Group selection

I know this has been done to death, but still think we're not seeing the whole picture.

When an animal competes and loses the "fight" for survival its tempting to think that animal and its genetic contribution is lost.

But competing and losing is necessary for another individual to win.

Bacteria just growing on an infinite petri dish will not undergo adaptation because there is nothing to adapt to.

A central part of Free Market Theory is that competition drives down prices and encourages innovation.

So without the losers, the winners gain nothing.

And that means that a "loser" not contributing their DNA, is however helping select the DNA that does make it through to the next generation. And so if we rethink organism allegiance and undo the necessary connection between an organism and "their own" DNA, then it makes perfect sense for an organism to sacrifice "their" DNA to promote "another" DNA. Why can't their work to promote another's DNA?

Darwin's original definition of Evolution by Natural Selection was that variation was necessary for natural selection to work upon. SO that raises the question that, if you had a choice in the matter, would you be conservative and just chose the tried and tested genome or would you roll a dice and try to get lucky by taking on some variation. If no one did this then adaptation would stop and inevitable extinction for that genotype would occur as it eventually became poorly adapted to eventually changing conditions. Everyone who takes a risk, even if they lose, is actually contributing to adaptation.

Again in Darwin's original conception organisms kind of worked together as a species. Variation was then a necessary feature to give the species resilience to environmental change. But obviously too much variation could lead to new species and they could out compete the parent species. So at what point does variation benefit a species and at what point does it destroy the species.

This is an identical problem to the question of whether an individual that loses still becomes part of the survivors in some way.

Dawkin's would say that no genetic inheritance means no place in the future. But he is obsessed about "units." His description of being able to whittle out the strongest oarsmen from multiple trials of rowing teams points to his utter obsession with individuality and separate units. Its is wholly unrealistic as in reality properties are co-dependent and you cannot isolate components. The gene for a finger is of limited value without pairing with a hand. You can do as many team trials as you like, eventually you will discover that finger is just a really bad oarsman, that is until you pair it with hand when it suddenly and unpredictably becomes excellent. The magic exists in no chemical, gene, individual, or species but in their interactions.

So what remains is to rethink some modelling to try and capture how "fitness" really works and contributes to adaptation and evolution, and exactly how are we to understand the "elements" of this process. 

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Quick review of previous work.

So the classic Prisoner Dilemma gained wide exposure due to Robert Alexrod (1984) publication "The Evolution of Cooperation."

Alexrod explores "round robin" games where every participant meets every other participant.

In reality however we are more selective. Families and friends stick together. Territories and geological boundaries like rivers also limit movement. We never meet everyone.

This means individuals are more likely to meet "their own kind."

It is frowned upon to draw parallels between the natural world and humans (as this is see as prescriptive and is often used by the "right-wing" to argue that things "are like this, so we should keep them like this" an modification of which argument I use a lot "things are like this for a reason, understand that before changing it.") However much of human existence is about limiting or exposure to those we trust, share common traits with and punishing or excluding those who do not conform. In what follows this makes a lot of sense. 

Many games, like Prisoner Dilemma only work when players conform to the same winning strategy. Prisoner Dilemma however is designed in such a way that the very best outcome for an individual cheating. In a community which works together and shares the results the temptation is just to avoid work and take the profits all the same. Capitalism is built upon this cheating strategy, where the majority of people are tricked or forced into working, while a small minority cream off the profits. Normally we punish the cheats, but if we don't and this strategy spreads then soon no-one is working and then there is nothing to share so everyone loses. As Capitalism spreads everyone is starting to lose.

I turned to exploring an old subject of tail flagging. Many herbivorous animals that feed in herds have a conspicuous white rump and tail that they flash to signal to predators that they have seen the predator. This deters the predator from wasting energy.

The tail flagging can also distract the predator by drawing it attention. Now this strategy only works in a herd. Standing up to attract a predator is risky, but if everyone does it then over time you will benefit more than you lose.

In mobility is limited then cheats are rare. But variation always risks creating a cheat in the heart of the community. Cheats emerging within a flagging community do extremely well. They are surrounded by altruistic individuals tail flagging, and if they never tail flag then they got all the benefits of protection from predators without any costs. Their cheat genes will spread far.

Now I did a model that compared the benefits of the strategies across whole population. What was interesting is that in no situation did the individual benefit from switching to a flagging strategy. It always increases the risk of being attacked for the individual.

However because individuals in altruistic herds do so spectacularly well compared with their cheating counterparts, the total benefit for flaggers far outweighed the benefits for the cheats as a whole.

So we have this strange situation where flaggers do best overall, but never the less each individual cheat does better than any flagger. As a result it has been noted that cheats will eventually prosper and take over.

But with one problem. If populations are patchy, and mobility and probability of natural arising of cheating is low, then cheats will quickly overwhelm any population they occur in and destroy any benefit for cheating. Cheats will quickly wipe themselves out!

Given that altruistic individuals do so much better than cheats, the arising of a small family of altruists will quickly produce multiple spin off populations that if rapidly isolated will take back places decimated by cheats.

At least this is how it seems. Altruism is not doomed, but is actually expected in populations with enough protection from the free spread of individualistic "Dawkinsian" type strategies.

I say Dawkinsian because his "selfish gene" is based upon exactly the argument that the free spread of self serving strategies will always defeat collective strategies. yet for this to be true, you have to make certain absurd assumption like genes are free to flow and that genes are self contained and do not interact.

Anyway that was over 10 years ago and I have still not got round to modelled this properly yet.

Adding to this then are further questions about the "contribution" of each individual to the next population. For Dawkinsian it is just the genetic. But can we expand that to measure other contributions that "failed" genetic lines made in "setting up" the successful genomes.

To show that we would need to prove that the "path" taken by a particular passage of evolution was necessary for the result. In other words the result is not enough. It is well acknowledged that the loss of Dinosaurs for example created the opportunity for mammal evolution. While people look at birds to see the literal remnants of therapod dinosaurs, actually you can look at mammals too! Dinosaurs failing is intimately wrapped up in the actual form of mammal evolution!