Almost all of the responses here putting this down as "not that big a deal" are completely missing the point. It's extremely easy to say that evolution should do a thing, but if you cannot provide a mechanism to explain how such a thing is passively selected for, then evolution doesn't care. Evolution has no intelligence. There is no designer. This is probably the most important aspect of evolution to understand and the one hardest to grasp intuitively.
For example: say you had a savannah with grass and tall trees populated by 4-legged horse-like animals that survive by grazing on the grass. We can look at such a scenario and say that it would be advantageous for some sub-population of those horse-like animals to grow longer and longer necks until they were capable of also grazing on the trees (doubling their available food supply, relative to their neighbors), but it will never happen! In each generation there will be a distribution of neck lengths, and as there is no advantage to those with slightly longer (but not long enough to reach the trees) necks, the distribution will remain unchanged. This is the basic Hardy-Weinberg principle.
The only way you get giraffes is if the trees start out much shorter, so that the horse-like animals are capable of grazing on them. Then the trees that are slightly taller will have an advantage, and the distribution of tree heights in the population will shift. This will give an advantage to the horse-like animals with longer necks, causing their distribution to shift, and on, and on. This is the basic Red Queen hypothesis.
So saying that an organism that has an inherent capacity for adaptation, or one that knows to cooperate with neighbors, would be better able to survive than the alternatives doesn't mean crap. If you cannot provide a mechanism (backed by a mathematical model) of how such traits arise, then evolution doesn't care.
That is what makes this work so particularly interesting. The authors are providing a model to explain how a mechanism for the selection of cooperation could occur.
>But evolution is a random process based on the short-term advantages that emerge in each generation.
This idea is easily discredited, even "disadvantageous-but-viable" mutations are prized possessions among my offspring. Environments change, and whether or not my lineage goes unbroken is a result of its ability to survive those changes.
Those environmental changes are unpredictable. phenotypes that benefit me now do not necessarily benefit me in the future. If it is my goal to extend my lineage as long as possible, then my optimal strategy must give extra value to diversity.
Since every organism possesses a lineage that goes back to the origin of life, it's fair to say that cooperation for the goal of increasing diversity is a pretty heavily selected for trait.
>it's fair to say that cooperation for the goal of increasing diversity is a pretty heavily selected for trait.
It seems like you're making the mistake of thinking that traits we see were necessarily being actively selected for. It's like saying that because we see an increase in complexity in organisms over time, that evolution is selecting for complexity (its not).
It's true that more diverse populations can withstand changes to the environment better. But to then say that the trait of diversity is selected for is a huge stretch. If diversity has no current value then it won't be selected for, and will be selected against in competitive environments. Evolution doesn't have a way to see into the future in that way. Diversity might be selected for in cooperative populations, but only when diverse behavior provides an immediate benefit to the population.
You're basically arguing for a species-level (or at least a deme-level) view of selection. That's something that we've tried to find for many decades, and there just isn't a lot of evidence for it. Selection happens at the level of the individual animal, not any higher grouping.
Cause in the opposite direction may be more fundamental, though in evolution all cause is circular. Because the world is variable a necessary adaptation in every lineage is a corresponding variability in each of its systems, subject to homeostasis. Combinations of this variability may then happen to offer survival of new challenges. So yes specific diversity is selected but it's because general diversity has been there from the beginning.
The article doesn't address this second-order effect of innovation. Instead it seems to take a basic result of evolutionary game theory and cast it in a model from physics.
You should read up on cryptic mutations. I don't think it is that popular in the evolutionary biology field though, mainly because it can be a very vague mechanism.
Cool take on things, but not really fundamentally new as an explanation of evolution of cooperative traits. Models involving reputation and punishment have been around for awhile. Basically, once you introduce reputation and memory, together with punishment, cooperation becomes more viable as a strategy. It's even led to models of higher-order cooperation, of enforcing the enforcers, etc.
To me it seems like the paper isn't really offering a fundamentally new explanation of how these traits arise, it's just providing a sophisticated analysis of the dynamics.
That cooperation is eventually selected for has been known for decades, but we didn't know how. Yes, there have been many speculative models describing how cooperation might arise, kin selection being among the earliest of these. Each of these mechanisms has some applicability and some predictive power (for example, kin selection is pretty good at describing cooperation in everything up to and including eusocial insects), but we've been missing the general mechanism that has predictive power across all domains.
In other words, the field of evolutionary biology today has its Newton's laws and Maxwell equations, but we're missing anything like the Standard Model. The authors of this work have been at this for a number of years. A sophisticated analysis of the dynamics is a key and very important step in beginning to develop a "grand unified theory" of evolution.
>To me it seems like the paper isn't really offering a fundamentally new explanation of how these traits arise, it's just providing a sophisticated analysis of the dynamics.
MIT Tech Review has often news about fascinating research, but one has to adjust for some amount of unnecessary hype.
>a crucial factor turns out to be the process of punishment. “Punishment acts like a magnetic field that leads to an 'alignment' between players, thus encouraging cooperation,” say Adami and Hintze.
either you're a team player or else. Collective punishment comes to mind too as a very effective way to induce cooperation/alignment inside the collective which is going to be or threatened to be punished.
Yes, they start out with game theory, which is only about rewards, and then add in punishment.
Game theory is enormously insightful, but It leaves out a great many factors that are very important in the real world, such as communication between the parties,uncertain rules, and reputation.
Dear science journalists, please quit saying that papers "solve" problems ("By treating evolution as a thermodynamic process, theorists have solved one the great problems in biology."). Also, as much as I love Arxiv, I wish journalists would note that articles posted are not subject to peer review.
That would be a neat derivative of poker. Same as regular poker where everyone antes but if everyone folds they get 1.1 X their ante. if one person doesn't fold, you play it like regular poker.
Cooperation is related to a family (or a clan/pack) life. It is the "most natural" survival strategy. Expanding it to a non-keen is not a big deal. Nothing to see here.
White blood cells are clearly altruistic. To the extent a species or even an ecosystem functions like an organism, there is an evolutionary advantage to evolving altruism. To quote Spock, "where the good of the many outweigh the good of the few, or the one."
There have been models that pretty convincingly show altruism arising without any special prerequisites. It's basically a balance between propagating directly versus ensuring propagation of enough of your kin. They may even be very distant kin, not sharing that many genes with you - but if your altruism helps sufficiently many by sufficiently much, you end up propagating those shared genes more successfully, in a sense of having more carriers of them in the follow-up generations. And if those shared genes include the ones that affected your altruistic behavior - again, in at least some of those you helped, not necessarily all - then it becomes a selectable trait.
Remember this article for the next time somebody complains about how perfect an Ayn Randian world would be. Remember that free cooperation helped humanity get this far, not Rugged, Individualism.
[+] [-] jballanc|8 years ago|reply
For example: say you had a savannah with grass and tall trees populated by 4-legged horse-like animals that survive by grazing on the grass. We can look at such a scenario and say that it would be advantageous for some sub-population of those horse-like animals to grow longer and longer necks until they were capable of also grazing on the trees (doubling their available food supply, relative to their neighbors), but it will never happen! In each generation there will be a distribution of neck lengths, and as there is no advantage to those with slightly longer (but not long enough to reach the trees) necks, the distribution will remain unchanged. This is the basic Hardy-Weinberg principle.
The only way you get giraffes is if the trees start out much shorter, so that the horse-like animals are capable of grazing on them. Then the trees that are slightly taller will have an advantage, and the distribution of tree heights in the population will shift. This will give an advantage to the horse-like animals with longer necks, causing their distribution to shift, and on, and on. This is the basic Red Queen hypothesis.
So saying that an organism that has an inherent capacity for adaptation, or one that knows to cooperate with neighbors, would be better able to survive than the alternatives doesn't mean crap. If you cannot provide a mechanism (backed by a mathematical model) of how such traits arise, then evolution doesn't care.
That is what makes this work so particularly interesting. The authors are providing a model to explain how a mechanism for the selection of cooperation could occur.
[+] [-] ouid|8 years ago|reply
This idea is easily discredited, even "disadvantageous-but-viable" mutations are prized possessions among my offspring. Environments change, and whether or not my lineage goes unbroken is a result of its ability to survive those changes.
Those environmental changes are unpredictable. phenotypes that benefit me now do not necessarily benefit me in the future. If it is my goal to extend my lineage as long as possible, then my optimal strategy must give extra value to diversity.
Since every organism possesses a lineage that goes back to the origin of life, it's fair to say that cooperation for the goal of increasing diversity is a pretty heavily selected for trait.
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|8 years ago|reply
It seems like you're making the mistake of thinking that traits we see were necessarily being actively selected for. It's like saying that because we see an increase in complexity in organisms over time, that evolution is selecting for complexity (its not).
It's true that more diverse populations can withstand changes to the environment better. But to then say that the trait of diversity is selected for is a huge stretch. If diversity has no current value then it won't be selected for, and will be selected against in competitive environments. Evolution doesn't have a way to see into the future in that way. Diversity might be selected for in cooperative populations, but only when diverse behavior provides an immediate benefit to the population.
[+] [-] onychomys|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irickt|8 years ago|reply
The article doesn't address this second-order effect of innovation. Instead it seems to take a basic result of evolutionary game theory and cast it in a model from physics.
[+] [-] partycoder|8 years ago|reply
Having a slow metabolism is usually bad, but if there's food shortage it becomes an advantageous trait. Dwarfism is similar.
That's why larger/stronger/faster cats like the saber-toothed cats died and now we have smaller cats, for instance.
[+] [-] daemonk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhfhduk|8 years ago|reply
To me it seems like the paper isn't really offering a fundamentally new explanation of how these traits arise, it's just providing a sophisticated analysis of the dynamics.
[+] [-] jballanc|8 years ago|reply
In other words, the field of evolutionary biology today has its Newton's laws and Maxwell equations, but we're missing anything like the Standard Model. The authors of this work have been at this for a number of years. A sophisticated analysis of the dynamics is a key and very important step in beginning to develop a "grand unified theory" of evolution.
[+] [-] aqsalose|8 years ago|reply
MIT Tech Review has often news about fascinating research, but one has to adjust for some amount of unnecessary hype.
[+] [-] basch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|8 years ago|reply
either you're a team player or else. Collective punishment comes to mind too as a very effective way to induce cooperation/alignment inside the collective which is going to be or threatened to be punished.
[+] [-] woodandsteel|8 years ago|reply
Game theory is enormously insightful, but It leaves out a great many factors that are very important in the real world, such as communication between the parties,uncertain rules, and reputation.
[+] [-] nilson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glup|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharemywin|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lngnmn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodandsteel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eevilspock|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ende|8 years ago|reply