Selfish altruism, fierce cooperation and the predator

Selfish altruism, fierce cooperation and the predator

Blog Article

This paper suggests a new way to think about a famous question: what explains cooperation in nature and in particular in humans? I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two ‘teammates’ in the presence of a predator (passing and shooting in two-on-one situations) is one of the fundamental conceptual building-blocks for understanding these phenomena because in such a situation the fact that life is packaged in many distinct enclosures (and not Twin Tent Bed in one big monolithic blob) can unfold its comparative advantage.I show how, in Door Handle the presence of a predator, cooperative equilibria emerge among entirely selfish teammates if we infinitesimally bias the lead player in the selfish direction or assign a computational burden on the predator due to the presence of a teammate.I argue that ‘predators’ are common in the biological jungle but also in everyday human settings.

Intuitively, this paper builds on the simple idea – a familiar one to a biologist observing the natural world but perhaps less so to social scientists – that everybody has enemies.