the benefits others may derive from the actions of the ethical egoist are accidental, and not ethical.

Volunteering as Red Queen mechanism for cooperation in public goods games.

Institute for Mathematics, University of Vienna, Strudlhofgasse 4, A-1090 Vienna, Austria.

The evolution of cooperation among nonrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and social sciences. Reciprocal altruism fails to provide a solution if interactions are not repeated often enough or groups are too large. Punishment and reward can be very effective but require that defectors can be traced and identified. Here we present a simple but effective mechanism operating under full anonymity. Optional participation can foil exploiters and overcome the social dilemma. In voluntary public goods interactions, cooperators and defectors will coexist. We show that this result holds under very diverse assumptions on population structure and adaptation mechanisms, leading usually not to an equilibrium but to an unending cycle of adjustments (a Red Queen type of evolution). Thus, voluntary participation offers an escape hatch out of some social traps. Cooperation can subsist in sizable groups even if interactions are not repeated, defectors remain anonymous, players have no memory, and assortment is purely random.

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Recap:

Sustainable human cooperation has to be voluntary. Folks need to be able to opt out of paying for social engineering and redistributive programs. When folks are left free to withdraw their resources from altruistic schemes, cooperation can exist. If this exit option is disallowed -- if folks are made to pay for things in which they don't believe -- then human cooperation goes extinct.

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The evolution of cooperation and altruism--a general framework and a classification of models.

Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Biophore, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. ll316@cam.ac.uk

One of the enduring puzzles in biology and the social sciences is the origin and persistence of intraspecific cooperation and altruism in humans and other species. Hundreds of theoretical models have been proposed and there is much confusion about the relationship between these models. To clarify the situation, we developed a synthetic conceptual framework that delineates the conditions necessary for the evolution of altruism and cooperation. We show that at least one of the four following conditions needs to be fulfilled: direct benefits to the focal individual performing a cooperative act; direct or indirect information allowing a better than random guess about whether a given individual will behave cooperatively in repeated reciprocal interactions; preferential interactions between related individuals; and genetic correlation between genes coding for altruism and phenotypic traits that can be identified. When one or more of these conditions are met, altruism or cooperation can evolve if the cost-to-benefit ratio of altruistic and cooperative acts is greater than a threshold value. The cost-to-benefit ratio can be altered by coercion, punishment and policing which therefore act as mechanisms facilitating the evolution of altruism and cooperation. All the models proposed so far are explicitly or implicitly built on these general principles, allowing us to classify them into four general categories.

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Recap:

Human cooperation requires one of four things, in order to sustainably exist:

1. utility/profit (direct benefit to cooperators)

2. trade (investment information about the cooperative reciprocity, or the value, that others produce to trade with us)

3. kinship (interactions between related individuals)

4. discrimination based on someone's genetics

All cooperation not based on one of these four things will fail.

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Probabilistic participation in public goods games.

Graduate School of Engineering, Soka University, Tokyo, Japan. tsasaki@soka.ac.jp

Voluntary participation in public goods games (PGGs) has turned out to be a simple but effective mechanism for promoting cooperation under full anonymity. Voluntary participation allows individuals to adopt a risk-aversion strategy, termed loner. A loner refuses to participate in unpromising public enterprises and instead relies on a small but fixed pay-off. This system leads to a cyclic dominance of three pure strategies, cooperators, defectors and loners, but at the same time, there remain two considerable restrictions: the addition of loners cannot stabilize the dynamics and the time average pay-off for each strategy remains equal to the pay-off of loners. Here, we introduce probabilistic participation in PGGs from the standpoint of diversification of risk, namely simple mixed strategies with loners, and prove the existence of a dynamical regime in which the restrictions ono longer hold. Considering two kinds of mixed strategies associated with participants (cooperators or defectors) and non-participants (loners), we can recover all basic evolutionary dynamics of the two strategies: dominance; coexistence; bistability; and neutrality, as special cases depending on pairs of probabilities. Of special interest is that the expected pay-off of each mixed strategy exceeds the pay-off of loners at some interior equilibrium in the coexistence region.

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Recap:

The individual right of freedom to be a non-participating loner is required for sustainable human cooperation, though cooperators can achieve higher expected pay-offs than loners can -- proving that while the right not to trade with others is a metaphysical necessity for sustainable human cooperation, trade is still good for man on Earth.

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A new consequence of Simpson's paradox: stable cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemma from populations of individualistic learners.

Department of Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdomn. n.chater@ucl.ac.uk

Theories of choice in economics typically assume that interacting agents act individualistically and maximize their own utility. Specifically, game theory proposes that rational players should defect in one-shot prisoners' dilemmas (PD). Defection also appears to be the inevitable outcome for agents who learn by reinforcement of past choices, because whatever the other player does, defection leads to greater reinforcement on each trial. In a computer simulation and 4 experiments, the authors show that, apparently paradoxically, when players' choices are correlated by an exogenous factor (here, the cooperativeness of the specific PD chosen), people obtain greater average reinforcement for cooperating, which can sustain cooperation. This effect arises from a well-known statistical paradox, Simpson's paradox. The authors speculate that this effect may be relevant to aspects of real-world human cooperative behavior.

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Recap:

Folks in the real world cooperate rationally because it maximizes value. Early conclusions from Prisoner's Dilemma games (where you supposedly get less jail time if you "rat-out" your partner in the game) are spurious conclusions stemming from scope-violating statistical artifacts (artifacts of the experimental process).

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The evolution of prompt reaction to adverse ties.

COMO, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. svsegbro@vub.ac.be

BACKGROUND: In recent years it has been found that the combination of evolutionary game theory with population structures modelled in terms of dynamical graphs, in which individuals are allowed to sever unwanted social ties while keeping the good ones, provides a viable solution to the conundrum of cooperation. It is well known that in reality individuals respond differently to disadvantageous interactions. Yet, the evolutionary mechanism determining the individuals' willingness to sever unfavourable ties remains unclear.

RESULTS: We introduce a novel way of thinking about the joint evolution of cooperation and social contacts. The struggle for survival between cooperators and defectors leads to an arms race for swiftness in adjusting social ties, based purely on a self-regarding, individual judgement. Since defectors are never able to establish social ties under mutual agreement, they break adverse ties more rapidly than cooperators, who tend to evolve stable and long-term relations. Ironically, defectors' constant search for partners to exploit leads to heterogeneous networks that improve the survivability of cooperators, compared to the traditional homogenous population assumption.

CONCLUSION: When communities face the prisoner's dilemma, swift reaction to adverse ties evolves when competition is fierce between cooperators and defectors, providing an evolutionary basis for the necessity of individuals to adjust their social ties. Our results show how our innate resilience to change relates to mutual agreement between cooperators and how "loyalty" or persistent social ties bring along an evolutionary disadvantage, both from an individual and group perspective.

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Recap:

Allowing folks to sever their ties -- to voluntarily "non-participate" or to be a strategic loner -- is required for human cooperation. Looters, moochers, cheats, and defectors are never able to establish non-coercive social ties -- but trading partners, using self-regarding individual judgement, can make such ties. Thus, in a free market, looters, moochers, cheats, and defectors run out of victims -- and productive human trade dominates, leading to a constantly-increasing standard of living.

Party loyalty -- or loyalty to people like Rev. Wright (or to their specific type of uprised, tyranny-of-the-victim thinking) -- is inherently destructive (to both individuals and groups); though it may be transiently sustained by use of the institutionalized force and fraud of a totalitarian dictatorship.

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Human altruism: economic, neural, and evolutionary perspectives.

Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, Bluemlisalpstrasse 10, 8006 Zuerich, Switzerland. efehr@iew.unizh.ch

Human cooperation represents a spectacular outlier in the animal world. Unlike other creatures, humans frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. Experimental evidence and evolutionary models suggest that strong reciprocity, the behavioral propensity for altruistic punishment and altruistic rewarding, is of key importance for human cooperation. Here, we review both evidence documenting altruistic punishment and altruistic cooperation and recent brain imaging studies that combine the powerful tools of behavioral game theory with neuroimaging techniques. These studies show that mutual cooperation and the punishment of defectors activate reward related neural circuits, suggesting that evolution has endowed humans with proximate mechanisms that render altruistic behavior psychologically rewarding.

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Recap:

Because of evolution, it feels good to cooperate and trade value for value with others (just like investing does). However, just because it feels good, doesn't mean you should give until it hurts. You have got to first create wealth for yourself, before you should ever think about investing anything in others. Otherwise, you're just a Schmoo.

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Altruism may arise from individual selection.

Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganés, Madrid, Spain. anxo@math.uc3m.es

The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people they will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle. Altruism, the capacity to perform costly acts that confer benefits on others, is at the core of cooperative behavior. Behavioral experiments show that humans have a predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish non-cooperators at personal cost (so-called strong reciprocity) which, according to standard evolutionary game theory arguments, cannot arise from selection acting on individuals. This has led to the suggestion of group and cultural selection as the only mechanisms that can explain the evolutionary origin of human altruism. We introduce an agent-based model inspired on the Ultimatum Game, that allows us to go beyond the limitations of standard evolutionary game theory and show that individual selection can indeed give rise to strong reciprocity. Our results are consistent with the existence of neural correlates of fairness and in good agreement with observations on humans and monkeys.

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Recap:

The Spaniards above are mistaken. The core of cooperation is the expectation of value of investing in others. Altruism, which is about sacrifice -- not about investment -- has nothing to do with cooperation. Altruism is a "unilateral" decision or process -- not a reciprocal one. 

Reality is best depicted by the Ultimatum Game, where one person slices the pie, and the other person gets to pick who gets what (and the original person gets to call off the whole deal, if treated "unfairly"). "I slice, you pick" is nothing other than the market-based trade of mutual consent. In a free market, if folks are shysters -- they go broke (because other traders vote against them with their dollars).

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Evolutionary games and population dynamics: maintenance of cooperation in public goods games.

Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, One Brattle Square, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. christoph_hauert@harvard.edu

The emergence and abundance of cooperation in nature poses a tenacious and challenging puzzle to evolutionary biology. Cooperative behaviour seems to contradict Darwinian evolution because altruistic individuals increase the fitness of other members of the population at a cost to themselves. Thus, in the absence of supporting mechanisms, cooperation should decrease and vanish, as predicted by classical models for cooperation in evolutionary game theory, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and public goods games. Traditional approaches to studying the problem of cooperation assume constant population sizes and thus neglect the ecology of the interacting individuals. Here, we incorporate ecological dynamics into evolutionary games and reveal a new mechanism for maintaining cooperation. In public goods games, cooperation can gain a foothold if the population density depends on the average population payoff. Decreasing population densities, due to defection leading to small payoffs, results in smaller interaction group sizes in which cooperation can be favoured. This feedback between ecological dynamics and game dynamics can generate stable coexistence of cooperators and defectors in public goods games. However, this mechanism fails for pairwise Prisoner's Dilemma interactions and the population is driven to extinction. Our model represents natural extension of replicator dynamics to populations of varying densities.

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Recap:

Altruism is a morality of death. If fully practiced, it would lead to the extinction of mankind.

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Partner choice creates competitive altruism in humans.

Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. pjb46@cornell.edu

Reciprocal altruism has been the backbone of research on the evolution of altruistic behaviour towards non-kin, but recent research has begun to apply costly signalling theory to this problem. In addition to signalling resources or abilities, public generosity could function as a costly signal of cooperative intent, benefiting altruists in terms of (i) better access to cooperative relationships and (ii) greater cooperation within those relationships. When future interaction partners can choose with whom they wish to interact, this could lead to competition to be more generous than others. Little empirical work has tested for the possible existence of this 'competitive altruism'. Using a cooperative monetary game with and without opportunities for partner choice and signalling cooperative intent, we show here that people actively compete to be more generous than others when they can benefit from being chosen for cooperative partnerships, and the most generous people are correspondingly chosen more often as cooperative partners. We also found evidence for increased scepticism of altruistic signals when the potential reputational benefits for dishonest signalling were high. Thus, this work supports the hypothesis that public generosity can be a signal of cooperative intent, which people sometimes 'fake' when conditions permit it.

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Recap:

A free market is all about reputation. Shysters cannot ever dominate in a free market.

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Social evaluation-induced amylase elevation and economic decision-making in the dictator game in humans.

Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. taikitakahashi@gmail.com

OBJECTIVE: Little is known regarding the relationship between social evaluation-induced neuroendocrine responses and generosity in game-theoretic situations. Previous studies demonstrated that reputation formation plays a pivotal role in prosocial behavior. This study aimed to examine the relationships between a social evaluation-induced salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) response and generosity in the dictator game. The relationship is potentially important in neuroeconomics of altruism and game theory.

METHODS: We assessed sAA and allocated money in the dictator game in male students with and without social evaluation.

RESULTS Social evaluation-responders allocated significantly more money than controls; while there was no significant correlation between social evaluation-induced sAA elevation and the allocated money.

CONCLUSIONS: Social evaluation significantly increases generosity in the dictator game, and individual differences in trait characteristics such as altruism and reward sensitivity may be important determinants of generosity in the dictator game task.

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Recap:

When folks are free to trade and free to choose -- they try to do right by others (trade value for value).

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Evolution of cooperation with shared costs and benefits.

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA. squirrel@uic.edu

The quest to determine how cooperation evolves can be based on evolutionary game theory, in spite of the fact that evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) for most non-zero-sum games are not cooperative. We analyse the evolution of cooperation for a family of evolutionary games involving shared costs and benefits with a continuum of strategies from non-cooperation to total cooperation. This cost-benefit game allows the cooperator to share in the benefit of a cooperative act, and the recipient to be burdened with a share of the cooperator's cost. The cost-benefit game encompasses the Prisoner's Dilemma, Snowdrift game and Partial Altruism. The models produce ESS solutions of total cooperation, partial cooperation, non-cooperation and coexistence between cooperation and non-cooperation. Cooperation emerges from an interplay between the nonlinearities in the cost and benefit functions. If benefits increase at a decelerating rate and costs increase at an accelerating rate with the degree of cooperation, then the ESS has an intermediate level of cooperation. The game also exhibits non-ESS points such as unstable minima, convergent-stable minima and unstable maxima. The emergence of cooperative behaviour in this game represents enlightened self-interest, whereas non-cooperative solutions illustrate the Tragedy of the Commons. Games having either a stable maximum or a stable minimum have the property that small changes in the incentive structure (model parameter values) or culture (starting frequencies of strategies) result in correspondingly small changes in the degree of cooperation. Conversely, with unstable maxima or unstable minima, small changes in the incentive structure or culture can result in a switch from non-cooperation to total cooperation (and vice versa). These solutions identify when human or animal societies have the potential for cooperation and whether cooperation is robust or fragile.

=======================

Recap:

When it's a non-zero-sum game, like reality is, folks follow enlightened self-interest -- and choose based on costs and benefits, cooperating only to the extent that their created wealth allows. They can't cooperate without wealth or with "other-peoples' wealth" (like disproportionately taxing the top 5% of wage earners) -- because that leads to extinction.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 11/09, 4:44pm)

The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that people are pre-disposed to evaluate gains from exchange and respond to unsynchronized variance in resource availability through endogenous reciprocal trading relationships.

I use a variant of these models along with a new set of empirical estimates of the extent of war among both prehistoric and historic hunter-gatherers to derive an explicit measure of the importance of warfare in the evolution of human social behavior. This measure is the maximum degree of altruistic behavior—namely c*, the greatest cost borne by individuals in order to benefit fellow group members—that could have proliferated given the empirically likely extent of warfare during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. ...

For simplicity, I represent the altruistic behavior in question as the expression of a single allele and let individuals reproduce asexually; the model is readily extended to any form of vertical transmission, including cultural. ...

What is the maximum cost of altruism (c*) such that the group benefits would offset the within-group selection pressures against the altruists? ...

... note that c* = 0.03, for example, is a quite substantial cost, one that in the absence of intergroup competition would lead the fraction of altruists in a group to fall from 0.9 to 0.1 in just 150 generations. An illustration more directly related to the question of warfare is the following. Suppose that in every generation, a group is engaged in a war with probability ê = 2ä and that an altruistic "warrior" will die with certainty in a lost war and with probability 0.20 in a war in which the group prevails, while nonaltruistic members also die with certainty in lost wars but do not die in won wars. (These mortality assumptions are extremely unfavorable for the altruists.) Assuming the altruists have no reproductive advantages during peacetime, then c = 0.2ä ...

... if groups were as differentiated as these populations and as warlike as the Murngin, between-group competition could overcome very strong within-group selection against altruistic behavior. Even for groups similar to the more peaceful Anbara, quite costly forms of altruism could proliferate by this mechanism (c* = 0.029).

Largest cost (c*) for an altruistic trait to proliferate given estimates of genetic differentiation and mortality in intergroup hostilities (ä) among three Arnhem Land, Australian hunter-gatherer populations. ...