Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene

Think in terms of what is in it for him. Speak in terms of other’s interest when influencing them. Even charity can be thought of as selfish, if they did it to feel good. 

Our brains have evolved to the point  where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. 

Dawkins seeks to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. This is important because altruism touches every aspect of our social lives: our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and generosity. 

"The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Our genes have survived millions of years in a highly competitive world. This entitled us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that the predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness."

We shall see that there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 

"This book is mainly intended to be interesting, but if you would like to extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, that to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from a biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish."

As a corollary to these remarks about teaching, it is a fallacy to suppose that genetically inherited traits are by definition fixed and unmodifiable. Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. 

Before going on, we need a definition. 

An entity, such as a baboon, is said to be truly altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another entity's welfare at the expense of its own. 

'Welfare' is defined as 'chances of survival', even if the effect on actual life and death prospects is so small as to seem negligible. 

We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator - molecules called DNA - but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range if machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways. 

Obviously lethal genes will tend to be removed from the gene pool. But equally obviously a late-acting lethal will be more stable in the gene pool than an early-acting lethal. 

A gene that is lethal in an older body may still be successful in the gene pool, provided its lethal effect does not show itself until after the body has had time to do at least some reproducing. 

For instance, a gene that made old bodies develop cancer could be passed on repeatedly because individuals would reproduce before they got cancer. On the other hand, a gene that made young adults develop fatal cancer would not be passed on to any offspring at all. 

According to the theory then, senile decay is simply a byproduct of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting. 

This theory leads us to some interesting speculations...

One way to increase the human lifespan would be to ban reproduction before a certain age, say 40. After some centuries the minimum age limit would be raised to 50, and so on. 

Secondly we could try to 'fool' genes into thinking that the body they are sitting in is younger than it really is. In practice this would mean identifying the chemical cues which take place during aging that cue late-acting lethal genes, and stopping the activation of them by simulating the chemical properties of a youthful body. 

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends. 

Brought up as we have by the 'good of the species' view of evolution, we naturally think first of liars and deceivers as belonging to a different species: predators, prey, parasites, and so on. 

However, we must expect lies and deceit, and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge. 

This will include individuals of the same species. 

As we shall see, we must even expect that children will deceive their parents, that husbands will cheat on their wives, and that brother will lie to brother. 

What is the selfish gene? It is not just a single physical bit if DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world. 

The selfish gene's goal is to become more numerous in the gene pool. 

This means that an action that appears altruistic is likely to be brought about by gene selfishness because a gene may be assisting or seeking to assist other replicas of itself in other survival machines. 

It is important to understand that close relatives possess a greater chance than average of sharing similar genes. This is what makes it clear why parents so often display altruism toward their young. 

Interesting page on calculating relatedness: 

It follows that you are just as likely to share the same amount if genes with your uncle as your grandfather. 

I am the only individual that any one of my selfish genes can be sure of. 

And although ideally a gene for individual selfishness can be displaced by a rival gene for altruistically saving at least one identical twin, two children or brothers, or at least four grandchildren, etc., the gene for an individual gene for selfishness has the enormous advantage of certainty of individual identity. 

The rival kin-altruistic gene runs the risk if making mistakes with identity, either accidental or engineered by cheats and parasites. 

The battle of the sexes:

Each individual wants as many surviving children as possible. The less he or she is obliged to invest in any one of those children, the more children he or she can have. The obvious way to achieve this desirable state of affairs is to induce your sexual partner to invest more than his fair share of resources in the child, leaving you free to have other children with other partners. 

This is a more desirable strategy for either sex, but is more difficult for the female to achieve. Since she starts by investing more than the male, in the form of her large food-rich egg, a mother is already at the moment of conception 'committed' to each child more deeply than the father is. 

More to the point, she would have to invest more than the father in the future in order to bring a new substitute child up to the same level of development. 

Let the population consist of individuals who adopt one of two strategies. Call the two strategies Sucker and Cheat. Suckers groom anyone who needs it, indiscriminately. Cheats accept altruism from suckers, but they never reciprocate or groom anyone else. If a single cheat mutates and reproduces unchecked, sucker genes will be driven to extinction. This is because no matter what the ratio in the population, cheats will always do better than suckers. 

When the proportion of cheats reaches about 90%, the average payoff for all individuals will be very low, but the cheats will still be doing better than the suckers. Even if the whole population declines toward extinction, there will never be any time when suckers do better than cheats. 

But now,

Suppose there is a third strategy called Grudger. Grudgers groom strangers and individuals who have previously groomed them. However if any individual cheats on them, they remember the incident and bear a grudge: they refuse to groom that individual in the future. 

Grudger does indeed turn out to be an evolutionary stable strategy against sucker and cheat, in the sense that, in a population consisting largely of grudgers, neither cheat nor sucker will invade. (Cheat is also an ESS however)

It is important to remember that although a population of cheats may be more likely to go extinct than a population of grudgers, this in no way effects its status as an evolutionary stable strategy. 

Memes:

If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of 'rival' memes. Memes compete for radio and television time, billboard space, and library shelf-space. 

A gene for celibacy is doomed to failure in the gene pool, except under very special circumstances such as we find with social insects. But still, a meme for celibacy can be successful in the meme pool. 

The medium of transmission of memes is spoken and written word, personal example, etc. 

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. 

We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in 3 generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, or in the color of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. 

But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common gene pool. 

Prisoners dilemma- page 262-268+

Nice guys finish first...

The winning strategy in Axelrod's simulation of 225 games if prisoner's dilemma was tit for tat. 

Tit for tat begins by cooperating on the first move, and afterward simply copies the previous move of the other player. 

Axelrod recognized two main categories of strategies which were submitted to the simulation: nice and mean. 

A nice strategy is defined as one that is never first to defect. 

Nasty or mean strategies are ones which defect at times, unprovoked. 

Of the 15, the top 8 scoring strategies were nice, and the bottom 7 were nasty strategies. 

Tit for tat is a forgiving strategy. It is swift to overlook misdeeds. It raps a defector over the knuckles instantly but, after that, lets bygones be bygones. 

Tit for tat and tit for two tats (allowing opponents two defections in a row before retaliating) were the two most effective in the long run because they avoid runs of mutual recrimination. 

It is important to consider how success for a strategy is dependent on the environment, or other strategies which happened to be submitted. 

The environment which tit for tat would be unsuccessful in would be if 13 out of 14 strategies were all nasty, and tit for tat was the only nice one. 

Tit for tat cannot score more than its opponent in a particular game, the most it can do is draw with its opponent. 

However, tit for tat wins because, in the long run, it wins by aggregating the losses of all other strategies against other strategies. 

The prisoner's dilemma is a nonzero sum game: there is a banker paying out money, and it is possible for both players to link arms and laugh all the way to the bank. 

Perceiving the world as zero sum invokes envy. 

Perceiving the world as nonzero sum invokes cooperation. 

Many situations in life are, as a matter of fact, equivalent to nonzero sum games. Nature often plays the role of 'banker', and individuals can therefor benefit from each others success. They do not have to do down rivals in order to benefit themselves.