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Overview

According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism’s reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics.

Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms “cooperation” and “altruism.” Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning.

The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674075535
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 05/07/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 414
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Martin A. Nowak is Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and Professor of Mathematics and Biology at Harvard University.

Sarah Coakley is Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity and Deputy Chair of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.

Heather D. Curtis is Associate Professor of Religion at Tufts University.

Dominic D. P. Johnson is Alistair Buchan Professor of International Relations at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Stephen M. Kosslyn is John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James, Emeritus, at Harvard University and Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 4: Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation



Evolution is based on a fierce competition between individuals and should therefore only reward selfish behavior. Every gene, every cell and every organism should be designed to promote its own evolutionary success at the expense of its competitors. Yet we observe cooperation on many levels of biological organization. Genes cooperate in genomes. Chromosomes cooperate in eukaryotic cells. Cells cooperate in multi-cellular organisms. There are many examples for cooperation among animals. Humans are the champions of cooperation: from hunter gatherer societies to nation states, cooperation is the decisive organizing principle of human society. No other life form on earth is engaged in the same complex games of cooperation and defection. The question how natural selection can lead to cooperative behavior has fascinated evolutionary biologists for several decades.

A cooperator is someone who pays a cost, c, for another individual to receive a benefit, b. A defector has no cost and does not deal out benefits. Cost and benefit are measured in terms of fitness. Reproduction can be genetic or cultural. In any mixed population, defectors have a higher average fitness than cooperators (Figure 4.1). Therefore, selection acts to increase the relative abundance of defectors. After some time co-operators vanish from the population. Remarkably, however, a population of only cooperators has the highest average fitness, while a population of only defectors has the lowest. Thus, natural selection constantly reduces the average fitness of the population. Fisher’s fundamental theorem, which states that average fitness increases under constant selection, does not apply here because selection is frequency dependent: the fitness of individuals depends on the frequency (=relative abundance) of cooperators in the population. We see that natural selection in well-mixed populations needs help for establishing cooperation.

Kin Selection

When J.ºB.ºS. Haldane remarked, “I will jump into the river to save two brothers or eight cousins,” he anticipated what became later known as Hamilton’s rule (Hamilton 1964). The ingenious idea is that natural selection can favor cooperation if the donor and the recipient of an altruistic act are genetic relatives. More precisely, Hamilton’s rule states that the coefficient of relatedness, r, must exceed the cost-to-benefit ratio of the altruistic act:

r > c/b (1)

Relatedness is defined as the probability of sharing a gene. The probability that two brothers share the same gene by descent is 1/2, while the same probability for cousins is 1/8. Hamilton’s theory became widely known as “kin selection” or “inclusive fitness” (Grafen 1985; Taylor 1992; Queller 1992; Frank 1998; West, Pen, and Griffin 2002; Foster, Wenseleers, and Ratnieks 2006). When evaluating the fitness of the behavior induced by a certain gene it is important to include the behavior’s effect on kin who might carry the same gene. Therefore, the “extended phenotype” of cooperative behavior is the consequence of “selfish genes” (Dawkins 1976; Wilson 1975).

Table of Contents

Contents Preface Introduction: Why Cooperation Makes a Difference - Sarah Coakley and Martin A. Nowak I. Evolutionary Cooperation in Historical Perspective 1. “Ready to Aid One Another” Darwin on Nature, God, and Cooperation - John Hedley Brooke 2. Altruism Morals from History - Thomas Dixon 3. Evolution and “Cooperation” in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century America Science, Theology, and the Social Gospel - Heather D. Curtis II. Mathematics, Game Theory, and Evolutionary Biology: The Evolutionary Phenomenon of Cooperation 4. Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation - Martin A. Nowak 5. Mathematical Models of Cooperation - Christoph Hauert 6. Economics and Evolution Complementary Perspectives on Cooperation - Johan Almenberg and Anna Dreber III. Psychology, Neuroscience, and Intentionality in the Cultural Evolution of Cooperation 7. Social Prosthetic Systems and Human Motivation One Reason Why Cooperation Is Fundamentally Human - Stephen M. Kosslyn 8. The Uniqueness of Human Cooperation Cognition, Cooperation, and Religion - Dominic D. P. Johnson 9. Self-Denial and Its Discontents Toward Clarification of the Intrapersonal Conflict between “Selfishness” and “Altruism” - Maurice Lee IV. Philosophy of Biology and Philosophy of Mind: Adjudicating the Significance of Evolutionary Cooperation 10. Unpredicted Outcomes in the Games of Life - Jeffrey P. Schloss 11. What Can Game Theory Tell Us about Humans? - Justin C. Fisher 12. How Not to Fight about Cooperation - Ned Hall V. Cooperation, Ethics, and Metaethics 13. The Moral Organ A Prophylaxis against the Whims of Culture - Marc D. Hauser 14. A New Case for Kantianism Evolution, Cooperation, and Deontological Claims in Human Society - Friedrich Lohmann 15. Nature, Normative Grammars, and Moral Judgments - Jean Porter 16. The Christian Love Ethic and Evolutionary “Cooperation” The Lessons and Limits of Eudaimonism and Game Theory - Timothy P. Jackson VI. Cooperation, Metaphysics, and God 17. Altruism, Normalcy, and God - Alexander Pruss 18. Evolution, Altruism, and God Why the Levels of Emergent Complexity Matter - Philip Clayton 19. The Problem of Evil and Cooperation - Michael Rota 20. Evolution, Cooperation, and Divine Providence - Sarah Coakley List of Contributors Index
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