CSflim

Certainly, running around "spreading your seed" with every possible partner, will ensure that you have more offspring, but what is important is that these offspring survive. By practicing monogamy, you pay attention to a small group of offspring, and make damn sure that they survive to maturity. Just going around producing illegitimate children is not really a good strategy in the long term.

Well, for the most part, our instincts will tell us to go for the healthiest specimen we can find. This doesn't hold 100% of the time, but certainly in the vast majority of cases.



I don't see how that follows. The inferior amongst us are removed from the gene pool, only in the presence of survival pressure. In this age, in the first world, pretty much anyone who wants to have children, can. There is no selection pressure, and hence no improvement in the gene pool.

In fact, that was the thinking behind Hitler's "master race". If you want to take the strength of the human species as a whole, then Hitler's approach is the way to go. Ignore the fact that Jews aren't objectively inferior, killing the handicapped and the "inferior" people was really for the betterment of the human race.
By sterilising the handicapped, he was attempting to increase the quality of the gene pool! Now you can see why taking the view of the human race as a whole can be quite destructive!

Ah. I see where you are coming from now.
How can a bunch of egoists form a cooperative society?

Well, my best answer to this question is to read Evolution of Cooperation by Robert M. Axelrod. I think it is a shitty way to answer someone by saying "Here: Fuck off and read this book", so I will do my best to sum up the book simply, and if you wish to learn more, then check out this book. I would highly recommend everyone to read it, not least because it is concise and simple, you don't have to make a huge time investment in it, you should be able to finish it in just a few hours.
But first I would have to say that the book is very misleadingly titled, as it is not about biological evolution. It does contain a single chapter on biological evolution, but to consider this a book about "evolution" very much confines where its theory is applicable. This is one of the few books where it seems to apply to absolutely everything! It is without a doubt, a philosophy for life (One woman wrote to him and thanked him for helping her through her divorce!) and it is where I get my sense of "morality" from, despite the fact that ethics or morality are never mentioned in this book.

The book is basically about a simple "game", known as the prisoner's dilemma.
Each player has a choice: Cooperate, or defect.
Then, depending on how the players acted, they are each rewarded a certain number of points:
If they both cooperate, they are both rewarded 3 points.
If they both defect, they are both rewarded 1 point.
If one defects, and the other cooperates, the defector is rewarded 4 points, and the cooperator is rewarded 0 points.

Quite a simple model, but it very effectively acts as an abstracted mathematical model of (almost) any situation where cooperation may occur.

Now suppose you are in this situation, and you don't know what the other player is going to do, do you defect or cooperate?
Well, think it through logically, and you will come to the conclusion that whether your opponent cooperates or defects, you are always better off to defect. Things don't look good for the formation of cooperating egoists! (and hence society).
But this logic only applies to a "once-off" encounter. What if you're going to meet again? Now there is a cause for cooperation. But the question remains, when should you cooperate, and when should you defect? If you keep on cooperating, the other player is probably going to take advantage of you, but if you keep defecting, the other player is going to stop cooperating and you are back to square one.

A tournament of game theorists was set up, and they were all to submit an algorithm to decide when to defect, or cooperate. They set all of these strategies playing with each other in a round robin tournament, to see who would have the most points at the end.
Some of the strategies were incredibly complex algorithms, other were quite simple.
Amazingly it was the simplest strategy of all that won! TIT FOR TAT. All it did, was cooperate on the first move, and then simply copy what the other player did in the previous round.

There was then a second tournament, where people could enter, knowing the results of the previous tournament. TIT FOR TAT won that one as well!

Interestingly, though TIT FOR TAT won the tournament as a whole, it never once scored higher than its current opponent...it simply cannot do so, the best it can hope for is to match the other player's score...but the mentality of "you vs. me" doesn't work in a situation. TIT FOR TAT did well by solicitation cooperation, and so getting high scores, both for itself and the other player.

Axelrod, then goes on to describe what would happen in various other circumstances. I won't go into detail here, but TIT FOR TAT comes out on top in nearly all of them. He then goes on to describe "populations" of strategies...which are stable, and which are not.
Take for instance a population of DEFECTS ALWAYS, can TIT FOR TAT hope to do well in such an environment? Well, obviously not...it cannot solicit cooperation, and so is doomed to score lower than everyone else in the population. In a DEFECTS ALWAYS environment, the best you can hope to score is 1 point per round, by always defecting yourself. But sadly, this means missing out on the potential score of a mutual 3 points per round.

We can assume that a pre-societal population of egoists is modelled quite accurately by DEFECTS ALWAYS. How can a society of TIT FOR TAT arise, given that it cannot score higher than one per round? The answer lies in TIT FOR TAT players sticking together. Even a tiny "island" of TIT FOR TAT players will score a higher average than 1 per round, if they interact with each other on a semi-regular basis (say 10% of the time is with like player, 90% with DEFECTS ALWAYS).
Apply the principles of biological evolution to this mathematical theorem, and you've arrived at something pretty damn profound! In my mind, this is the key to understanding the origin of society.

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Proof:
This proof is reconstructed, I can't remember how exactly Axelrod went about it in the book, but regardless, they both come to the same conclusions.

Let n be the number of interactions between two players
A TIT FOR TAT interacting with DEFECTS ALWAYS will score n-1 points
A TIT FOR TAT interacting with another TIT FOR TAT will score 3n points

A DEFECTS ALWAYS interacting with another DEFECTS ALWAYS will score n points
A DEFECTS ALWAYS interacting with a TIT FOR TAT player will score n + 4 points.

Now assume each player interacts with each other player n times.
Let 1-j:j be the ratio of DEFECTS ALWAYS players to TIT FOR TAT players, where 0<j<1.
We can now work out the score of both types of players.
A DEFECTS ALWAYS player will receive:
n(1-j) + (n+4)j =
n + 4j points

A TIT FOR TAT player will receive :
(n-1)(1-j) + 3nj =
n + 2nj +j -1 points.

Now lets sub in values for n and j.
Let n = 100, and let j = 0.1
DEFECTS ALWAYS scores 100.4 points
TIT FOR TAT scores 119.1
a clear victory!

Now, having 10% of a population just spring into existence is a bit much to ask. However, we must remind ourselves what j actually represents. It represents the probability of a given player interacting with a TIT FOR TAT, as opposed to a DEFECTS ALWAYS. If we were to create a "community" of TIT FOR TATS, our weighting wouldn't be quite so simple, as a TIT FOR TAT player would be more likely to interact with another TIT FOR TAT player, and a defects always would be more likely to interact with another DEFECTS ALWAYS player. This would allow us to have a massively lower proportion of the population using TIT FOR TAT, and still scoring higher than the DEFECTS ALWAYS players. I don't really want to produce a proof of this, but I'm sure that you can intuitively see that it is true (as far as I can remember such a proof is found in the book).
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So, now we can see how Egoists can evolve to cooperate, and do better in life than people who refuse to cooperate, and hence form the societal norms that we observe today.

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