
New Model of Evolution Reveals How Cooperation Evolves - RockyMcNuts
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608139/new-model-of-evolution-finally-reveals-how-cooperation-evolves/
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jballanc
Almost all of the responses here putting this down as "not that big a deal"
are completely missing the point. It's extremely easy to say that evolution
_should_ do a thing, but if you cannot provide a mechanism to explain how such
a thing is __passively __selected for, then evolution doesn 't care. Evolution
has no intelligence. There is no designer. This is probably the most important
aspect of evolution to understand and the one hardest to grasp intuitively.

For example: say you had a savannah with grass and tall trees populated by
4-legged horse-like animals that survive by grazing on the grass. We can look
at such a scenario and say that it would be advantageous for some sub-
population of those horse-like animals to grow longer and longer necks until
they were capable of _also_ grazing on the trees (doubling their available
food supply, relative to their neighbors), but it will never happen! In each
generation there will be a distribution of neck lengths, and as there is no
advantage to those with slightly longer (but not long enough to reach the
trees) necks, the distribution will remain unchanged. This is the basic Hardy-
Weinberg principle.

The only way you get giraffes is if the trees start out much shorter, so that
the horse-like animals _are_ capable of grazing on them. Then the trees that
are slightly taller will have an advantage, and the distribution of tree
heights in the population will shift. This will give an advantage to the
horse-like animals with longer necks, causing their distribution to shift, and
on, and on. This is the basic Red Queen hypothesis.

So saying that an organism that has an inherent capacity for adaptation, or
one that knows to cooperate with neighbors, would be better able to survive
than the alternatives doesn't mean _crap_. If you cannot provide a mechanism
(backed by a mathematical model) of how such traits arise, then evolution
_doesn 't care_.

That is what makes this work so particularly interesting. The authors are
providing a model to explain how a mechanism for the selection of cooperation
could occur.

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ouid
>But evolution is a random process based on the short-term advantages that
emerge in each generation.

This idea is easily discredited, even "disadvantageous-but-viable" mutations
are prized possessions among my offspring. Environments change, and whether or
not my lineage goes unbroken is a result of its ability to survive those
changes.

Those environmental changes are unpredictable. phenotypes that benefit me now
do not necessarily benefit me in the future. If it is my goal to extend my
lineage as long as possible, then my optimal strategy must give extra value to
diversity.

Since _every_ organism possesses a lineage that goes back to the origin of
life, it's fair to say that cooperation for the goal of increasing diversity
is a pretty heavily selected for trait.

~~~
onychomys
You're basically arguing for a species-level (or at least a deme-level) view
of selection. That's something that we've tried to find for many decades, and
there just isn't a lot of evidence for it. Selection happens at the level of
the individual animal, not any higher grouping.

~~~
statevol
I've taught evolutionary biology to non-biology majors and the way I would
explain natural selection is as follows.

First, to clarify the last sentence above, selection does not happen at the
level of an individual. Selection is a statistical process that requires a
population of individuals.

For evolution by selection to occur, there has to be 1) variation in traits
(i.e. "Phenotypes"), 2) the variation in these traits has to be in part
heritible (i.e. Have a genetic basis), and 3) there have to be average
differences in success of leaving offspring that themseves go on to reproduce,
etc, etc, based on the trait differences amongst individuas.

~~~
int_19h
But diversity is not a phenotype in any meaningful way, is it?

~~~
akvadrako
Well you can either have a reproduction mechanism that encourages diversity or
doesn't. That seems like a trait to me.

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dhfhduk
Cool take on things, but not really fundamentally new as an explanation of
evolution of cooperative traits. Models involving reputation and punishment
have been around for awhile. Basically, once you introduce reputation and
memory, together with punishment, cooperation becomes more viable as a
strategy. It's even led to models of higher-order cooperation, of enforcing
the enforcers, etc.

To me it seems like the paper isn't really offering a fundamentally new
explanation of how these traits arise, it's just providing a sophisticated
analysis of the dynamics.

~~~
jballanc
That cooperation is _eventually_ selected for has been known for decades, but
we didn't know how. Yes, there have been many speculative models describing
how cooperation _might_ arise, kin selection being among the earliest of
these. Each of these mechanisms has some applicability and some predictive
power (for example, kin selection is pretty good at describing cooperation in
everything up to and including eusocial insects), but we've been missing the
general mechanism that has predictive power across all domains.

In other words, the field of evolutionary biology today has its Newton's laws
and Maxwell equations, but we're missing anything like the Standard Model. The
authors of this work have been at this for a number of years. A sophisticated
analysis of the dynamics is a key and very important step in beginning to
develop a "grand unified theory" of evolution.

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trhway
>a crucial factor turns out to be the process of punishment. “Punishment acts
like a magnetic field that leads to an 'alignment' between players, thus
encouraging cooperation,” say Adami and Hintze.

either you're a team player or else. Collective punishment comes to mind too
as a very effective way to induce cooperation/alignment inside the collective
which is going to be or threatened to be punished.

~~~
woodandsteel
Yes, they start out with game theory, which is only about rewards, and then
add in punishment.

Game theory is enormously insightful, but It leaves out a great many factors
that are very important in the real world, such as communication between the
parties,uncertain rules, and reputation.

~~~
jballanc
All the factors you mention are accounted for by researchers that use game
theory as the basis for evolutionary modeling (for a primer, check out
"Evolutionary games on graphs" \- [https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-
mat/0607344](https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0607344)).

~~~
woodandsteel
Ok, I was confusing the prisoner's dilemma with game theory as such.

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glup
Dear science journalists, please quit saying that papers "solve" problems ("By
treating evolution as a thermodynamic process, theorists have solved one the
great problems in biology."). Also, as much as I love Arxiv, I wish
journalists would note that articles posted are not subject to peer review.

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sharemywin
That would be a neat derivative of poker. Same as regular poker where everyone
antes but if everyone folds they get 1.1 X their ante. if one person doesn't
fold, you play it like regular poker.

~~~
ftlio
Who pays out the .1?

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andrewdb
Perhaps a rotating big and small blind on top of ante?

~~~
sharemywin
Maybe the person with the least amount of chips or the one with the most
depending on whether you want the game to go longer or shorter.

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lngnmn
Cooperation is related to a family (or a clan/pack) life. It is the "most
natural" survival strategy. Expanding it to a non-keen is not a big deal.
Nothing to see here.

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woodandsteel
I wonder if this has any relevance to the question of the evolution of
altruism.

~~~
eevilspock
White blood cells are clearly altruistic. To the extent a species or even an
ecosystem functions like an organism, there is an evolutionary advantage to
evolving altruism. To quote Spock, "where the good of the many outweigh the
good of the few, or the one."

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throwawaymanbot
Remember this article for the next time somebody complains about how perfect
an Ayn Randian world would be. Remember that free cooperation helped humanity
get this far, not Rugged, Individualism.

~~~
ende
First you'll have to teach those strawmen to read.

