Prisoner's Dilemma: The Challenge of Cooperation

I called this blog "Ramblebrain", because that's exactly what my brain tends to do.  I never know where it's going to wander off to.  Recently, I spent a few weeks reading and writing about the foundations of ethics.  Then I got interested in a group of guys in New Orleans who dress as skeletons and wake people up on Mardi Gras morning.  In a couple of weeks, I'll probably be fascinated by something else. But I'm going to try to rein myself in here, and come back to the ethics topic.  All things considered, it's probably more important than some of the other things that strike my fancy.

In my last post on ethics, I talked about the idea that selfish genes can encourage altruistic behavior (self-sacrifice for the good of another) among related individuals, because related individuals carry the same genes.  This is why many organisms give preferential treatment to their relatives.  This preferential treatment can be quite selfless (at the organism level, if not the gene level).  Many animals work themselves nearly to death caring for their young.  Some even sacrifice themselves to protect others.  If you've ever been stung by a bee, and it left its stinger behind, you've been the victim of a suicide attack.  The bees in a hive are all quite closely related, which is why bees are willing to die defending their hive.

Humans also tend to be very altruistic toward their kin.  How we treat other people is obviously a big question in ethics, so the evolution of altruism is clearly important for understanding people's moral sense.  However, the idea of kin selection only explains altruistic behavior among related organisms.  It doesn't offer any reason for being nice to unrelated animals.  As we might expect, many unrelated animals--even of the same species--are pretty nasty to each other.  Large alligators see small, unrelated alligators as just another potential meal.  If a band of chimpanzees comes upon a lone male chimpanzee from another group, they will probably try to kill it.

However, cooperation is also pretty common among unrelated animals.  Crows, even unrelated ones, will cooperate to mob an owl or hawk, "encouraging" it to hunt somewhere else. Sometimes bluejays and other birds will join in, and they certainly aren't related to the crows (except in a more distant, evolutionary sense).  Mobbing an owl clearly carries some risk, since an owl is quite capable of killing an individual crow or bluejay.  Why do mobbing birds cooperate like this?

The likely answer is that each bird gains more by cooperating to drive away the owl than it loses in risk to itself.  Mobbing owls is a win-win situation for them.  Each one gains by joining in, because the more join in, the more likely they are to chase away the owl.  This kind of situation can be modeled mathematically using the branch of mathematics called game theory.  Game theorists refer to a win-win situation as a non-zero-sum game.  We tend to think of games as competitions where one side wins and the other loses.  These are called zero-sum games because we can think of a win as +1 and a loss as -1.  The sum is zero.  A lot of interactions that can be modeled with game theory are non-zero-sum, win-win affairs.  It's advantageous to both parties, so natural selection favors it.  Natural selection isn't always about being nasty to others, because oftentimes being nasty isn't adaptive.

Occasionally, though, unrelated organisms have interactions where one voluntarily sacrifices to help another.  A commonly-cited example of such benevolence occurs in, oddly enough, the vampire bat.  Vampire bats fly out every night in search of food.  When they find a large animal, they creep up on it, bite a sliver of skin away, and lap up its blood.  Oftentimes the victim doesn't notice, because the bat has an anesthetic in its saliva.  But many of them do notice, and shake the bat off. The bat may return to its cave hungry.  Because its metabolism is so high, it can starve to death after just a couple of hungry nights.  So, it will beg another bat in the cave to regurgitate some of its blood, to get it though the night.  Generally, they can find a bat willing to do so.

This is different from a clearly win-win interaction, because the donor bat gets nothing in return.  If it is unrelated, why does it do it?  One possible answer is that it can expect the other bat to donate on another night, when it comes home hungry.  I'll barf up blood for you, if you'll barf up blood for me.  Evolutionary biologists call this reciprocal altruism, although this is really a misnomer, since the donor bat is only sacrificing in the short term.  I'll use the term delayed reciprocity, to avoid the suggestion of true altruism.  It's a win-win situation (ideally), but the win for one party is delayed.

And that's why delayed reciprocity is rare in nature.  It's vulnerable to cheaters who don't return favors.  It's true that a bat who receives blood from another, and then gives blood on another occasion, is better off than it would be if it didn't cooperate.  But it would be even better off if it made a habit of accepting blood, but never giving any back.  In a large population of reciprocating animals, it's only a matter of time until a mutant appears that will exploit its more trusting brethren.  It will be better nourished than the others, and better able to survive and reproduce.  The "cheater" genes will spread through the population, until it becomes a population of cheaters and reciprocity vanishes.  Sure, the group as a whole will do worse, but as I explained in another post, evolution (probably) doesn't happen at the group level.

The only way delayed reciprocity can be stable in a population is for its members to learn to avoid cheaters.  This generally means they are smart enough to recognize individuals, and to remember whether that individual has cooperated with them in the past.  This means delayed reciprocity is only feasible among relatively smart animals, living in stable social groups small enough that most members are recognizable.  It also means that reciprocators can't be too forgiving.  They have to be willing to cooperate with animals that cooperate with them, but not with animals that don't.  They may even punish cheaters.  Let's say a monkey asks another monkey, which it has groomed in the past, to return the favor.  If the other monkey refuses, the first monkey is likely to scream and even attack the cheater.  Monkeys, and many other intelligent animals, have a sense of fair play, and get very indignant when others don't play nice.  In a population of monkeys that mostly groom each other when asked, but refuse to groom those that have refused to groom them, delayed reciprocity can be stable.

Economists and evolutionary biologists have used game theory to model this this kind of reciprocity.  This stuff can get pretty abstract, but it has some extremely important implications.  In game theoretic terms, a delayed reciprocity situation resembles what's known as a prisoner's dilemma.  This is a situation where it pays to cooperate, but there is a temptation not to.  It gets its name because it is commonly formulated as a situation faced by two prisoners accused of committing a crime together.  They are put in separate cells, and each one is given the following options.  "If you confess, and implicate your partner, you'll go free and he will get five years in prison.  If he confesses, and implicates you, he'll go free and you'll get five years.  If you both confess, you'll both get two years.  If neither of you confess, we'll hold you for a few months, but we'll have to release you for lack of evidence."

Each prisoner--let's call them Shorty and Biggy--sits in his cell and ponders his situation.  Shorty thinks, "If we cooperate, and we both refuse to talk, we'll both get out after a few months.  But if Biggy talks, and I don't, I'll get five years, and he'll walk.  If I talk, and he doesn't, I'll walk and he'll get five years.  I don't want to stay in here six months, much less five years.  I'm gonna talk".  Of course, Biggy will go through the same thought processes, and he will probably decide to squeal, too.  So they'll both talk, and both get two years.  Both of them would have been better off if they had cooperated, but they were both too tempted to defect, so they both suffer for their lack of cooperation.

Of course, in real life Shorty and Biggy would also be considering the fact that they will probably meet again.  Shorty thinks "I'd love to rat out Biggy and walk, but in five years, he'll get out and come after me".  Of course, Biggy will do that because he's a product of evolution, wired to punish cheaters.  Most of us are, at least to some extent.  So, they are more likely to cooperate if they think they will meet again.

What happens in real life is that prisoner's dilemma type situations are played over and over again.  This is known as an iterated prisoner's dilemma.  In the early 1980's, a political scientist named Robert Axelrod decided to run computer simulations of an iterated prisoner's dilemma involving multiple players.  He turned it into a contest, inviting people to send in programs that used a particular strategy.  When two programs met, each would choose to cooperate or defect, and was awarded a certain number of points depending on the outcome.  The biggest payoff for each one happened when it defected and the other program didn't.  But it was better for both to cooperate than for both to defect. 

People sent in programs with all kinds of different strategies.  Some were simple, some complex.  There were "nice" programs, that always cooperated, and "nasty" ones, which never did.  The simulation was run, and each program played against the other several times.  At the end, the scores were tallied.  The most successful one was called "Tit for Tat".  This program's strategy was to cooperate initially, and then, whenever it met another program for a second time, do whatever that program had done the last time.  If it had cooperated, Tit for Tat would cooperate.  If it had defected, Tit for Tat would defect.  So, Tit for Tat was "nice" by default, but not a pushover.  It wouldn't cooperate with a program that had cheated it in the past.  But it was forgiving.  It would start cooperating again with a cheater as soon as that cheater decided to cooperate.

Over many tournaments, Tit for Tat kept on beating other programs.  The only time it didn't win was when most of the programs submitted were "nasty" ones, that rarely cooperated.  In this environment, Tit for Tat proved to be too "nice", and could never get a foothold.  The average score for all the programs was lower when the population was dominated by "nasty" programs than when it was dominated by "nice" ones.  At the individual level, it turns out that it pays to be nice, but only if you're not willing to be a sucker, and only if you're not in a completely nasty environment.  At the group level, the group average is always better if the population is composed of cooperators.  While an individual may do best in a nasty environment by being nasty, he would be better off as a cooperator in a nice environment.

When evolutionary biologists use game theory to simulate organisms in a population, the ones who get the most points become more common in the population.  Whole populations can oscillate back and forth, as one strategy, and then another, gets more common.  In most populations, organisms with a Tit for Tat strategy come to dominate.  Cooperation prevails, and cheaters can't get a foothold.  However, if the population is too uncooperative in the first place, then cheaters do better, and soon the population is nothing but cheaters. Now everybody does poorly, but cooperation can't get a foothold, so that's the way it stays.  Another possibility is that in a population of Tit for Tat strategists, even "nicer" strategies can appear in the population.  Let's call these Saints. Saints always cooperate, and never retaliate against cheaters.  They do fine in a Tit for Tat environment.  But when the first mutant cheater appears, they are robbed blind.  The cheaters do well in this environment, because of the population of Saints that don't retaliate.  In this way, the cheaters can get a foothold.  The population swings back toward cheating, and everybody suffers.

So, what does all this have to do with human ethics and behavior?  A lot, in my opinion.  For one thing, it seems very likely to me that humans have a natural moral sense constructed by evolution.  Just as our urge to caring for certain others may have its roots in kin selection, perhaps our tendency to cooperate comes from the fact that we are social animals, who can often do better by cooperating than by fighting or going it alone.  Like many animals, we cooperate with non-relatives to take advantage of win-win situations where everybody gets an immediate payoff.  There's nothing particularly altruistic about this.  Both parties cooperate because it is too their advantage.  Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, made this point beautifully: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."  Trade is cooperation based self-interest, not altruism. 

We humans also seem to be unusually good at delayed reciprocity, where we cooperate with others in the expectation of getting rewards later.  Among other animals, clear evidence of delayed reciprocity (AKA reciprocal altruism) is pretty scarce.  Even among vampire bats, it's been argued that the bats that feed each other are likely to be related, which would mean they're practicing kin altruism, not reciprocal altruism.

People are able to reap the benefits of delayed reciprocity, because we are smart enough to recognize a large number of people, and remember how they have treated us in the past.  This may be why we form friendships with unrelated people, and why we get so indignant when we think someone isn't treating us fairly.  In fact, some biologists think one reason we became so smart is that big brains helped us to reap the benefits of cooperation, while remembering those that cheated us.  This may even help explain language.  Humans spend a lot of time talking about each other.  We're tireless gossipers.  While gossip is often frowned upon, gossip may have allowed us to expand the circle of people that we can safely cooperate with. Maybe we learned to talk so we could gossip more effectively.  An animal deciding whether to cooperate with another has to just try it, and see what happens.  People, on the other hand, can ask around.  "I'm thinking about taking Zog mammoth hunting.  Does he pull his weight on a hunt?"  With our big brains, and our ability to talk about the reputation of others, we were able to combine into much larger, more cooperative groups than most other animals.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that we should only make friends and cooperate with unrelated people when we can benefit from it.  I do think our cooperative instincts evolved because they were beneficial, but there's no reason we can't go beyond the dictates of biology.  Besides, most of us don't go around calculating the benefits we'll receive from making friends and being nice.  We just feel drawn to people we like and think we can trust.

Besides, cooperation and delayed reciprocity can't explain everything about human behavior, because people can be altruistic toward complete strangers they will never meet again.  A common example is that most people tip servers at restaurants, even if they are traveling, and will probably never meet that person again.  Some people are extremely altruistic toward people they've never met, for example, by sending aid money to people in other countries. Of course, a lot of people aren't very nice to anyone.  Still, it's clear that humans have found a way to expand the scale of cooperation far beyond what most animals are capable of.  We are able to do so partly because of our biology, which gave us our big brains and our ability to talk. But it is also cultural.  Over time, people have learned to live in larger and larger groups, and to engage in more and more complex types of cooperation.  We have developed cultural institutions like religions, governments, and laws that encourage us to cooperate, and to treat at least some non-relatives decently. 

Just how this cultural expansion of cooperation might have happened is a huge topic, and I'm certainly not going to tackle it now.  For now, I want to conclude by considering the lessons we can learn from biological ideas about win-win cooperation and delayed reciprocity.  As I look back over this post, I realize that my conclusions are more pragmatic than ethical.  I do think that cooperation between non-kin can tell us about human ethics, because it can tell us where our sense of friendship and fairness came from.  However, it really doesn't tell us that much about altruism.  At least in nature, true altruism (in the sense of self-sacrifice without expectation of future gain) is pretty rare.  But cooperation is common, and can be beneficial, even if it isn't altruistic. So, even though I admire altruism, my conclusions here will have more to do with applying lessons from game theory to encouraging mutually-beneficial cooperation, a much easier task than encouraging selfless altruism.

One thing we learn from the game theory models of reciprocity is that cheating is a big problem.  Any time there is a situation where people can take advantage of others, a few of them will.  Conservatives reading this may be nodding and saying, "See, we have to make sure people on welfare don't cheat the system."  That's true, we do, but we also have to make sure corporations don't cheat.  There are incentives to take advantage of others at all levels.  Liberals tend to have an overly rosy view of individual human nature, but conservatives tend to have an overly rosy view of "corporate nature".  When I hear people saying that oil companies will "police themselves", I think, "And they say liberals are the starry-eyed ones." 

In any competitive system, some of the players will always be tempted to play dirty.  That's why, at all levels, we have to make sure that there are rules to keep competition from getting too nasty.  That's why we have laws.  One of the most interesting results of computer simulations of the prisoner's dilemma is that there is no universally successful strategy.  What is a good strategy for dealing with others depends on the environment; on the strategies others are using.  In a big city, where most people are strangers to each other, people tend to be less trusting than in a small town, where most people know each other.  This makes perfect sense.  You have to be more careful when you're surrounded by strangers, even though many of them are perfectly trustworthy.  In the same way, if you grow up on the streets in a rough neighborhood, you may need to cultivate a reputation for toughness that you don't need if you grow up in the middle class suburbs. The tough guy approach may be a problem if you try to move into the middle class, but it may have been a necessity back on your block.

It seems to me that if people perceive that they are in a fair, safe environment, they will be more likely to be cooperative.  If people think they are in a dangerous, unfair environment, they will decide they have to play dirty to survive.  People are smart, and we adapt our behavior to suit our environment.  If we decide to have a dog-eat dog world, we shouldn't complain if we get bitten.  It seems to me that a major challenge for society is to establish ground rules that discourage cheating, and encourage fair play.  

I'm not advocating for pure top-down government control of everything here.  Some cooperative ventures can evolve on their own.  This includes free-market trade networks.  Lots of people think that countries have gone to war with each other less in the last fifty years because they trade with each other more.  As the psychologist Stephen Pinker puts it "The spread of trade and commerce has brought violence down, when it becomes cheaper to buy something than to steal it and more and more of the world becomes more valuable alive than dead."  Of course, competition is an essential part of market economies.  Companies that don't have to compete start making shoddy, overpriced goods.  The trick, with corporations as well as people, is to have ground rules to keep the competition from getting too nasty.  In basketball, it's OK to block your opponent's shot.  It's not OK to gouge him in the eye.  Competition can bring out amazing things in people and organizations, but it can also bring out a lot of nastiness, because it leads to incentives to play dirty.  We have to have competition within the framework of cooperation, where we agree to have rules to ensure that we play fairly, if not perfectly nicely.  We live in a competitive world, but we can choose what kind of competitive environment we want to have.  If we encourage everyone to play fair, everyone benefits.  If we let cheaters get too common, to the point it no longer pays to cooperate, everybody suffers.  The prisoner's dilemma turns into a losing game, even though it didn't have to be.

I'm not the sort to see much purpose in nature.  However, I can't help seeing the prisoner's dilemma as a challenge nature has handed us, even if only by chance.  It's as though nature is saying "You're a pretty smart species.  Are you smart enough to figure out the prisoner's dilemma, and how to win it?"  Well, are we?
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Recommended Reading:

Cooperation Between Non-Kin in Animal Societies / Tim Clutton-Brock

The Selfish Gene / Richard Dawkins

Nonzero:  The Logic of Human Destiny / Robert Wright

Prisoner's Dilemma:  John von Neuman, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb / William Poundstone

Skeletons of Mardi Gras: How the Walking Dead Are Keeping Traditions Alive in New Orleans

When I pulled onto Esplanade Avenue on Mardi Gras morning, the clouds over New Orleans were just losing their sunrise glow. I found a parking spot in the shadow of I-10, which sits right on top of Claiborne Avenue in the Fauborg Tremé neighborhood; one of the oldest predominantly black neighborhoods in the country. The famous Zulu parade would be be coming down Claiborne later, but that's not what I was here to see. On this most festive of days, I was in search of the walking dead.

Not long after leaving my car, I heard a faint crrrraww! sound to my left. Several blocks away, a handful of black-clad figures with huge white heads emerged into the street, and then vanished, followed by a small parade of brightly dressed onlookers. I pulled out my camera and ran after them.

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang were on the move.  Several African American men and boys were making their way down the street.  They wore black sweats with skeletons painted on them, and paper-mache skulls the size of beach balls. On their white butcher's aprons was a leering skull design. All of them carried big bones in their hands, which they used to bang on doors on either side of the street. One particularly scary looking Skull walked on stilts, making him at least nine feet tall. The leader, a big guy with antelope horns protruding from his skull mask, boomed in a deep voice “Skull and bones gang! Mardi Gras morning! Wake up!” Some of them shook tambourines and rattles, and one—I think the one on stilts, though it was hard to say with the masks--kept making the eerie crrrrawwwww!! call.

Doors cracked, and people peered out at the apparitions on the street. Most of the grown-ups smiled and said “Good morning”, or “Happy Mardi Gras!” Kids peeked around their parents, looking thunderstruck. “Get up outta that bed! It's Mardi Gras morning!” the bone men yelled, “You gotta get your life straight!”

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang are the best known of several “skeleton gangs” that roam the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras morning. They claim to be the oldest skeletons, tracing their history to 1819. If so, they've been waking people up on Mardi Gras morning for nearly 200 years. But they aren't just trying to get the party started. They have a serious message, too. As they walked down the street, they greeted people emerging from doorways, shaking hands, patting backs, and bending down to talk to kids. I couldn't hear most of what they were saying, but based on what I've read, they tell them to be good, stay away from drugs, and do their homework. If they don't, they say, the bone men will come back for them.

By appearing as the walking dead, the bone men remind people--young and old—to live well while they're alive. As the words on their aprons say, “You next!” Sometimes they dance in a circle and chant “You better get your...life together, next time you see us...it's too late to try!”

Not everybody welcomed the Skulls that morning, though. When they banged on one door, an irate white woman with a Midwestern accent appeared and said, “Why are you doing cop-knocking first thing in the morning? I had to stuff all my s**t under the couch, what the f**K!?”. The leader of the Skulls, somehow looking disgusted through a giant paper-mache skull mask, said “Then move outta the city.” All the onlookers nodded in agreement. Another woman, whose husband opened the door and shook hands with some of the Skulls, pointed at the leader and said, “Don't touch me.” I couldn't hear what she said next, but she seemed to think the Skulls represented black magic or devil worship. I heard the big Skull in the antelope horns saying, “No, no, that's not what we're about.”

It's hard to pinpoint the cultural origins of the skeleton gangs. Some sources vaguely suggest that the North Side Skull and Bones Gang was started by a merchant marine from New Orleans, who witnessed the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico, and decided it would be perfect for Mardi Gras. If that's true, the tradition was borrowed from a combination of old Aztec celebrations (the Aztecs being big on skulls) and European traditions like the Danse Macabre motif in art, and the idea of the dead becoming restless during the three day period of Halloween, All Saint's Day, and All Souls Day (October 31-November 2). One of the Skulls I talked to later that day, however, said the tradition was related to Lent, and that skeletons are a reminder that the pleasures of the flesh—the carnal things celebrated at Carnival—are fleeting.

But I suspect there's more to the story. New Orleans is often called the most unique city in the United States, and most people assume that's because of its French heritage. They're partly right, but New Orleans preserved more than French culture. It also preserved African culture; more so than nearly any other place in North America.  Under French (and Spanish) law, slaves had more extensive rights than in the Anglo-American south. One result was that they were allowed to gather on Sundays for dancing and drumming at the place now known as Congo Square. This would never have been allowed in Anglo-America. The Congo Square gatherings helped preserve rhythms that mostly disappeared in other parts of the United States; rhythms which reemerged in Mardi Gras Indian chants, jazz, and rock and roll. If New Orleans preserved this musical aspect of African culture, there's every reason to think it preserved other aspects, including African religion. After all, African music and African religion aren't easily separated. One of the functions of the drums was to call forth the spirits. Those drums certainly fill me with the spirit.  I don't happen to believe in the kinds of spirits the Congo Square drummers believed in, but I can see how they came to believe the drums allowed transcendent spirits to enter their bodies.  I mean, it's a pretty accurate description of what it feels like.

One of most important African religious traditions to be preserved in New Orleans was Voodoo. Just to be clear, I'm not falling for the Hollywood version of New Orleans Voodoo here. Most of the “Voodoo” you see in the city today is strictly tourist kitsch.  However, Voodoo (or Vodou, or Vodun) is a real religion, and it did play a role in New Orleans' history.  Voodoo originated in West Africa, and is still an important religion in some countries there, especially Benin.  It was blended with Catholicism and Native American religions to produce produce Santeria in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Voodoo in Haiti.  Voodoo came to New Orleans with slaves, soon after the city was founded. After the Haitian revolution, many white refugees fled to New Orleans, bringing slaves with them. The Voodoo tradition was even stronger in Haiti, of course, and remains the predominant religion there to this day. The 1800's were the heyday of influential Voodoo practitioners in New Orleans. The most famous was Marie Laveau, whose tomb is in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1, right next to Congo Square.

In Voodoo, there is a supreme god, who stays remote from human affairs. Lesser spirits known as Loa are the ones who deal with people. One group of Loa are the Ghede, who are simultaneously spirits of death and fertility. The Ghede are a sort of family, often pictured as skeletal figures wearing black and purple. They're a wild bunch; drinking spiced rum, dancing the suggestive Banda dance, and swearing profusely. They are the spirits of fertility, but they are dead, so nobody can punish them for their lewdness. They can do what they want. Interestingly, many of the Ghede, especially Papa Ghede, their patriarch, are very fond of children. The Ghede are closely associated with the more powerful Loa, Baron Samedi (Baron Saturday) and his wife, Maman Brigitte. These two resemble the Ghede (and are sometimes considered a part of them) with skeletal faces and black clothing.

When the Skulls finished their rounds on Mardi Gras morning, they returned to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé, just across Armstrong park from the cemeteries and Congo Square. Their leader, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, traded his giant skull and antelope horns for a skull mask and top hat with a cross in front. Now he clearly resembled Baron Samedi or Papa Ghede. Barnes seems to see the Northside Skull and Bones Gang in terms of the Ghede tradition. In interviews, he explicitly links the skeleton gangs to the Ghede tradition in Haitian Voodoo.

I don't know if the skeleton gangs really originated with the Ghede and Voodoo.  It's intriguing that both the Ghede and the skeleton gangs (or at least the North Side Skull and Bones) seem concerned with the welfare of children. But maybe the tradition originated from multiple sources: African, Catholic, and perhaps even Aztec (if the Day of the Dead connection is true). All these traditions were influencing each other well before New Orleans was founded. Besides, people tend to come up with similar ideas independently. If you believe the spirits of the dead remain after the body dies, you could easily conclude that the dead had lessons to teach us. One piece of advice they might offer is to live life fully, and not join them sooner than necessary. This sort of idea has surely occurred to people around the world.

Whatever its origins, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang today seems mostly concerned with maintaining the traditions and culture of black New Orleans, by encouraging young people to participate in that culture, and by warning them away from the drugs, guns, and violence that are all too common there. The people involved seem quite capable of making a difference. When I started reading about the Skulls after Mardi Gras, I realized how talented some of their members are. An older gentleman I spoke with turned out to be Ronald Lewis, the creator of the House of Dance and Feathers, a museum of black New Orleans culture in the 9^th ward. Another member is Royce Osborne, creator of an excellent documentary about Black Carnival traditions in New Orleans, called All On A Mardi Gras Day. Their leader, Bruce Barnes, is a park ranger at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park, a multi-instrumentalist who leads a Zydeco band called Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, a former professional football player, and an important community leader.

Underneath their masks, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang are talented, influential people They're fighting for a worthy cause, and helping preserve a truly unique heritage. I hope they go on banging on doors and waking people up for years to come.

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Links

Backstreet Cultural Museum
 
All on a Mardi Gras Day 

House of Dance and Feathers

Sacred Ground (a good article about the North Side Skull and Bones Gang, and the Tremé neighborhood)

Signs of Life (a photo exhibit featuring the North Side Skull and Bones) 

Darwinian Family Values: From Selfish Genes to Altruism

It's a Saturday night in south Louisiana; the weekend before Mardi Gras.  There's going to be parading and debauchery from now through Fat Tuesday, and I intend to see some of it.  But tonight, the rain is pounding against my windows, and I just can't get that excited about going out in it.  So, I'll risk the wrath of Bacchus by staying in and continuing my recent ramblings about ethics.

In my last two posts, I've been considering whether ethical laws are an intrinsic part of nature.  I've concluded there are good reasons to be skeptical about the idea of natural law--the idea that there are clear ethical rules implicit in nature, and that we can use our reason to discover them.  If the natural world evolved through a combination of  basic physical processes and natural selection, then there's good reason to question the natural law idea that everything in nature has a purpose, and that learning our purpose can tell us what is good.  If humans are chance products of natural selection, then we may have no purpose at all.  It seems quite likely to me that we weren't put on earth for any reason.  We are here because we happened to evolve.  I don't mean to wring my hands and say life is meaningless.  I think human life can be incredibly meaningful.  We are smart, curious, social, and talkative creatures living in a world full of wonders.  There are plenty of ways to find rewards and meaning in life.  I just don't think we can assume that we are here to serve some cosmic purpose.

Another reason to be skeptical about natural law is the problem of the appeal to nature fallacy (or naturalistic fallacy), which reminds us that we can't automatically jump from descriptions about how things are to how things should be.  Evolution, for example, has made human males stronger and more aggressive (on average) than human females. In the past, and in some places and subcultures even today, being big and bad enough to outfight or intimidate other males was a successful strategy for having more offspring.  Does that mean men should fight more, since we are, in the mindless evolutionary sense, designed for it?  Certainly not.  The fact that belligerence was a successful strategy in the past doesn't mean it's the right way to act.  Is does not equal ought.

Nature only seems care about what works, not what's right.  However, this doesn't mean nature is irrelevant to morality.  We can't simply ignore the laws of nature, or the realities of human nature, when we decide how we should act.  We can't for example, decide that it's wrong to ever eat any part of another living thing.  We would starve to death. 

On a less drastic level, it's important to know as much as we can about human nature, to gain insight into why we have ethical preferences all.  Is our sense of morality a universal part of human nature, with deep roots in our evolutionary history?  Or are humans born a blank slate, learning the socially constructed rules of our particular culture?  In some circles, it's heresy to claim that human behavior has any intrinsic basis.  It smacks too much of old theories justifying racism, sexism, and the supposed superiority of western ways.  In the last few decades, though, it's been increasingly hard to deny that human nature has been influenced by evolution.  But it's a universal human nature, common to all people, regardless of race.  While our moral sense is obviously modified by the culture we grow up in, it was not created by that culture, at least not entirely.

If evolution is amoral and blind, how did it give us a sense of morality, a sense that some things are good or bad, right or wrong?  Let's focus one aspect of morality for now: altruism.  Altruism occurs when one animal (human or otherwise) does something to help another, at a cost to itself.  Most people feel an urge to help others, at least to some extent, especially if those others are their friends or family.  But we aren't the only animals capable of altruism. Vervet monkeys, for example, will give a loud call if they see a predator.  This warns the other members of the group to be careful, but it also increases the chance that the predator will zero in on it, and have that selfless monkey for dinner.  Wolves that have had a successful hunt will eat their fill, return to the pack, and regurgitate food for others who weren't part of the hunt.  This may be gross, but it's undeniably altruistic.

Now, we don't know if vervet monkeys and wolves feel some sense of obligation or empathy which spurs them to such selfless acts.  Both are fairly-large brained creatures, so it seems likely to me that they do.  In humans, a sense of obligation or empathy is considered a moral sense.  While I don't know if I would say wolves and vervet monkeys are moral creatures, I would say their urges toward selfless behavior could be a precursor of our more sophisticated moral sense.

But the question remains--how did this kind of behavior evolve?  Lots of people figure that animals are altruistic because it helps the group or species survive. After all, evolution is about the survival of the fittest species, right?  Well, not really.  Evolution doesn't seem to happen at the group level, except possibly in very special cases.  Here's why:  let's say you have a group of extremely altruistic monkeys, whose members always share food and help care for each others' offspring.  They always help each other, and because of that, they are a very successful group.  But there is always some variation within any group of organisms.  Occasionally, one will arise within the group that doesn't have "helpful genes".  They never help, and they take advantage of the altruism of the others.  This they will survive better, at the expense of the others.  It also means they have more offspring, who inherit their tendency to take advantage of others.  Very quickly, these non-altruistic monkeys will get more and more common in the population, until the group is no longer composed mostly of altruists.  To the extent that acting for the good of the group is not conducive to survival and reproduction of the individual, it is not--to use the evolutionary biologist's term--an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Actually, what matters most in evolution is not the even success of the individual, but of particular genes.  Individual living things are ephemeral--most only live a few years at best. An individual's particular combination of genes are also ephemeral.  In sexually reproducing organisms, each one has a unique genome, a mix of the genomes of their parents.  If they reproduce, they will pass 50 % of their genes on to each of their offspring, and each of them will have their own unique combination of genes.  What lasts across generations are individual genes.  For the last few billion years, genes that happen to be good at getting themselves replicated have increased at the expense of genes that weren't as good at replicating.  Over time, the world has come to be populated by organisms whose genes are good at replicating themselves.  As Richard Dawkins explains in The Selfish Gene, whole organisms are vehicles designed by genes for the purpose of replicating those genes.  Of course, neither the organism or the gene is conscious of this.  A gene has no consciousness at all, and an organism that acts in a way that spreads its genes isn't conscious of why it's doing so.  A mother alligator cares for her babies because her brain and hormones tell her to, not because she's thinking about how best to spread her genes.  This is true for people, too.  We care for our children because we feel an intense love for them, rarely considering that this love has anything to do with our genes.

Caring for children is so automatic for most people that it doesn't even seem like altruism.  It's just what you do.  But it is altruism in the sense that the parent is making sacrifices for the child.  Often big sacrifices.  Once I had a dog that had puppies.  She was a wonderful mother, and nursed them all the time.  Before long, her hair started falling out, because her puppies were getting nutrients she needed for herself.  She was sacrificing her health (albeit unconsciously) for the sake of other creatures--her puppies.  The immediate reason she did this is because she felt (and I'm convinced she had feelings) an overwhelming urge to do so.  But the ultimate, evolutionary reason she felt that way is that each one of those eight puppies held copies of her genes.  I say copies because genes can't pass themselves on.  They can only pass copies of themselves on.  This means it doesn't matter, in terms of the gene's success, that those copies are in another organism.  In fact, it works out well, because one organism can have many offspring, producing multiple copies of many of its genes (multiple copies of all of them, if it reproduces asexually, but that's a different topic). 

Today, this "gene's eye" view of evolution is often known as the "selfish gene" theory, because it was explained in the brilliant book of the same name by Richard Dawkins.  Other scientists, especially W.D. Hamilton, George Williams, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Trivers, came up with the basic idea of looking at evolution at the level of the genes.  As Richard Dawkins would readily admit, he was just explaining it.  As he would also admit, the title of the book has caused a lot of misunderstanding.  He called the book The Selfish Gene because genes tend to do whatever it takes to get themselves replicated, whether or not this is good for the individual organism.  A male preying mantis has an intense urge to mate with a female preying mantis, even though she is quite likely to bite his head off in the midst of their passion.  It's a risk worth taking, as far as his genes are concerned, because he is getting them reproduced.  As long as more genes are replicated in the long run, the misfortunes of Mr. Mantis are irrelevant to evolution.   This is the sense in which genes are selfish.  The mistake is to conclude that selfish genes always create selfish organisms.  Genes do whatever it takes to get themselves replicated.  Sometimes selfish organisms do this most effectively, but oftentimes, altruism works just as well.

We've already seen one way this is true: with parental care of offspring.  But altruism in nature goes beyond that.  If all genes become widespread by making copies of themselves, those copies don't have to be in direct offspring.  An organism's offspring, as I mentioned, have copies of 50% of its genes.  But so do its parents and siblings.  This means that if it doesn't have offspring, but helps two of its siblings survive and reproduce, the effect is the same in terms of gene replication.  This means natural selection will tend to produce organisms that act altruistically toward their relatives.  The closer the relation, on average, the more altruism.  While siblings share 50% of their genes, cousins only share 25% of them (on average, as always).  If we look at how the world works, that's exactly what tends to happen.  Some animals do take care of their siblings' offspring, but they don't spend as much time with them as their own offspring.  My aunts and uncles were all very kind and generous to me, but they didn't raise me.  They raised their own children.  That's how evolution made us.

Selection for altruism toward relatives is known as kin selection, and it accounts for most of the altruism in nature.  But it only goes so far.  It doesn't lead to absolute altruism, even toward ones children or siblings.  If there are two siblings, and only enough food for one of them to survive, kin selection theory predicts each will try take the food for itself.  Yes, if one of them lets it's sibling have the food, and then dies, 50% of its genes would have survived.  But if it takes the food itself, 100% of its genes have survived.  So, even close relatives don't share the exact same interests, genetically speaking, unless they are identical twins.  This means there's a lot of conflict in nature, even among members of immediate families.  In some cases, when an individual can spread its genes more effectively by surviving at the expense of its family members, kin altruism is selected against.  This is apparently the case in the Sand Tiger shark.  This shark gives birth to live young, but only two of them.  The shark has a double uterus, and in each branch, the shark embryos eat each other, until only one remains.  Evolution doesn't always encourage niceness, even among brothers and sisters.
 
This unsettling image brings up an extremely important point.  I want be perfectly clear that, while I do think evolution created most of our moral impulses, such as our urge to treat relatives well, I don't think these impulses are the best we can do morally.  As I discussed in the last post, nature is amoral.  Evolution encourages altruism when altruism is useful for spreading the most genes.  When it isn't useful, it isn't encouraged.  Our genes, in their mindless quest to replicate themselves, gave us large brains, capable of reflecting on our impulses, and (with a good bit of willpower) choosing which ones to follow, and which ones to resist.  And some of our natural impulses should definitely be resisted.

In any case, it seems likely to me that altruism between related individuals gave rise to some of our basic, morally-laden emotions, including love, the urge to nurture and protect, and our sense of loyalty to family.  In human societies, we are constantly using family metaphors to encourage bonding, cooperation, and loyalty among unrelated people.  Students in fraternities and sororities call each other brothers and sisters.  Catholic priests are called "Father".  Americans talk about our Founding Fathers, while Russian's talk about Mother Russia.  Confucius saw society as a large family, and believed that the kind of loyalty and hierarchy that made a good family (as he saw it) would also make a good society.  This extension of the family metaphor into larger groups has been a mixed blessing, of course.  On the one hand, it's built cooperative groups capable of accomplishing far more than they would have if they hadn't cooperated.  On the other hand, it can be used by tyrants to justify their power (Big Brother is watching you), and it can lead to a nasty kind of tribalism, where people abuse those that aren't part of their societal "families".

I don't want to get caught up in how the family metaphor is extended to unrelated people, at least not now.  My main point in this post is that the moral impulses humans feel have an evolutionary history that began long before humans did.  But it isn't common to all animals.  Many animals feel no impulse at all to treat other members of their species well.  If parental care isn't adaptive, they don't even feel the need to treat their own babies well. Many frogs simply leave their eggs in a pond, and then go about their business.  It's probably safe to say that this frog doesn't have any particular sense of good will or fair play toward other frogs.  However, animals that practice parental care--even solitary ones such as bears--do seem to feel an obligation to protect and care for other bears--if those bears are their own offspring.  In social animals, individuals may feel an urge to care for the rest of their family, not just their own offspring.  In many small groups of animals, most individuals are related, so they may feel a general altruism toward all their fellows (though they are likely to feel more of it towards immediate kin).

Of course, there's a lot more to human morality than altruism between relatives. We also have a sense of the sacred, of fairness, of loyalty, and of moral outrage when we think these things are being violated.  If I'm going to consider the origins of these impulses, then I have a lot more work to do.  However, I think it makes sense to start by looking at how some animals began to have the sense that they should be benevolent or cooperative to certain other animals (instead of ignoring them, chasing them away, or killing them).  One way this happened is though kin altruism.  But it's not the only way.  Unrelated animals do cooperate in nature, and some may even form friendships, develop a rudimentary sense of fairness and empathy, and trade favors.  This kind of cooperation isn't as strong as kin altruism, though, and it's prone to shifting alliances and exploitation by cheaters.  This is where social life among animals turns into a real soap opera.  But this post is long enough, so I'll talk about that in the next episode.

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

The Expanding Circle:  Ethics and Sociobiology - Peter Singer

Meerkat image © goldencolt - Fotolia.com