Firstly, from the article: “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise. Obviously humans who cooperate to raise children to sexual maturity will have more descendants.
Secondly, in these simulated games it seems likely to me the participants would be, at least to some extent, randomly selecting cooperate / defect because a potential monetary reward for participation isn't the same as "cooperate or everyone freezes to death in their car tonight", or whatever real-world consequences might apply where you don't get "12 iterations".
The way I see is: while our worldview is "everything is a competition" that is how we will interpret what we see. Evolution and economics being the most strident examples. Anything that doesn't automatically fit the worldview needs explaining by science, which is code for "publish or perish". If we had a different worldview I'm sure we would shoehorn everything to fit.
"while our worldview is "everything is a competition" that is how we will interpret what we see."
If you think that the idea that competition is rife is merely a product of our world view, stop competing for a while and see what happens. You may have to think carefully about what all constitutes "competition"; you come from a very long line of survivors and there's a lot of competitive behaviors that come naturally to you. Squeezing them all out may take some work.
Competition is a second-order effect; the primary cause is the limited nature of desirable resources, and the ability of resources consumers to step up their rate of consumption exponentially in the face of an increase of resources. Unless you can prove that resources are not limited here and now, you're going to get competition.
Scarce resources can be coped with by both cooperation and competition (and other modes?). If there's limited water, we can share it - thus enabling us to have more people to hunt/gather resources. If you keep all the water you'll be stronger, but perhaps you'll hunt less effectively, struggle to gather enough resources, etc..
Competition isn't always the best way to cope with limited resources.
Competition between different groups within which there is cooperation, that's another option, of course.
>> “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise.
I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior. Something like taking resources from your offspring to give to someone else would be more in line with the definition of selfless (e.g. taking food from your own malnourished child to give to another child).
If you want to think clearly about these issues, you need to be very careful to define "altruistic" and "selfishness" for yourself properly. It seems to be a common temptation to assume as you implicitly do that an altruistic or selfishness-free act must net harm at all time scales the person so acting, but if you try to map that definition back to the real world, you find that it doesn't isn't as useful a model as you'd like for the behaviors you care about. I have phrased that very carefully; it is not as if it is an objectively wrong definition, because it's pretty hard for such a thing to exist. It's just that it's not exactly what we're trying to figure out here.
> I'm fairly certain that cooperating to raise your own offspring is still considered selfish behavior.
Cooperation is selfish.
I think this strengthens my point about how the dominant worldview colours our thoughts.
It could be argued that even a sports game, the epitome of competition, requires magnitudes of order more cooperation in order for it come about that the game can be played.
But then it could be argued that it is the selfish desire of the individual to want to play that drives the cooperation to compete.
This reminds me how all(?) Wikipedia articles can lead to philosophy.
The "individual" in evolutionary game theory is generally considered the gene, not the human. A lot of facts of life - like raising offspring at all, or death - make zero sense if you consider the actor to be a person, but make a lot of sense if you consider the actor to be a gene.
I would agree with that but it doesn't appear to be what Kümmerli is saying:
> “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly,” Rolf Kümmerli, co-author of the study, told PhysOrg.com. “However, we observe cooperation in humans and other organisms, where cooperation is costly for the actor but benefits another individual.
I think that's the "faulty premise" that TheSpiceOfLife is referring to. He's saying that building a study to explain cooperation between humans is modeling a phenomena that's a social construct anyway, when the real question is "what genes lead to behavior that ensures the survival and propagation of those genes?" Natural selection operates on the genetic level, not on the human level, so Kümmerli made an error by trying to inject natural selection arguments into a model where the primary actors are humans.
> A lot of facts of life - like raising offspring at all, or death - make zero sense if you consider the actor to be a person, but make a lot of sense if you consider the actor to be a gene.
Raising offspring presents a huge cost to the parents, but every living organism does it because it's the only way to ensure that your genes will propagate on to the next generation after your death. Those that don't are washed out of the gene pool, and irrelevant after one lifespan.
Similarly, death is obviously bad for an individual - it's the termination of your existence. However, it frees up resources for new individuals who may be better adapted to conditions of the time. Species where individuals rarely die may see the whole species die off at once as they get outcompeted by other species whose individuals are better adapted to the environment.
(There's a societal analogue as well here: historically, societies that hold tight to tradition and preserve the internal firms & institutions within them end up being conquered, en masse, by more competitive societies where the individual firms within them either adapt or die.)
I'm aware of the gene-centered view of evolution, but I think that interpretation of the sentence in question is quite a stretch. If that was the intended meaning, then I apologize.
Your first point is pretty reductive. The idea of the selfish gene has been very dominant until recently. Your very example can be reframed as selfish behavior.
> Firstly, from the article: “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise. Obviously humans who cooperate to raise children to sexual maturity will have more descendants.
I think there's an enormous gulf between the way logic-dorks think people behave, and how people actually behave.
All this game theory stuff needs to go in the trash, frankly.
Firstly, from the article: “In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly” is a faulty premise. Obviously humans who cooperate to raise children to sexual maturity will have more descendants.
Secondly, in these simulated games it seems likely to me the participants would be, at least to some extent, randomly selecting cooperate / defect because a potential monetary reward for participation isn't the same as "cooperate or everyone freezes to death in their car tonight", or whatever real-world consequences might apply where you don't get "12 iterations".
The way I see is: while our worldview is "everything is a competition" that is how we will interpret what we see. Evolution and economics being the most strident examples. Anything that doesn't automatically fit the worldview needs explaining by science, which is code for "publish or perish". If we had a different worldview I'm sure we would shoehorn everything to fit.