Organic processes in The Selfish Gene

[valvatica]

For those who've read The Selfish Gene (I'm in the middle of it currently) there's a section I found particularly interesting at the beginning of chapter 5 (starts around page 72 in the 1989 edition).

Dawkins is talking about a hypothetical case where a group of species has individuals that are either labeled "hawk" or "dove" based on their behaviors (no relation to the actual animals of those names). A hawk always fights, and never retreats until seriously injured. A dove will never fight. If it's a hawk vs. a dove, the hawk automatically wins. If it's a hawk vs. a hawk, the hawk who gets seriously injured before the other loses and thus the other wins. If it's a dove vs. a dove, they will have a stare-off/intimidation match and the one who grows tired and retreats first loses, and thus the other wins. There is no learning from past performances, and the other doesn't know what the other will do prior to the fight.

Dawkins developed an arbitrary point system and showed how the evolutionary trend would tend to oscillate if it ended up going to 100% doves or 100% hawks. The balanced ratio he found for the point system he gave was that the population would tend to be 7/12 hawks, 5/12 doves.

Now, humans are conscious in a way that animals aren't. Thus we can conspire or "plan" to be all hawks or all doves. Here's the main point of me posting this. If humans wanted to conspire to be all doves, it would in essence be unmatched points-wise compared to any other conspiracy, or all-hawks, or the natural 7:5 ratio. BUT, all it takes is one individual to screw things up... what Dawkins calls "treachery from within". Since this conspiracy to be all doves isn't organic, all it takes is one individual to be a hawk and to have the advantage on everyone else, spread his genes, etc. This seemed to draw parallels to statism when I thought about it. He expanded on this example by drawing the same conclusion about price-fixing, but it makes the same point as the hawk/dove scenario and thus no need to explain it here.

If it sounds confusing I'll try to explain better, but it really drove home what I've read here on the forums and elsewhere about things inevitably failing that aren't developed organically. Basically, even if everyone in a society agreed to be a certain way (resisting the urge not to be greedy, for instance) and fixes/regulations were instituted to reinforce that, as long as at least ONE person decides to take advantage of it, it's doomed.

[VectorM]

Btw, isn't Dawkins a statist himself?

[valvatica]

I think so, which is why I was surprised at this piece. I'd love to put it here under Fair Use, it's only a page or two long and explains it much better than I did.

[MrBogosity]

I think so, which is why I was surprised at this piece. I'd love to put it here under Fair Use, it's only a page or two long and explains it much better than I did.

I think a page or two would be fine.

[valvatica]

It's around 3 pages actually but if it looks too lengthy feel free to remove it.

An evolutionarily stable strategy or ESS is defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.* It is a subtle and important idea. Another way of putting it is to say that the best strategy for an individual depends on what the majority of the population are doing. Since the rest of the population consists of individuals, each one trying to maximize his own success, the only strategy that persists will be one which, once evolved, cannot be bettered by any deviant individual. Following a major environmental change there may be a brief period of evolutionary instability, perhaps even oscillation in the population. But once an ESS is achieved it will stay: selection will penalize deviation from it.

To apply this idea to aggression, consider one of Maynard Smith's simplest hypothetical cases. Suppose that there are only two sorts of fighting strategy in a population of a particular species, named hawk and dove. (The names refer to conventional human usage and have no connection with the habits of the birds from whom the names are derived: doves are in fact rather aggressive birds.) Any individual of our hypothetical population is classified as a hawk or a dove. Hawks always fight as hard and as unrestrainedly as they can, retreating only when seriously injured. Doves merely threaten in a dignified conventional way, never hurting anybody. If a hawk fights a dove the dove quickly runs away, and so does not get hurt. If a hawk fights a hawk they go on until one of them is seriously injured or dead. If a dove meets a dove nobody gets hurt; they go on posturing at each other for a long time until one of them tires or decides not to bother any more, and therefore backs down. For the time being, we assume that there is no way in which an individual can tell, in advance, whether a particular rival is a hawk or a dove. He only discovers this by fighting him, and he has no memory of past fights with particular individuals to guide him.

Now as a purely arbitrary convention we allot contestants 'points'. Say 50 points for a win, 0 for losing, -100 for being seriously injured, and -10 for wasting time over a long contest. These points can be thought of as being directly convertible into the currency of gene survival. An individual who scores high points, who has a high average 'pay-off, is an individual who leaves many genes behind him in the gene pool. Within broad limits the actual numerical values do not matter for the analysis, but they help us to think about the problem.

The important thing is that we are not interested in whether hawks will tend to beat doves when they fight them. We already know the answer to that: hawks will always win. We want to know whether either hawk or dove is an evolutionarily stable strategy. If one of them is an ESS and the other is not, we must expect that the one which is the ESS will evolve. It is theoretically possible for there to be two ESSs. This would be true if, whatever the majority strategy of the population happened to be, whether hawk or dove, the best strategy for any given individual was to follow suit. In this case the population would tend to stick at whichever one of its two stable states it happened to reach first. However, as we shall now see, neither of these two strategies, hawk or dove, would in fact be evolutionarily stable on its own, and we should therefore not expect either of them to evolve. To show this we must calculate average pay-offs.

Suppose we have a population consisting entirely of doves. Whenever they fight, nobody gets hurt. The contests consist of prolonged ritual tournaments, staring matches perhaps, which end only when one rival backs down. The winner then scores 50 points for gaining the resource in dispute, but he pays a penalty of -10 for wasting time over a long staring match, so scores 40 in all. The loser also is penalized -10 points for wasting time. On average, any one individual dove can expect to win half his contests and lose half. Therefore his average pay-off per contest is the average of +40 and -10, which is +15. Therefore, every individual dove in a population of doves seems to be doing quite nicely.

But now suppose a mutant hawk arises in the population. Since he is the only hawk around, every fight he has is against a dove. Hawks always beat doves, so he scores +50 every fight, and this is his average pay-off. He enjoys an enormous advantage over the doves, whose net pay-off is only +15. Hawk genes will rapidly spread through the population as a result. But now each hawk can no longer count on every rival he meets being a dove. To take an extreme example, if the hawk gene spread so successfully that the entire population came to consist of hawks, all fights would now be hawk fights. Things are now very different. When hawk meets hawk, one of them is seriously injured, scoring -100, while the winner scores +50. Each hawk in a population of hawks can expect to win half his fights and lose half his fights. His average expected pay-off per fight is therefore half-way between +50 and -100, which is -25. Now consider a single dove in a population of hawks. To be sure, he loses all his fights, but on the other hand he never gets hurt. His average pay-off is 0 in a population of hawks, whereas the average pay-off for a hawk in a population of hawks is -25. Dove genes will therefore tend to spread through the population.

The way I have told the story it looks as if there will be a continuous oscillation in the population. Hawk genes will sweep to ascendancy; then, as a consequence of the hawk majority, dove genes will gain an advantage and increase in numbers until once again hawk genes start to prosper, and so on. However, it need not be an oscillation like this. There is a stable ratio of hawks to doves. For the particular arbitrary points system we are using, the stable ratio, if you work it out, turns out to be 5/12 doves to 7/12 hawks. When this stable ratio is reached, the average pay-off for hawks is exactly equal to the average pay-off for doves. Therefore selection does not favour either one of them over the other. If the number of hawks in the population started to drift upwards so that the ratio was no longer 7/12, doves would start to gain an extra advantage, and the ratio would swing back to the stable state. Just as we shall find the stable sex ratio to be 50:50, so the stable hawk to dove ratio in this hypothetical example is 7:5. In either case, if there are oscillations about the stable point, they need not be very large ones.

Superficially, this sounds a little like group selection, but it is really nothing of the kind. It sounds like group selection because it enables us to think of a population as having a stable equilibrium to which it tends to return when disturbed. But the ESS is a much more subtle concept than group selection. It has nothing to do with some groups being more successful than others. This can be nicely illustrated using the arbitrary points system of our hypothetical example. The average pay-off to an individual in a stable population consisting of 7/12 hawks and 5/12 doves, turns out to be 6 1/4. This is true whether the individual is a hawk or a dove. Now 6 1/4 is much less than the average pay-off for a dove in a population of doves (15). If only everybody would agree to be a dove, every single individual would benefit. By simple group selection, any group in which all individuals mutually agree to be doves would be far more successful than a rival group sitting at the ESS ratio. (As a matter of fact, a conspiracy of nothing but doves is not quite the most successful possible group. In a group consisting of 1/6 hawks and 5/6 doves, the average pay-off per contest is 16 2/3. This is the most successful possible conspiracy, but for present purposes we can ignore it. A simpler all-dove conspiracy, with its average pay-off for each individual of 15, is far better for every single individual than the ESS would be.) Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy, since a group that contained a 7/12 proportion of hawks would be less successful. But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. It is true that everybody does better in an all-dove group than he would in an ESS group. But unfortunately, in conspiracies of doves, a single hawk does so extremely well that nothing could stop the evolution of hawks. The conspiracy is therefore bound to be broken by treachery from within. An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.

And again, there's a few more paragraphs that follow where Dawkins talks about price-fixing in the same light, but I didn't want to make this any longer than it already is (I feel I'm already starting to push past Fair Use here). This seems to reinforce ideas like no regulations and the hands-off approach, and how anything that is coopted will always be ruined once one person games the system. It also reminded me of what Shane said in his "What is the Free Market?" video: "Free Market economics does NOT say this [profit] is good. Instead, it is a recognition that this is going to happen, and that a sound policy should be constructed around this basis. The idea that people seek profit is therefore DEscriptive, not PREscriptive."

Better to accept and recognize what we are in terms of human behavior, and go from there. It's like what Bill Hicks said about pornography: "Playboy does not create sexual thoughts. There ARE sexual thoughts, and thus, there is Playboy."