1786780100 (N) by Haim Shapira

Author:Haim Shapira [Shapira, Haim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust
ISBN: 9781786780102
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-12-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

PENGUIN MATHEMATICS

This chapter is devoted to animals – experts in playing games and stars of a field called Evolutionary Game Theory. We’ll discuss the seemingly strange behaviour of the Thomson’s gazelle as related to altruism, join a gang of penguins in their search for a volunteer, and learn about a nice definition from Evolutionary Game Theory that expands the Nash Equilibrium.

One of the Game Theory branches that I find most fascinating is known as Evolutionary Game Theory, which attempts to study and understand animal behaviour.

I was attracted to this field of study because, among other things, animals tend to be almost completely rational. Now, rationality is the very thing that encourages mathematicians to produce models that attempt to predict behaviours. And it’s nice to see how such models fit with natural phenomena.

One of the fascinating issues I addressed when I first started studying the application of Games Theory to animal behaviour was altruism.

In The Selfish Gene (1976) Richard Dawkins offers this definition: ‘An entity … is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity’s welfare at the expense of its own.’ That is, an act is considered altruistic when its results lower the altruist’s chances of survival. Dawkins is in effect trying to offer possible explanations of altruism, because the phenomenon seems to conflict with his own fundamental concept of the ‘selfish gene’. He argues that living organisms are mere survival machines for genes that want to move on to the next generation in a competitive world where egocentricity is advantageous. After all, if the living organisms’ only interest was to send their genes forward in time (we could say that self-replication is the only thing that genes care about), altruism should not have survived evolution and natural selection. Nevertheless, nature provides us with many examples of altruistic behaviour, such as the lioness that fights to protect its cubs. Dawkins spoke of a Thomson’s gazelle that leaps up and down (‘stots’) instead of running for dear life when a predator comes knocking: ‘This vigorous and conspicuous leaping in front of a predator is analogous to bird alarm calls, in that it seems to warn companions of danger while apparently calling the predator’s attention to the stotter himself.’ The gazelle’s behaviour could be viewed as self-sacrificing, or extremely risky; its only motivation is a wish to warn the pack. These are only two examples. Nature provides us with many more, from bees to monkeys.

As noted, at first glance altruism seems to contradict Dawkins’s selfish-gene theory, but in reality there’s no contradiction, since there’s no true altruism in the wild.

The lioness that fights for her cubs may be altruistic on the individual level, but genetically speaking her action is extremely egotistical – the creature is trying not so much to save its cubs as to protect its genes (or, rather, their carriers).

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