In his essay, Church begins by pointing to the coming benefits of genetic research, refers to the need to support the “altruists” who provide their information openly for research, and ends by making a generic call for genome sharing:

As “the first genomic generation” we will set the rules that many future generations may follow. Will we treat our genomes like our faces, which we share publicly even though they reveal details about our health, ancestry, and personality? Or will we be forced to hide them from view?

Talk about a leading question! Will you remain hidden behind your genetic burka?

I’ll ask a different leading question: Is it generally a good idea to release your personal information to the internet?

Generally no.  I’m with John Hawks here.  I’m not sure what someone would do with my genetic information, unless they worked for an insurance company and found something about me that made me uninsurable.  But, it still seems a bit creepy.

The 82nd Four Stone Hearth, anthropology blog carnival, is now online at Anthropology in Practice.  Including this gem about Koala bears and reciprocity from the Primate Diaries.

Reciprocity is an intrinsic feature of human beings as well as most species of ape. Chimpanzees and bonobos regularly engage in granting gifts of food and expect a return on their generosity (those who don’t reciprocate are less likely to receive such gifts in the future) (de Waal and Brosnan 2006). This “tit-for-tat” basis of exchange exists in all human societies and becomes ritualized based on the cultural norms that are present. One of the most well known descriptions of reciprocity among indigenous societies is that of the Kula among the Trobriand Islanders near Papua New Guinea that was documented by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.

Astrobiologists have built Uracil, a component in RNA, in space-like conditions in the lab.

“We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space,” said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth.”

“Ardi”, or Ardipithecus ramidus, has been much in the news lately.  Most of the reporting has been decent, but there are some clearly over hyped ones.  Thankfully, Paleoanthropologist John Hawks wrote an article for Seed magazine about Ardipithicus and its significance to the ongoing science of human origins.  He also wrote up a great FAQ page on his blog, where he goes into some real detail.

As paleoanthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy describes it, Ardi gives us a view of a previously unknown “adaptive plateau” among early hominins—a suite of anatomical and behavioral characteristics that lasted for a long, stable period in the early Pliocene environment. The Ardipithecus form might account for the bulk of the whole story of human evolution—a kind of hominin that was different from anything that came before or after.

North America during the Pleistocene

War, what is it good for?  Apparently, altruism.  In a paper published in Science, Samuel Bowels and Jung-Kyoo Choi took a game-theoretic approach to studying the evolutionary roots of both altruism and parochialism.  They concluded that neither would have likely evolved alone, but instead co-evolved, together being a powerful combination in the survival kit  of our Pleistocene and early Holocene ancestors.

Abstract

Altruism–benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself–and parochialism–bostility toward individuals not of one’s own ethnic, racial, or ther group–are common human behaviors.  The intersection of the two–which we term “parochial altruism”–is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or parochial behavior reduces one’s payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these behaviors.  But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted intergroup hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts.  Our game-theoretic analysis and agent -based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

Background

Even Darwin noted that war was a powerful tool “used” by evolution to increase  altruism and solidarity toward ones own group members.  But, there have been two major questions lingering.

1. What is the process by which war became common enough to support the evolution of altruism in this context?
2. What is the likelyhood that altruism itself (conditioned on group membership) contributed to the high levels of lethal intergroup conflict among humans?

Neither of these questions has been well enough analyzed and was one of reasons the authors did their study.    Empirically, both altruism and hostility are quite important to members of other groups.

The empirical importance of both altruism and hostility to members of other groups is well established.  Experimental and other evidence demonstrates that individuals often willingly give to strangers, reward good deeds, and punish individuals who violate social norms, even at a substantial personal cost (4), while favoring fellow group members over “outsiders” in the choice of friends, exchange partners, and other associates and in the allocation of valued resources (5).

They site an example of a case in Papua New Guinea, “There exists strong favoritism toward ones-own linguistic group in giving to others,”  and a higher tendency to punish those from different linguistic groups.

They use the term Parochial Altruism in reference to a person to mean that when a person engages in hostile and aggressive behavior with another group, this person incurs a mortal risk, therefore a fitness loss verses those who refrain from such aggression.

Knowing Parochial altruism exists and assuming that neither Parochialism nor Altruism would have evolved in an environment (that is survived a selection process) that favored some other trait that resulted in higher payoffs, then how DID Parochial Altruism evolve?

A Solution

One possibility is that since oiur ancestors lived in a hostile environment where resources were scarce, Parochial Altruism could have evolved and thrived because those groups with high numbers of Parochial Altruists would have been more able to engage in aggressive action and “win” on behalf of their groups.

The two most important correlates of tribal warfare are natural disasters and resource scarcity.  The Pleistocene and early Holocene (roughly 125,000 to 10,000 years ago) are known to have been times of substantial volatility.  They also coincide with the most significant periods of human evolution.

Could Parochial Altruism have evolved in such a climate?

The Game

Bowel’s and Choi’s model consists of 4 types of players.

1. PA:  Parochial Altruists
2. TA: Tolerant Altruists
3. PN: Parochial Non-Altruists
4. TN: Tolerant Non-Altruists

Note that Parochials of both types are hostile toward other groups.  But, ONLY Parochial Altruists will engage in combat.  This is because PN’s won’t risk death for the benefit of others.

Their model has two types of selection acting at once.  Intra-Group selection favors TN’s and tends to eliminate PA’s.  And, Inter-Group selection which favors PA’s via selective extinction.

In a purely risk vs. reward scenario, it makes little sense to be a PA.  While there exists two benefits to winning a war (namely 1. Greater chance of future survival, 2. Opportunity to reproduce, thereby replacing those PA’s lost in war), the risk of mortal death incured by war “offsets this direct benefit by a wide margin.”  Therefore, each PA would be better off adopting a different strategy, in terms of their own reproductive fitness.  This confirms that PA’s are, indeed, altruistic according to the traditional meaning of the term.

3 Stage Game

The game runs in 3 stages.   In stage one, when two groups A and B meet, there is a probability that they will engage hostilely.  If they do not, then the game ends.  If  their interaction is hostile, they move on to stage two.

Stage two, given that their interaction is hostile, there is a new probability that A and B will goto war.  If they don’t, they move on, game is done.  If they do, stage 3.

Stage 3, they are now at war, the group with the higher number of PA’s has a higher probability of winning.  If this group is A, then A is more likely to win a war against the PA deficient group B.   Given that A is stronger (ie, has more PA’s) there are two options:  A and B draw, and the result is simply that both groups lose a certain number of fighters (PA’s); or A wins, and still loses a certain number of fighters, but also now gains a number of replicas that make up for that loss.

From B’s perspective, given that B is weaker (has less PA’s), there is only Draw or Lose. B could get lucky and draw, and only lose some PA’s.  But, there is a higher likelyhood of a loss.  In this case, B loses both fighters (PA’s) and civilians (made up of the other types).

In the paper they are quite explicit about what these probabilities are and why they chose them.  But, the point is that not every encounter with another group is hostile, not every hostile interaction results in war, and every war is won with a higher probability if you have a large number of PA’s.

Conclusion

They ran this game through a number of iterations accounting for hundreds of generations.  They found that transitions from quite tolerant non-altruistic (read: peaceful) groups to bellicose parochial altruistic groups can happen very rapidly–in about 200 generations, or about 5,000 years.

The markedly higher reproductive success of predominantly parochial altruist groups when interacting with groups with fewer parochial altruists could therefore explain the rapid range expansions that are thought to be common among some late Pleistocene human groups, and thus may partly explain sthe still puzzling second great hominid diaspora that swept from Africa as far as Australia in the course of no more than 10 millennia.

This study aids in the study of why group boundaries have such a profound effect on human behavior, from an evolutionary perspective.

In conclusion they add:

We have explained how Homo Sapiens could have become a warlike yet altruistic species.  But there is no evidence that the hypothetical alleles in our model exist, or that were they to exist they could be expressed in the complex behaviors involved in helping others and engaging in lethal conflict.  Theus, we have not shown that a warlike genetic predisposition exists, only that should one exist, it might have coevolved with altruism and warfare in the way that we have described.

They make a good closing point.  Theoretical (ie, mathematical) biology doesn’t “prove” that certain things are true.  It tests the validity of certain hypothesis and ideas, thereby opening up further possibilities for empirical research.

References:

Choi, Jung-Kyoo, and Samuel Bowles. 2007. The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War. Science 318, no. 5850 (October 26): 636-640. doi:10.1126/science.1144237.

Paddy K is hosting the 78th Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival, and the theme is Bones.

I was particularly interested by Adhominin’s look at mid Pleistocene Heidelbergensis.

At the conference, much attention was focused on the Middle Pleistocene “muddle in the middle” [3], particularly the role of Homo heidelbergensis in hominin evolution. While H. heidelbergensis possesses both archaic and derived traits intermediate between H. erectus and later members of the Homo genus, it lacks uniquely derived traits or autapomorphies, which are a prerequisite for defining a species.

H. heidelbergensis has traits that have been interpreted as nascent Neandertal autapomorphies, leading some researchers to propose that there was a continuous evolution of Neandertals [4-6]. This accretion model would make H. heidelbergensis a chronospecies on the continuum of the Neandertal lineage, a view championed by Jean-Jacques Hublin. The accretion model proposes that Neandertals evolved by anagenesis, i.e. non-branching evolutionary change.

Evolution, by Douglas Futuyma

Via a poll done by Kansas State University, the people of Kansas spoke:

A majority of respondents, 53 percent, said they favored teaching both evolution and creationism in the public schools, while 18 percent said that neither theory should be taught. The remaining respondents were evenly divided between wanting one or the other of the theories taught exclusively.

What is totally strange about this is that Kansas currently has one of the strongest biology curricula in the Nation, according to this study by Louise Mead and Anton Mates. They graded all the states in 2000, and followed up in 2009.  Kansas currently has an A, after receiving an F- in 2009.  My state of  Oregon got a B in 2000, and maintained that B into 2009 (but doesn’t teach evolution).

What does this mean? John Hawks responded to the poll with:

If the remainder are really “equally divided”, that makes two-thirds in favor of teaching creationism, and one-third against teaching evolution at all.

So, Kansas biology teachers and school boards have done a lot of hard work to improve the classroom experience of their students.  But, they are doing so in an often hostile environment.

Leech on a Tadpole

A new article on BioMed Central has discovered something new about the taxonomy of these little “suckers”.  (I couldn’t help it.)

Here’s their results:

This study is the first to evaluate molecular evidence from hirudinid and haemopid leeches in a manner that encompasses the global scope of their taxonomic distributions. We evaluated the presumed monophyly of the Hirudinidae and assessed previous well-accepted classification schemes. The Hirudinidae were found not to be monophyletic, falling instead into two distinct and unrelated clades. Members of the non-bloodfeeding family Haemopidae were scattered throughout the tree and among traditional hirudinid genera. A combination of nuclear 18S rDNA and 28S rDNA with mitochondrial 12S rDNA and cytochrome c oxidase I were analyzed with Parsimony and with Bayesian methods.

Mmm .. Bayesian methods.

These types of leeches were instrumental in fascilitating the 19th century blood letting craze.  (I’m glad we’re past that, by the way.)  They conclude that “The family Hirudinidae must be refined to include only the clade containing Hirudo medicinalis (European medicinal leech) and related leeches irrespective of bloodfeeding behavior.”

I know that taxonomy is notorious for boring the living hell out of students.  But, I actually find it cool.  It’s a very human thing to try and categorize  all the elements, creatures, etc of the world.  We even do it with abstract notions like numbers and sets, and sets of sets, and sets of sets of sets.

Oh, and I spoke to soon about us being past the blood letting phase our history.  Check this site out.

Hobbit Fossil

Science Saturday on BloggingHeads.tv had one of my favorite bloggers on it this week.  John Hawks, of the University of Wisconsin, and of JohnHawks.net was interviewed by Razib Khan of Gene Expression on a number of talking points in the field of Paleoanthropology.

Here’s a scattered list of notes about the interview:

Lumpers vs Splitters:  What do you want to get out of the word “species”, anyway?

Computer software analysis of data in science:  assumptions are hidden in the code; implicit assumptions, how do you sort THAT out?

HOBBITS!  Homo floresiensis.  A new species or just pathology?  Rotations of pre-molars and asymmetric skeletal structure doesn’t look good.  That is, is this “Hobbit” a good model of it’s population?

Open Access Fossils?  Should more data be made available in an open format so that all scientists can have access to it?  Or would that increase the likelyhood of scientists getting “scooped”?

In a paper uploaded to the Arxiv in April, a group of researchers headed up by Matthias Hanauske, approach the recent financial meltdown from a Quantum Evolutionary point of view.  Here’s the abstract:

The last financial and economic crisis demonstrated the dysfunctional long-term effects of aggressive behaviour in financial markets. Yet, evolutionary game theory predicts that under the condition of strategic dependence a certain degree of aggressive behaviour remains within a given population of agents. However, as the consequences of the financial crisis exhibit, it would be desirable to change the ‘rules of the game’ in a way that prevents the occurrence of any aggressive behaviour and thereby also the danger of market crashes. The paper picks up this aspect. Through the extension of the in literature well-known Hawk-Dove game by a quantum approach, we can show that dependent on entanglement, evolutionary stable strategies can emerge, which are not predicted by classical evolutionary game theory and where the total economic population uses a non aggressive quantum strategy.

The Hawk-Dove game is a classic of Evolutionary Game Theory and has been applied in many varied ways all over the study of animal (and human) behavior.  So, their use of it to study markets is nothing new.  What IS new is taking a Quantum approach to this old game as a way of studying a method by which we can introduce regulations (a rule system) to the game of financial economics that would mitigate the kinds of behaviors that lead to the situation we’re in now.  Don’t worry, it doesn’t require that we all spend our lives staring at quantum computers!

FINANCIAL RISK AND AGGRESSION

In the lead up to the financial crisis of 2008, certain actors in the market can be said to have exhibited aggressive behavior since they made choices that benefited only their own short term utility while KNOWING that these choices would negatively affect the utility of the group (all of us) as a whole. That is, these actors knew that these risky financial products would do harm to the overall market portfolio (and therefore be harmful, long term, to themselves), but would, in the short term, result in a positive gain to themselves–so they took them on anyway.

Given that we’re approaching economics like a game as it is, can we change the “rules” of this game so that aggressive behavior of the type discussed above is lessened? If this behavior is “natural” given the situation, then we certainly can’t expect people to play nice. We ought to do as the Boy Scouts do, “Hope for the best. Plan for the Worst.”

QUANTUM GAMES TO THE RESCUE

The authors show that dependent upon the type of entanglement, evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS’s) can show up that would NOT have been predicted by classical evolutionary game theory. What I love about their approach is they are not restricting themselves to a literalist interpretation of quantum game theory (that is, games played over quantum channels with tiny molecular objects as the unit of information). Instead, they are using this theory “metaphorically”.

That sounds bad. But, in truth ALL mathematics is metaphoric. A wave equation is not itself a wave. It just represents a wave. So, it’s not a stretch to take a mathematical idea that was originally strictly defined with respect to a particular physical situation, and apply it to a totally different situation. This has been the history of how great ideas in applied mathematics proliferate.

Here is how they set it up:

“We interpret entanglement in this context as the objective influence of socio-economic context factors, while the application of quantum strategies exhibits the degree to which decision makers incorporate these factors into their decisions. This interpretation allows the derivation of consequences and shows the linkage of our study to other game theoretical analyses that also highlight the importance of the socio-economic context to the outcomes of games.”

But, first let’s look at the classic (non-quantum) evolutionary game as applied to the financial crisis.

They call the Doves in the game those bank investors who acquire rather low risk products that return moderate payoffs. The Hawks are those bank investors who seek out high risk products that have the potential to return large payoffs–but, these also could result in huge losses. The authors make the point:

“Additionally, when selling their products to investors, doves remain with their contract conditions and do not try to make a deal by all means, e.g. promising unrealistic returns or omitting to point out severe risk factors of the investment product.”

Hawks do whatever necessary to make a profit.

Both of these investors then fight to garner the attention of a more moderate or neutral group of investors. When a hawk “fights” a dove, the hawk wins, since he can offer a higher return to the investor. If 2 doves fight, then the investor splits his investment equally among them assuming they will both return an equal amount. If 2 hawks meet, the investment is again spread equally.

The payoffs of all three situations are different as is true in the classical version of the game. I’m NOT going to get into what this actually looks like, as the math gets ugly, but it results in the following. The evolutionary game theoretic predictions of this particular version of the Hawk-Dove game are that the ratio of aggressive vs. non-aggressive behaviors would not reach equilibrium. That is, it predicts a crash!

OK, great. We already HAD the crash. What can we do to prevent it? That is:

“Although the risk of destabilization in the investment market was obviously increasing for the last few years, the behaviour of some aggressive investment bankers did not change. However, instead of ending in a stable state, finally the market crashed and almost all aggressive agents disappeared from the population. This could have been prevented, if any aggressive behaviour were inhibited completely.”

QUANTUM VERSION

They reformulated this game in a quantum game theoretic context and show that by entangling the strategies of the doves they induce a new Evolutionarily Stable Strategy that eliminates excessive hawkishness. By increasing the amount of entanglement (interconnectedness) the incentives to “go it alone” are reduced and the incentives to act in a more cooperative manner are increased.

The point is that regulations  and social pressures that encourage openness and interconnectedness of market participants may be enough to drastically reduce aggressive and hawkish behaviors that lead to the type of destabilization seen in the recent market crash. In the lead up to 2008, there was very little entanglement of the strategies employed by market participants. This caused them to play the “game” in the classical way, a way that led inevitably to a market crash.

To reiterate, what’s great about this paper is their approach to using quantum game theoretic language OUTSIDE of a purely physical context:

“So far, in literature entanglement has been discussed from a more physical point of view. However, in order to derive consequences from the obtained results we want to propose one possibility to interpret it in an economic context. In this paper, entanglement has been termed a conjoint, psychological contract between the members of an economic population aligning their strategies. However, this contract is not the result of conscious negotiations but of general socio-economic factors influencing the agents simultaneously. These factors comprise moral standards, values, legal rules, joint experiences, a similar educational background etc. All these factors can drive the decision processes of different individuals into the same direction without the necessity that the individuals have to communicate to each other. The objective existence of these background factors can vary, which is reflected by the degree of the entanglement parameter .”

In Japan there is massive social pressure to be polite, at a level unheard of in America. In fact, it is so great, most American’s find it problematic and strange.  It results in an entire culture avoiding certain types of behaviors they deem aggressive. We Americans wouldn’t think of these same behaviors as aggressive, per se. Instead, we value a type of forthrightness the Japanese find rude. As such, we exhibit behaviors seemingly more aggressive than they do.

The social pressures involved in Japanese culture can be seen as types of entanglement, since they correlate the strategies of the actors involved.

I think this is a fruitful way of looking at Quantum Game Theory applied to the social sciences and human behavior that better takes into account the socio-economic situations we all face, and how they affect our decision making than does classical game theory.

References

Hanauske, Matthias, Jennifer Kunz, Steffen Bernius, and Wolfgang König. 2009. Doves and hawks in economics revisited. An evolutionary quantum game theory-based analysis of financial crises. 0904.2113 (April 14). http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.2113.

SMITH, J. MAYNARD, and G. R. PRICE. 1973. The Logic of Animal Conflict. Nature 246, no. 5427 (November 2): 15-18. doi:10.1038/246015a0.