shorter the prison term, the higher the score.

“Over the course of hundreds of computerized rounds, the winning strategy was one called Tit for Tat: Whatever you did in the last round of the game, I will do to you in this round. This strategy relies on direct reciprocity and abounds in the real world, especially in communities where creatures have a history with one another. For instance, Neighbor Jones is more likely to change a flat tire for Neighbor Newell if Newell helped fix Jones’s broken lawn mower last week. It holds true in the animal world as well: A vampire bat is more likely to share a blood meal with others in the cave if those others shared a blood meal with it the last time it failed to find prey./+/

“Nowak and Sigmund regarded Axelrod’s work as an elegant exercise of mathematics but wanted to change the game so that it applied more directly to specific questions in evolution. The classic Darwinian theory of natural selection suggests that individuals who cooperate threaten their own evolutionary fitness, since cooperation always involves a cost to the self (the vampire bat that shares blood has less food for itself). Still, life is full of cooperation, from the single cells that joined to form higher organisms to the construction of cities by humans and intricate communal nests by ants. If cooperation exists so widely, Nowak wondered, what mechanisms were at work to increase cooperation when natural selection seemed to argue against it? /+/

“A paper published in Nature in 1976 by Lord Robert May, a British physicist who has made notable contributions to theoretical biology, introduced some new ideas for changing the game and teasing out those mechanisms. May argued that virtual tournaments like Axelrod’s might not accurately replicate the interplay of cooperation and defection in real life. “I pointed out that many of the results from computer modeling depended on [virtual] people deciding on a strategy and following it exactly,” May says. “In reality, there is going to be a lot of noise and error. You need to allow for this.” /+/

“In other words, real creatures rarely follow a strategy perfectly. Neighbor Jones usually repays Neighbor Newell’s helpfulness, but if Jones has just had an argument with his wife when he sees Newell coming to ask for help with the flat tire, he may decide he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. So Nowak and Sigmund set out to create virtual tournaments that allowed for noise and error by conferring probabilistic behavior on the virtual players. Some might defect 80 percent of the time after their partner defected in a previous round; others might cooperate 50 percent of the time even when their previous partner defected. This probabilistic behavior added in the kind of noise that May deemed lacking in pristine models that came before. /+/

“To further put the terms of the game into a plausible evolutionary context, Nowak and Sigmund gave winning players and their strategies the power of reproduction. In this new version of the game, the virtual players didn’t just accumulate points when they won; they were rewarded with a duplicate of themselves equipped with the same winning strategy. Their offspring then took the place of another player in the population. The game now mimicked what happens to real organisms: Random mutations resulted in some players having winning strategies that allowed them to triumph and spread those strategies while others died off. After thousands of rounds of the computer playing the game, Nowak and Sigmund would see what kind of strategy for cooperation or defection dominated the population.” /+/

Generous Tit for Tat

Kristin Ohlson wrote in Discover: “As Nowak and Sigmund expected, an approach called Always Defect triumphed for 100 generations. Then it gave way to Tit for Tat for generations, with the two scientists cheering as they watched the gimlet-eyed Always Defectors fizzle out. The game churned on even after Nowak finished his Ph.D. in 1989. He then moved to England to do postdoctoral research with May at the University of Oxford. The first breakthrough in his work with Sigmund happened when Nowak returned to Vienna for a vacation, toting his computer with him. Checking in on his virtual world, he was amazed to see the emergence of a new winning strategy. Later named Generous Tit for Tat, players with this strategy occasionally cooperated, even after the other one had defected. [Source: Kristin Ohlson, Discover, October 25, 2012 /+/]

“Nowak saw a huge evolutionary message emerging from these simulations. “What we were seeing was the evolution of forgiveness,” he says. “Generous Tit for Tat suggests that we never forget a good turn, but we occasionally forgive a bad one. It makes a lot of sense. Tit for Tat can create a vendetta, but Generous Tit for Tat allows you to move on.” As the game continued, Nowak saw that even though Generous Tit for Tat was a long-lived strategy, it didn’t hold sway forever. There were still some Always Defectors that survived, and they were ultimately able to break down the new highly cooperative status quo. A society filled with happy cooperators becomes easy pickings for the selfish, who can tip things back toward dog-eat-dog. But that state, too, will have a few remaining cooperators who eventually tip things back to mass generosity. /+/

“We see this pattern all the time in human society. Peace is followed by war, which is followed by peace again. Empires rise and fall. Companies grow, attract the attention of competitors, and lose their market share, but can then reorganize (requiring internal cooperation) and dominate the market again. Every trend of cooperation and defection, it seems, contains the seeds of its opposite. But no matter what happens, Nowak realized that there is always selective pressure toward cooperation.” /+/

Indirect Reciprocity; Strangers Helping Each Other

Kristin Ohlson wrote in Discover: “One day when Nowak was back in Austria, hiking the mountains with Sigmund, they began to talk about cooperation between people who barely knew each other, a behavior called indirect reciprocity. While some experiments have a long and arduous genesis, Nowak in three weeks developed a computer simulation that explained indirect reciprocity. In this game, as in the prisoner’s dilemma, the players either defected or cooperated with each other, but only once—they couldn’t decide how to behave on the basis of previous experience with the other player. But Nowak also added a mechanism by which the players built up a reputation, one that rose or fell according to their history of cooperative behavior. As he expected, the players with good reputations experienced more cooperation than those with bad reputations. [Source: Kristin Ohlson, Discover, October 25, 2012 /+/]

“Nowak became convinced that the power of reputation, or indirect reciprocity—being willing to cooperate with someone despite not knowing him personally—is a hugely important factor in human cooperation. And because cooperation has been so important in human development, he concluded that the need to grapple with reputation was a major factor driving the development of language and our powerful brains. /+/

““From very early on, the selection pressure was about social interactions in a group,” Nowak says. “You need to be smart enough to monitor the social interactions in the group, to understand motives and intentions for action. You need to be able to keep it in memory, and you need to be able to talk about it. One theory before this had been that big brains make language possible, but I believe it was the opposite—that the need for language created big brains.” /+/

Five Crucial Mechanisms That Drove Cooperation

Kristin Ohlson wrote in Discover: “ After nearly two decades of studying the rise of cooperation in populations, Nowak sees the entire world through the prism of the prisoner’s dilemma: He is always looking at the tension between cooperation and defection. In 2006 he had an epiphany of sorts while sitting in a meeting in Japan, jet-lagged from his trip. Working in his head, like the mathematicians at the seminary, he counted five crucial mechanisms that drove cooperation in highly social species like ours. [Source: Kristin Ohlson, Discover, October 25, 2012 /+/]

“The first mechanism is Tit for Tat, or direct reciprocity—“I will if you will”—which represented the first outbreak of cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma simulation. /+/

“Next comes the much more advanced mechanism of indirect reciprocity, or reputation, when one individual is willing to help another not because of personal experience but because others have described having good prior encounters with that person. /+/

“Nowak identifies the third mechanism as “spatial selection”—interaction born of living in proximity. Within a small area, social networks aid survival and cooperation flowers. /+/

“The fourth is multilevel selection, involving larger groups like towns, tribes, or companies. These structures encourage cooperation among their members. /+/

“The fifth mechanism is a version of the familiar kin selection, the tendency to cooperate with blood relations. Nowak believes blood ties might play a role—but one defined more by social cooperation than by the propagation of family genes?. /+/

“Nowak is also open to the possibility of an additional cooperative strategy he has missed. “It would be exciting if we found one. It would make me very happy—I’d have to figure out why it developed and why I missed it. The beauty of all this is how it’s so open-ended,” he says. /+/

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024