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Social evolution and strategic thinking

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Abstract

Thinking about organisms as if they were rational agents which could choose their own phenotypic traits according to their fitness values is a common heuristic in the field of evolutionary theory. In a 1998 paper, however, Elliott Sober has emphasized several alleged shortcomings of this kind of analogical reasoning when applied to the analysis of social behaviors. According to him, the main flaw of this heuristic is that it proves to be a misleading tool when it is used for predicting the evolution of cooperation. Here, I show that these charges raised against the heuristic use of this analogy are misguided. I argue, contra Sober, that such a heuristic turns out to be a perfect predictive tool in all relevant contexts where cooperation can at least evolve. Moreover, I argue that it constitutes a powerful and sufficient methodological framework for the analysis of social evolution.

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Notes

  1. I will not consider Sober’s objection to HP in the context of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma (the second in the order of Sober’s original exposition).

  2. There are in fact two necessary (and jointly sufficient) conditions for a game to be an n-player linear prisoner dilemma. First, the global welfare of a group must be strictly proportional to the number of cooperator in the group, or b > c. And second, each player must get a higher payoff in choosing to cooperate rather than to defect, or b/n < c.

  3. It is unsatisfiable in the limit of an infinite population, since c > 0 in such a case.

  4. When the population is randomly structured in groups of size n, the probability of having i altruists in a given group is binomial.

  5. More precisely, a trait will be considered as being weakly altruistic when it provides a net benefit x to the actor, and when the benefit y that is provided by the actor to the recipient is such that y > x.

  6. For a more extended discussion of Nunney’s argument and its relevance for the debates on multilevel selection, see Okasha (2006) and Godfrey-Smith (2008).

  7. Note that it doesn’t matter for my argument how precisely the groups are defined, neither how there are formed. As Nunney has himself showed in his 1985 paper, the HP works equally well in viscous populations where groups are not well defined by clear boundaries. But see Godfrey-Smith (2008) for a very good treatment of these problems raised in evolutionary theory by the varieties of possible population structures.

  8. As Sober remarks, there is nevertheless a special case when P(C/C) − P(C/D) = 0, in which the HP and the CARF method gives exactly the same prediction, i.e. that defection will evolve in the population.

  9. Interestingly, this difficulty was alluded to by Sober himself and led him to specify the conclusion of his objection: “If the dominance principle is correct, selfishness is the rational act. But why buy the dominance principle? It is in conflict with some formulations of decision theory, as aficionados of the Newcomb problem well realize. I will not try to track this argument back to first principles, so perhaps my conclusion should be more conditional: if the dominance principle is a correct rule for rational deliberation, then the one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma provides a counter-example to the heuristic of personification” (Sober 1998, p. 411).

  10. In addition, one should note that we are not even bound to renounce to the dominance principle in adopting Jeffrey expected utility. In the second edition of The Logic of Decision (1983), Jeffrey has indeed amended his own model so that it could account for the dominance principle. This was done by the introduction of a new concept, that of “ratifiability”. Skyrms (1994) argues moreover that some variant of the concept of “ratifiability” is the appropriate generalization of that of “evolutionary stable strategy” (Maynard Smith 1982) in correlated evolutionary game theory. See Skyrms (1990) for further discussion of the concept of ratifiability and its significance in Jeffrey’s thought, and Skyrms (1994) for a discussion of this concept related to evolutionary game theory.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Philippe Huneman and Samir Okasha for their helpful comments on this article.

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  1. IHPST, Paris 1 Sorbonne-University, 13 rue du Four, Paris, 75006, France

    Johannes Martens

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Martens, J. Social evolution and strategic thinking. Biol Philos 26, 697–715 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-011-9276-0

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