What is man? After posing this question, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the discovery of evolution] are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely."
Emperor penguins are afraid to jump into the water for fear of being eaten by seals. If one would dive in, the rest would know whether there was a seal or not. None of them want to be the guinea pig, so they wait and sometimes even try to push each other in.
-- I imagine them being pretty good-natured about this
Often altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups.
Living creatures don't evolve to do things for the good of the group: that's a common mistake made by people not familiar with evolutionary theory.
Dawkins' argument is that the fundamental unit of natural selection is the gene.
Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of the more general law of 'survival of the stable'.
Things in nature tend to form themselves into stable configurations.
Simulations of the primordial stew have shown that its various components form themselves into amino acids, the building blocks for protein.
Dawkins' hypothesis is that the major significant step in the primordial stew came when a molecule figured out how to duplicate itself. "The Replicator" continued to duplicate itself over and over, but there were copying errors which produced new variants of replicators. Soon, these replicators reached the point where they needed to compete for resources and started evolving efficiencies, offenses, and defenses: cell walls are given as an example of a defense.
The replicators that survived were the ones that built themselves survival machines. Now, the replicators are genes, and we are their survival machines.
Identical twins have identical DNA - the single cell containing the DNA blueprint duplicates itself during the division process.
Sex shuffles genes around. The exact combination of genes in an individual is short-lived, but the genes themselves are long-lived.
Allele: genes that are rivals for the same slot on a chromosome (brown eyes vs. blue eyes)
The shorter a genetic unit is, the less chance it has to be split or be affected by mutation, increasing its "lifespan".
The bee experiment:
Honey bees are susceptible to an infectious disease called foul brood. Some strains of bees are "hygenic", stamping out epidemics by uncapping the cells of infected grubs and throwing them out of the hive. When a non-hygenic strain was crossed with a hygenic strain, the hybrid wasn't hygenic. The researcher then crossed the hybrids with the hygenic strain again and received interesting results. Some groups were hygenic, some were non-hygenic, and others would uncap the cells of the grubs but not throw them out. Thinking that there were seperate genes responsible for uncapping the cells and throwing the grubs out, the researcher took the caps off of the infected grubs - sure enough, half of the apparently non-hygenic bees threw out their grubs.
One theory (the Medawar theory) behind why people die of old age is that a gene that has negative consequences for its bearer is more likely to be replicated if its effects occur later in the bearer's life. Under this theory, what we know as old age is a byproduct of the accumulation of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes in the gene pool.
We have a lot more DNA than is used to build a body. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing.
-- that'd be a fun job. What IS it doing?
The gene pool is the new primordial soup.
Evolution went plant -> animal with muscle -> animal with muscle and memory -> animal with muscle, memory, and simulation ability
Genes can only do their best in advance by building a fast executive computer for themselves, and programming it in advance with rules and 'advice' to cope with as many eventualities as they can 'anticipate'.
Genes make general predictions, and do so very slowly. Polar bear genes have come to predict that the polar bear's environment will be a cold one. If the climate of the Arctic became a desert, the predictions of the genes would be wrong, and the bear would likely die.
Evolutionary stable strategy: one which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.
Retaliation is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Prober-retaliator, where you retaliate if attacked and occasionally test opponents to see if they'll fight back, is close.* Peace works against retaliators but not against aggressors (who attack everybody), bullies (who attack until someone fights back), and prober-retaliators.
-- Prober-retaliator is a high-risk high-reward strategy that only pays off in the long run if the benefits gained by winning instigated fights and reproducing can offset the population decrease caused by losing fights. A society of prober-retaliators would need to evolve a dominance hierarchy that allowed probing challenges, but kept actual fighting to a minimum.
* The endnotes to the book tell a different story. Dawkins admits that there's no such thing as a "close to" ESS, and says that retaliation is not an ESS because it can be invaded by people who play peace. The real ESS, as researched by someone else, is a mixture of aggressors and bullies: bullies get free wins over each other, which keeps the numbers high, and as many aggressors as the bully population can support.
Territorialism is another evolutionarily stable strategy. Evolving a pattern of "intruder wins, resident loses" would be weak, because no one would want to be a resident anywhere - they'd all be nomads, which results in a lot of otherwise-wasted energy spent moving around
The fish experiment:
Two fish built nests in opposite ends of a tank. The researcher took the fish and put them in glass tubes. Next to each other, the fish tried to fight each other through the glass. When the tubes were moved into fish A's territory, fish A tried to fight and fish B tried to retreat. When the situation was reversed, so were the results.
The butterfly experiment:
Pretty much the same as the fish experiment, except the researchers managed to trick the butterflies into thinking that they each got there first. Serious, prolonged fights broke out.
Size and fighting:
If larger fighters always win fights, there's only one evolutionarily stable strategy: pick fights with people smaller than you and run away from people larger than you.
If large fighters have a slight advantage in fights, that strategy still works, but there's an alternate evolutionarily stable strategy: pick fights with people larger than you and run away from people smaller than you!
That strategy, however, is only evolutionarily stable as long as its deviants never reach the kind of numbers that would shift the strategy back to the more intuitive one of using your size advantage to triumph over the smaller people.
The cricket experiment:
The researcher (R.D. Alexander) used a model cricket to beat up real crickets. After this treatment, the beaten crickets were more likely to lose fights against other crickets.
-- this is one reason you get a great fight when you pit champion vs. champion
-- it also goes a long way towards explaining intentional avoidance of competition: though an individual defeat may not sting, being "weighed in the balance and found wanting" is a slippery slope
-- crickets who won fights were more likely to court females - winners also keep the rise in testosterone that comes from competition
Dominance hierarchies are not a function of a group dynamic - they're the result of recognition, by an individual, that it would be better to give in to a dominant individual than to fight him.
-- UO is a perfect example of this
Honesty and lying are not stable evolutionary strategies in a war of attrition. Once lying is evolved, selection favors bluff-callers, which decreases the liars' numbers and has a negative impact on the honest people.
The poker face is an evolutionarily stable strategy.
The selfish gene is not one copy of the gene, but all copies.
The minimum requirement for a suicidal altruistic gene to be successful is that it should save more than two siblings or more than four half-siblings (uncles, grandparents, etc.)
-- a child would be worth the same as a sibling, since the child shares half the genetic material - a grandchild would count as a half-sibling
The mathematical formula for "altruism", from a genetic standpoint is (cost - (benefit * perceived relationship %)) - if this results in a net gain, do it
-- I wonder how reciprocity figures into this? Reciprocity is a crazy collusion attack which makes total sense from a genetic standpoint - reciprocally responsible individuals would be spreading the risk and enjoying a higher chance of surviving to pass those genes on.
Humans are familiar with rules, and rules are so powerful that if we're small-minded, we obey them even when it does no one any good.
memeoid: someone so taken over by an idea that their own survival becomes inconsequential
In most cases we should probably regard adoption as a misfiring of a built-in rule.
An example of a deliberately engineered misfiring of the maternal instinct is provided by birds that lay their eggs in somebody else's nest.
Individual guillemots can recognize their own eggs in case the eggs get mixed up, and incubate their offspring exclusively. Why would they need this ability when everything's taken care of if each mother sits on an egg? The answer is to guard against the evolution of cheating behavior, where mothers spend their time laying eggs instead of taking care of them. Even if the other mothers refused to be blackmailed, without the ability to know which egg came from which parent, the honest mother is more likely to incubate one of the two or three eggs laid by the cheater than the one laid by herself.
As has been mentioned, neither cheating nor the honesty that allows for it is an evolutionarily stable strategy. The cheating strategy in this case is unstable because the altruistic strategy it exploits is unstable and will disappear. The only ESS for a guillemot is to recognize its own egg and sit exclusively on its own egg. This is exactly what happens.
Songbirds have learned to discriminate in favor of eggs bearing the markings of their species, but cuckoos have learned to lay eggs bearing those markings. Songbirds with eyes sharp enough to detect the forgery stand a better chance of passing their genes on to successive generations, as do the more proficient forgers. This "arms race" is a good example of how natural selection can sharpen active discrimination.
-- is an "arms race" an ESS? I would say no, because at one point, one side is likely to gain a significant advantage over the other and then multiply that advantage. Also, the resources they're using to fund this race may be finite.
Men are more likely to put in less effort in caring for their offspring than women are, because women know for a fact that the offspring is theirs. A maternal grandmother can be more attached to her daughter's baby than a paternal grandmother, who can think her son was cuckolded.
A thing sometimes not realized even by people who worry about population problems is that population growth depends on when people have children as well as how many they have. Since populations tend to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate per year.
Increases in food production may temporarily alleviate the population problem, but it's mathematically certain that they cannot be a long-term solution; indeed, like the medical advances that precipitated the crisis, they may well make the problem worse by speeding up the rate of the population expansion. . . it is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraception methods. They express a preference for natural methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
-- I would say that increasing food production isn't an ESS, but I would stop short of saying that it wasn't a long-term solution. Malthus was right about food supply increasing linearly while population increases exponentially, but ~71% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. Serious expense would be required to inhabit even a small part of an ocean, and I'm sure we haven't even scratched the surface of their true agricultural potential.
If you can't win a fight, you can wait for an opportunity.
One possible explanation for menopause is that genes for becoming infertile in middle-age became numerous because they were present in grandchildren whose survival was assisted by grandmotherly altruism.
The mathematical altruism model says that sibling altruism takes place at 1:2 - where the benefit to the altruist is doubled by the benefit to the recipient. Until then, there will be greed.
-- a way around this is to space children out so that they're not forced to compete over the same resources
A child will lose no opportunity at cheating. It will pretend to be hungrier than it is, younger than it is, more in danger than it is. It is too small and weak to bully its parents physically, but it uses every psychological weapon at its disposal: lying, cheating, deceiving, exploiting. . .
-- the funny thing is, this is natural. Animals cheat their asses off too.
-- Play to Win is the right concept for life. Scrubsmanship does not prepare you to recognize the fact that everyone you'll ever deal with can and will potentially take any advantage available to them.
Genes in juvenile bodies will be selected for their ability to outsmart parental bodies; genes in parental bodies will be selected for their ability to outsmart the young.
Parents should invest equally in sons and daughters. Usually, that means one son per daughter, but in special cases (such as elephant seals with their harems), it makes more evolutionary sense to, say, have three daughters and one triple-strength son.
In a study of elephant seals, 4% of the males did 88% of the copulating.
There are two mating strategies - the domestic bliss and the he-man
The domestic bliss strategy:
The simplest version of the domestic bliss strategy is this. The female looks the males over and tries to spot signs of fidelity and domesticity in advance. There's bound to be variation in the predisposition of males to become faithful husbands. If the females can recognize these qualities in advance, they can benefit themselves by choosing males who possess them. One way to do this is to play hard to get. Any male not patient enough to wait is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband.
Courtship rituals require considerable pre-copulation investment by the male. This is very good from the female's point of view, but it also suggests another version of the strategy: can females require males to put in so much pre-copulation investment that they won't abandon the relationship after copulation? The answer to this is that males can cut their losses at any point, especially in the presence of females who have more lax requirements for suitors.
Since the female's strategy for determining a good husband is dependent on her ability to detect qualities of fidelity and domesticity in advance, males can exploit this by appearing to have those qualities until copulation occurs. . . Natural selection tends to favor those females who are good at seeing through this deception. One way a female can do this is to play especially hard to get when courted by a new male, but be increasingly ready to accept the advances of a faithful ex. This will automatically penalize young males embarking upon their first breeding season, whether they're deceivers or not. The brood of naive first-year females would tend to be dominated by unfaithful fathers, but in the females' second and third years, faithful fathers have the advantage.
For simplicity, males have been talked about as either purely honest or thoroughly deceitful. In reality it is more probable that all males, indeed all individuals, are a little bit deceitful, in that they are programmed to take advantage of opportunities to exploit their mates. . . Males have more to gain from dishonesty than females, and we must expect that they will usually tend to do a bit less work than the females, and to be a bit more ready to abscond.
The he-man strategy:
The female resigns herself to not getting any help from the father and goes all-out for good genes. If the female can detect good genes in the male, she can benefit her own genes by allying them with good paternal genes. Chances are good that most of the females will agree with each other on which are the best males, since they all have the same information to go on. Therefore, these few lucky males will do most of the copulating. This is presumably what happened in elephant seals.
From the point of view of a female trying to pick good genes with which to ally her own, what is she looking for? One thing is evidence to survive. Obviously any potential mate who's courting her has proved his ability to survive at least into adulthood, but he has not necessarily proved that he can survive for much longer. A good policy for a female might be to go for older men. Whatever their shortcomings, they have at least proved that they can survive.
What other evidence? There are many possibilities. Perhaps strong muscles as evidence of ability to catch food, perhaps long legs as evidence of ability to run away from predators. One of the best things a mother can do for her genes is to make a son who will turn out in his turn to be an attractive he-man. . . one of the most desirable qualities a male can have in the eyes of a female is, quite simply, sexual attractiveness itself. Originally, then, females may be thought of as selecting males on the basis of obviously useful qualities like big muscles, but once such qualities became widely accepted as attractive among the females of the species, natural selection would continue to favor them simply because they were attractive.
A. Zahavi theorizes that this system, too, can be tricked. Genes that produce cost-effective false muscle are passed on until, by counter-selection, females become capable of differentiating false advantages from real ones. Therefore, it's not enough to look strong - one must also, demonstratably, be strong.
The birds of paradise story:
A slightly longer tail than usual was selected by females as a desirable qualitity in males. Tails just became longer and longer and longer until finally they became so grotesquely long that their manifest disadvantages started to outweigh the advantage of sexual attractiveness.
In nature, bright colors attract females. The female of a species is often drably colored, as she need not compete for males.
A fish story:
Fish reproduce by spewing reproductive cells into the water. The male is disadvantaged because his sperm are more easily diffused than the female's eggs. Since the male can't spawn first, he waits for the female to spawn. She does, and then takes off - a decision not available to the male fish, who can't leave the potential children to die.
-- if you wanted to change this, you would have to pull together a massive collusion attack to get male fish to release their sperm first, but the evolutionary incentive to cheat here is through the roof
Chapter 10 - reciprocity (all right)
Bird calls to warn of predators seem like an example of altruistic behavior, but there are two good selfish reasons for them. One is that the calling bird is trying to prevent his companions from making him a target; the other is that as long as all of the birds move at the same time, he stands a low chance of being picked out of the flock.
To reduce the risk of making the alarm call, birds have evolved alarm calls with acoustic properties that make the caller hard to locate.
Pronking gazelles jump around to let predators know that they're not old and unhealthy. "Chase someone else!" is what they're effectively saying.
Altruistic behavior in bees can be explained by the fact that the worker bees are sterile - their genes will never reproduce, so they're expendable - and that the unit of bee functionality is the hive.
In many species of social insects, workers essentially farm their queen, using her to make sisters. The optimal ratio for farming is 3 workers per drone, and that's extremely close to what researchers discovered when they looked at 20 different ant species. The queen's optimal ratio is 1 worker per drone, which is what the researchers found when they looked at species in which the queen was not dependent on same-species workers to care for her eggs.
Reciprocity is an ESS against cheating and can only be developed in species that can recognize individuals they've previously dealt with.
Cleaner fish, the fish that remove parasites from other fish, have nasty little mimics. These mimics dance around and trick the big fish into relaxing. When the big fish lets down its guard, the mimic takes a bite of its fin and runs away. Fortunately for the cleaner fish, however, the big fish have decided that the advantages the cleaner fish provides justify not immediately eating him.
For a meme, longetivity is not as important as fecundity.
Meme theory says that memes have their own pool - a meme pool - in which they compete for the limited resource of transmission time.
Replicators can't be expected to forego short-term selfish advantage for any reason.
-- this is why every ESS requires exploit protection
Foresight can be used to engineer artificial systems that triumph over short-term selfishness.
The book talks about the prisoner's dilemna over multiple iterations. In the experiment that was run, an initially cooperative strategy of retaliation had the most potential for a high score but could never win.
-- I wish I could have entered that competition with this strategy: initial cooperation / retaliation until the last round, where I pocket the betrayal points
-- people would have devised strategies to beat my strategy by betraying each other one move earlier until it finally reached "always betray", the only ESS for a prisoner's dilemna
-- oh: he talks about that exploit later and says that game theorists have a fix, which is that the length of the game is never revealed
Divorce is a zero-sum game for the participants and a nonzero-sum game for the lawyers, who make money based on the time they spend on the case.
The fig story:
Fig wasps can either pollinate fig flowers, which perpetuates the fig tree, or lay eggs in them, which perpetuates the wasp. If the wasp lays eggs in too many flowers and pollinates too few, the tree retaliates by cutting off the development of the fig, leaving the wasp's offspring to die.
Some genes mess with meiosis, "cheating" to beat their alelles.
Life/Dinner principle: drawing its name from the rabbit, who runs for his life, and the fox, who's just running for his dinner, this principle refers to the evolutionary advantage possessed by creatures who've needed to become experts in their game to offset significant costs of failure
The pig experiment:
Researchers taught pigs how to pull a lever on one side of their cage to dump food into the other side of the cage. They then put two pigs who knew the trick into the cage, and watched what happened. The pigs evolved a strategy where the weaker, subordinate pig would sit at the food trough while the dominant pig pulled the lever. It sounds counterintuitive until you realize that the weaker pig knows he won't get anything to eat if he pulls the lever while the dominant pig is in the trough.
Handicap theory of sexual selection:
1. Qualifying handicap (if you succeed with a handicap, you're better than someone who succeeds without it)
2. Revealing handicap (the handicap reveals some ability the other sex wouldn't ordinarily see)
3. Conditional handicap (you have to be a good choice to even develop this handicap)
4. Strategic choice handicap (you know your quality and can choose to grow handicaps for sexual selection)
It's based on four things:
1. Males vary in quality.
2. Females can't perceive males' qualities directly and must rely on male advertisement.
3. Males know their own quality and evolve strategies based on this.
4. Females evolve strategies they feel are most likely to beat males' strategies.
Out of this, what we want is an evolutionarily stable pair of strategies for male and female. What winds up happening is this:
1. Despite being able to advertise anything they want, males choose a level that correctly reflects their quality even if their quality is low - because the worse you are, the more your ads cost.
2. Despite being able to counter ads however they want, females usually end up believing the males.
-- this makes sense. What handicaps would I evolve?
Excessive strength
Overeducation
Expensive clothing [fake: I'd buy it for 50% off]
Expensive experiential hobbies (concerts, trips, culture, etc.)
Expensive social hobbies (anything I'd do repeatedly with friends that I wouldn't do alone)
Enough irresponsibility to make things interesting
Robert Ardrey - The Social Contract
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson - Sex, Evolution, and Behavior
Donald Symons - The Evolution of Human Sexuality
