The Selfish Gene Read online

  The important characteristic of an evolutionarily stable strategy, you will remember from earlier chapters, is that it carries on doing well when it is already numerous in the population of strategies. To say that Tit for Tat, say, is an ESS, would be to say that Tit for Tat does well in a climate dominated by Tit for Tat. This could be seen as a special kind of 'robustness'. As evolutionists we are tempted to see it as the only kind of robustness that matters. Why does it matter so much? Because, in the world of Darwinism, winnings are not paid out as money; they are paid out as offspring. To a Darwinian, a successful strategy is one that has become numerous in the population of strategies. For a strategy to remain successful, it must do well specifically when it is numerous, that is in a climate dominated by copies of itself.

  Axelrod did, as a matter of fact, run a third round of his tournament as natural selection might have run it, looking for an ESS. Actually he didn't call it a third round, since he didn't solicit new entries but used the same 63 as for Round 2. I find it convenient to treat it as Round 3, because I think it differs from the two 'round-robin' tournaments more fundamentally than the two round-robin tournaments differ from each other.

  Axelrod took the 63 strategies and threw them again into the computer to make 'generation 1' of an evolutionary succession. In 'generation 1', therefore, the 'climate' consisted of an equal representation of all 63 strategies. At the end of generation 1, winnings to each strategy were paid out, not as 'money' or 'points', but as offsprings identical to their (asexual) parents. As generations went by, some strategies became scarcer and eventually went extinct. Other strategies became more numerous. As the proportions changed, so, consequently, did the 'climate' in which future moves of the game took place.

  Eventually, after about 1000 generations, there were no further changes in proportions, no further changes in climate. Stability was reached. Before this, the fortunes of the various strategies rose and fell, just as in my computer simulation of the Cheats, Suckers, and Grudgers. Some of the strategies started going extinct from the start, and most were extinct by generation 200. Of the nasty strategies, one or two of them began by increasing in frequency, but their prosperity, like that of Cheat in my simulation, was short-lived. The only nasty strategy to survive beyond generation 200 was one called Harrington. Harrington's fortunes rose steeply for about the first 150 generations. Thereafter it declined rather gradually, approaching extinction around generation 1,000. Harrington did well temporarily for the same reason as my original Cheat did. It exploited softies like Tit for Two Tats (too forgiving) while these were still around. Then, as the softies were driven extinct, Harrington followed them, having no easy prey left. The field was free for 'nice' but 'provocable' strategies like Tit for Tat.

  Tit for Tat itself, indeed, came out top in five out of six runs of Round 3, just as it had in Rounds 1 and 2. Five other nice but provocable strategies ended up nearly as successful (frequent in the population) as Tit for Tat; indeed, one of them won the sixth run. When all the nasties had been driven extinct, there was no way in which any of the nice strategies could be distinguished from Tit for Tat or from each other, because they all, being nice, simply played cooperate against each other.

  A consequence of this indistinguishability is that, although Tit for Tat seems like an ESS, it is strictly not a true ESS. To be an ESS, remember, a strategy must not be invadable, when it is common, by a rare, mutant strategy. Now it is true that Tit for Tat cannot be invaded by any nasty strategy, but another nice strategy is a different matter. As we have just seen, in a population of nice strategies they will all look and behave exactly like one another: they will all cooperate all the time. So any other nice strategy, like the totally saintly Always Cooperate, although admittedly it will not enjoy a positive selective advantage over Tit for Tat, can nevertheless drift into the population without being noticed. So technically Tit for Tat is not an ESS.

  You might think that since the world stays just as nice, we could as well regard Tit for Tat as an ESS. But alas, look what happens next. Unlike Tit for Tat, Always Cooperate is not stable against invasion by nasty strategies such as Always Defect. Always Defect does well against Always Cooperate, since it gets the high 'Temptation' score every time. Nasty strategies like Always Defect will come in to keep down the numbers of too nice strategies like Always Cooperate.

  But although Tit for Tat is strictly speaking not a true ESS, it is probably fair to treat some sort of mixture of basically nice but retaliatory 'Tit for Tat-like' strategies as roughly equivalent to an ESS in practice. Such a mixture might include a small admixture of nastiness. Robert Boyd and Jeffrey Lorberbaum, in one of the more interesting follow-ups to Axelrod's work, looked at a mixture of Tit for Two Tats and a strategy called Suspicious Tit for Tat. Suspicious Tit for Tat is technically nasty, but it is not very nasty. It behaves just like Tit for Tat itself after the first move, but-this is what makes it technically nasty-it does defect on the very first move of the game. In a climate entirely dominated by Tit for Tat, Suspicious Tit for Tat does not prosper, because its initial defection triggers an unbroken run of mutual recrimination. When it meets a Tit for Two Tats player, on the other hand, Tit for Two Tats's greater forgivingness nips this recrimination in the bud. Both players end the game with at least the 'benchmark', all C, score and with Suspicious Tit for Tat scoring a bonus for its initial defection. Boyd and Lorberbaum showed that a population of Tit for Tat could be invaded, evolutionarily speaking, by a mixture of Tit for Two Tats and Suspicious Tit for Tat, the two prospering in each other's company. This combination is almost certainly not the only combination that could invade in this kind of way. There are probably lots of mixtures of slightly nasty strategies with nice and very forgiving strategies that are together capable of invading. Some might see this as a mirror for familiar aspects of human life.

  Axelrod recognized that Tit for Tat is not strictly an ESS, and he therefore coined the phrase 'collectively stable strategy' to describe it. As in the case of true ESSs, it is possible for more than one strategy to be collectively stable at the same time. And again, it is a matter of luck which one comes to dominate a population. Always Defect is also stable, as well as Tit for Tat. In a population that has already come to be dominated by Always Defect, no other strategy does better. We can treat the system as bistable, with Always Defect being one of the stable points, Tit for Tat (or some mixture of mostly nice, retaliatory strategies) the other stable point. Whichever stable point comes to dominate the population first will tend to stay dominant.

  But what does 'dominate' mean, in quantitative terms? How many Tit for Tats must there be in order for Tit for Tat to do better than Always Defect? That depends upon the detailed payoffs that the banker has agreed to shell out in this particular game. All we can say in general is that there is a critical frequency, a knife-edge. On one side of the knife-edge the critical frequency of Tit for Tat is exceeded, and selection will favour more and more Tit for Tats. On the other side of the knife-edge the critical frequency of Always Defect is exceeded, and selection will favour more and more Always Defects. We met the equivalent of this knife-edge, you will remember, in the story of the Grudgers and Cheats in Chapter 10.

  It obviously matters, therefore, on which side of the knife-edge a population happens to start. And we need to know how it might happen that a population could occasionally cross from one side of the knife-edge to the other. Suppose we start with a population already sitting on the Always Defect side. The few Tit for Tat individuals don't meet each other often enough to be of mutual benefit. So natural selection pushes the population even further towards the Always Defect extreme. If only the population could just manage, by random drift, to get itself over the knife-edge, it could coast down the slope to the Tit for Tat side, and everyone would do much better at the banker's (or 'nature's') expense. But of course populations have no group will, no group intention or purpose. They cannot strive to leap the knife-edge. They will cross it only if the undirected forces of nature
happen to lead them across.

  How could this happen? One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'. We can do a little better than 'chance'. We can try to think of practical ways in which a minority of Tit for Tat individuals might happen to increase to the critical mass. This amounts to a quest for possible ways in which Tit for Tat individuals might happen to cluster together in sufficient numbers that they can all benefit at the banker's expense.

  This line of thought seems to be promising, but it is rather vague. How exactly might mutually resembling individuals find themselves clustered together, in local aggregations? In nature, the obvious way is through genetic relatedness-kinship. Animals of most species are likely to find themselves living close to their sisters, brothers and cousins, rather than to random members of the population. This is not necessarily through choice. It follows automatically from 'viscosity' in the population. Viscosity means any tendency for individuals to continue living close to the place where they were born. For instance, through most of history, and in most parts of the world (though not, as it happens, in our modern world), individual humans have seldom strayed more than a few miles from their birthplace. As a result, local clusters of genetic relatives tend to build up. I remember visiting a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, and being struck by the fact that almost everyone on the island had the most enormous jug-handle ears. This could hardly have been because large ears suited the climate (there are strong offshore winds). It was because most of the inhabitants of the island were close kin of one another.

  Genetic relatives will tend to be alike not just in facial features but in all sorts of other respects as well. For instance, they will tend to resemble each other with respect to genetic tendencies to play-or not to play-Tit for Tat. So even if Tit for Tat is rare in the population as a whole, it may still be locally common. In a local area, Tit for Tat individuals may meet each other often enough to prosper from mutual cooperation, even though calculations that take into account only the global frequency in the total population might suggest that they are below the 'knife-edge' critical frequency.

  If this happens, Tit for Tat individuals, cooperating with one another in cosy little local enclaves, may prosper so well that they grow from small local clusters into larger local clusters. These local clusters may grow so large that they spread out into other areas, areas that had hitherto been dominated, numerically, by individuals playing Always Defect. In thinking of these local enclaves, my Irish island is a misleading parallel because it is physically cut off. Think, instead, of a large population in which there is not much movement, so that individuals tend to resemble their immediate neighbours more than their more distant neighbours, even though there is continuous interbreeding all over the whole area.

  Coming back to our knife-edge, then, Tit for Tat could surmount it. All that is required is a little local clustering, of a sort that will naturally tend to arise in natural populations. Tit for Tat has a built-in gift, even when rare, for crossing the knife-edge over to its own side. It is as though there were a secret passage underneath the knife-edge. But that secret passage contains a one-way valve: there is an asymmetry. Unlike Tit for Tat, Always Defect, though a true ESS, cannot use local clustering to cross the knife-edge. On the contrary. Local clusters of Always Defect individuals, far from prospering by each other's presence, do especially badly in each other's presence. Far from quietly helping one another at the expense of the banker, they do one another down. Always Defect, then, unlike Tit for Tat, gets no help from kinship or viscosity in the population.

  So, although Tit for Tat may be only dubiously an ESS, it has a sort of higher-order stability. What can this mean? Surely, stable is stable. Well, here we are taking a longer view. Always Defect resists invasion for a long time. But if we wait long enough, perhaps thousands of years, Tit for Tat will eventually muster the numbers required to tip it over the knife-edge, and the population will flip. But the reverse will not happen. Always Defect, as we have seen, cannot benefit from clustering, and so does not enjoy this higher-order stability.

  Tit for Tat, as we have seen, is 'nice', meaning never the first to defect, and 'forgiving', meaning that it has a short memory for past misdeeds. I now introduce another of Axelrod's evocative technical terms. Tit for Tat is also 'not envious'. To be envious, in Axelrod's terminology, means to strive for more money than the other player, rather than for an absolutely large quantity of the banker's money. To be non-envious means to be quite happy if the other player wins just as much money as you do, so long as you both thereby win more from the banker. Tit for Tat never actually 'wins' a game. Think about it and you'll see that it cannot score more than its 'opponent' in any particular game because it never defects except in retaliation. The most it can do is draw with its opponent. But it tends to achieve each draw with a high, shared score. Where Tit for Tat and other nice strategies are concerned, the very word 'opponent' is inappropriate. Sadly, however, when psychologists set up games of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma between real humans, nearly all players succumb to envy and therefore do relatively poorly in terms of money. It seems that many people, perhaps without even thinking about it, would rather do down the other player than cooperate with the other player to do down the banker. Axelrod's work has shown what a mistake this is.

  It is only a mistake in certain kinds of game. Games theorists divide games into 'zero sum' and 'nonzero sum'. A zero sum game is one in which a win for one player is a loss for the other. Chess is zero sum, because the aim of each player is to win, and this means to make the other player lose. Prisoner's Dilemma, however, is a nonzero sum game. There is a banker paying out money, and it is possible for the two players to link arms and laugh all the way to the bank.

  This talk of laughing all the way to the bank reminds me of a delightful line from Shakespeare:

  The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

  2 Henry VI

  In what are called civil 'disputes' there is often in fact great scope for cooperation. What looks like a zero sum confrontation can, with a little goodwill, be transformed into a mutually beneficial nonzero sum game. Consider divorce. A good marriage is obviously a nonzero sum game, brimming with mutual cooperation. But even when it breaks down there are all sorts of reasons why a couple could benefit by continuing to cooperate, and treating their divorce, too, as nonzero sum. As if child welfare were not a sufficient reason, the fees of two lawyers will make a nasty dent in the family finances. So obviously a sensible and civilized couple begin by going together to see one lawyer, don't they?

  Well, actually no. At least in England and, until recently, in all fifty states of the USA, the law, or more strictly-and significantly-the lawyers' own professional code, doesn't allow them to. Lawyers must accept only one member of a couple as a client. The other person is turned from the door, and either has no legal advice at all or is forced to go to another lawyer. And that is when the fun begins. In separate chambers but with one voice, the two lawyers immediately start referring to 'us' and 'them'. 'Us', you understand, doesn't mean me and my wife; it means me and my lawyer against her and her lawyer. When the case comes to court, it is actually listed as 'Smith versus Smith'! It is assumed to be adversarial, whether the couple feel adversarial or not, whether or not they have specifically agreed that they want to be sensibly amicable. And who benefits from treating it as an 'I win, you lose' tussle? The chances are, only the lawyers.

  The hapless couple have been dragged into a zero sum game. For the lawyers, however, the case of Smith v. Smith is a nice fat nonzero sum game, with the Smiths providing the payoffs and the two professionals milking their clients' joint account in elaborately coded cooperation. One way in which they cooperate is to make proposals that they both know the other side will not accept. This prompts a counter proposal that, again, both know is unacceptable. And so it goes on. Every letter, every t
elephone call exchanged between the cooperating 'adversaries' adds another wad to the bill. With luck, this procedure can be dragged out for months or even years, with costs mounting in parallel. The lawyers don't get together to work all this out. On the contrary, it is ironically their scrupulous separateness that is the chief instrument of their cooperation at the expense of the clients. The lawyers may not even be aware of what they are doing. Like the vampire bats that we shall meet in a moment, they are playing to well-ritualized rules. The system works without any conscious overseeing or organizing. It is all geared to forcing us into zero sum games. Zero sum for the clients, but very much nonzero sum for the lawyers.

  What is to be done? The Shakespeare option is messy. It would be cleaner to get the law changed. But most parliamentarians are drawn from the legal profession, and have a zero sum mentality. It is hard to imagine a more adversarial atmosphere than the British House of Commons. (The law courts at least preserve the decencies of debate. As well they might, since 'my learned friend and I' are cooperating very nicely all the way to the bank.) Perhaps well-meaning legislators and, indeed, contrite lawyers should be taught a little game theory. It is only fair to add that some lawyers play exactly the opposite role, persuading clients who are itching for a zero sum fight that they would do better to reach a nonzero sum settlement out of court.

  What about other games in human life? Which are zero sum and which nonzero sum? And-because this is not the same thing- which aspects of life do we perceive as zero or nonzero sum? Which aspects of human life foster 'envy', and which foster cooperation against a 'banker'? Think, for instance, about wage-bargaining and 'differentials'. When we negotiate our pay-rises, are we motivated by 'envy', or do we cooperate to maximize our real income? Do we assume, in real life as well as in psychological experiments, that we are playing a zero sum game when we are not? I simply pose these difficult questions. To answer them would go beyond the scope of this book.