Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Evolutionary Self Interest is Relative

David Sloan Wilson and Omar Eldakar have a neat discussion on group selection in evolutionary biology.   They point out that relative fitness is the key to assessing evolutionary success, absolute fitness be damned, which fits in nicely with my hypothesis that relative utility is more relevant than absolute utility functions.  They make this explicit around 21:45-24:15, which is snipped here:



Wilson points out a  great quote in there from AJ Kane: "Only the simplest minds can think that in any great controversy, one side was mere folly."  I think that's important to remember, and makes for more thoughtful debates, because if you habitually caricature the other side as indefensible you clearly are missing their essential if not most common arguments.

5 comments:

Tom Anichini said...

Eric, this Matt Cutts post explains it pretty well.

Cheers.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/start-youtube-video-minutes-seconds/

spandrell said...

That's very insightful. You're more likely to be killed by a fellow human than by some wild beast. And reproduction depends mostly on your local status.

"All politics are local", and all that. Also the cause of many upheavals during political history.

Mercury said...

I had no idea the concept of relative fitness was controversial in evolutionary theory. After all, you only have to be faster than everyone else (you vs. the rest of the group or your group vs. other groups) to win the race. Although I guess this assumes that at least one group/mating pair is *sufficiently* fit. Similarly, “survival of the fittest” only means survival of the smartest, fastest or strongest if those attributes are an advantage in a given environment. Sometimes they aren’t.

But I’m not so sure that human decisions motivated by envy and status anxiety always equal a relative fitness strategy as these guys seem to imply. I’m sure they mean “all else being equal” but all else never is equal in the real world and often people play the “mine’s bigger” game in trivial areas of their lives at the expense of other areas that they should be paying more attention to.

Plus, there’s a big difference between a windfall that makes you $1mm richer…but also everyone else $2mm richer in the 1. neighborhood and 2. the world.

Show me the guy who bought the crappiest house in a nice neighborhood and I’ll show you a good candidate for your sister to marry.

Hal Morris said...

Relative fitness is all that matters, assuming you are in a zero-sum game vs all the other members of your species.

If you magically make yourself X% less capable of surviving cold weather, and everyone else 2x% less capable of surviving, and the right level of freeze happens to occur, then everyone is dead including you. Or think of it in terms of resistance to some disease, and an epidemic of that disease rolls in. Guess what we're talking about here? EXTERNALITIES.

Also, if the lotto paid off in actual goods, rather than inflatable money it would be a different matter. Especially if you were in a 3rd world country in a famine and the goods were food.

This seems directly analogous to a flaw in some forms of economic thinking -- zero sum thinking, and thinking as if there were no externalities (because they f**k up the theory and leave you with no recourse but to look at actual events).

Tel said...

"Show me the guy who bought the crappiest house in a nice neighborhood and I’ll show you a good candidate for your sister to marry."

In Australia there's a bit of well known wisdom about how to make a profit in real estate and it goes like this, "Buy the worst house in the best street."

The reasoning should be obvious, this is the house that has most opportunity for capital gain, and any investment in renovation will get the highest return.

"If you magically make yourself X% less capable of surviving cold weather, and everyone else 2x% less capable of surviving, and the right level of freeze happens to occur, then everyone is dead including you."

You mean if the price of heating oil goes up? Surely that would never happen... and if it did happen, no one would be happy about it.