Altruism

From NECSIWiki

I'll start with a provocative statement, and see where our community takes this:

The biosphere shows evidence of far more 'cooperation' than standard population genetics can account for. In particular,

1- Sex imposes a huge 2-fold cost in individual reproductive capacity, with only long-term benefits for the group. Yet sex is everywhere. How is it that living things don't succumb to the temptation to hermaphrodicity?

2- Aging and compulsory death have been revealed to be adaptations in the own right by genetic and breeding experiments. The effects of aging are wholly negative for the individual, and appear directly in the present; the benefits are long-term and accrue to a very broad population (sharing a food supply).

3- Predatory restraint was described exhaustively by Wynne-Edwards 40 years ago. The idea is that no population can afford to eat and reproduce unsustainably. He who trashes his ecosystem bequeaths a desert to his own offspring. But population genetic theories can never account for the evolution of reproductive restraint, because reproductive potential is taken to be the definition of fitness.

4- Diversity has been recognized as a mystery ever since Darwin. Every computer modeler learns this lesson early: diversity quickly collapses in evolutionary simulations, unless we do something to shore it up. Why is the biosphere as diverse as it is? Diversity is not an individual trait, and can only be accounted for with a theory that considers broad-scale interactions.

To the population geneticist, these are four great mysteries. But to the computer modeler, they are not all equal. Sex, predatory restraint, and diversity are difficult effects to account for with computer models. But #3, predatory restraint, pops out quite handily from even the crudest models of multilevel selection.

Perhaps this is a hint about how the biosphere works: First, there was individual competition. But very early in the history of life, living things were integrated into ecosystems. Trashing your ecosystem is maladaptive, ergo, unsustainable reproduction is verboten.

This changes everything. Once the need for reproductive restraint is established, the unrestrained competition for reproductive success is curbed. The level of selection is lifted from the individual to the entire population sharing a food supply.

-Josh Mitteldorf