Survival of the nicest

This may sound sentimental but bear with me. A friend of mine, Frank Dun once said:

One of the key discoveries so far of Complexity Theory is that co-operative processes in general seem far more likely to survive than isolated, rampantly selfish entities. This moves successful evolution away from the original ‘principle of natural selection’; which was rather reductionist in that it placed the key stress on individual survival; to a more holistic, symbiotic view of adaptability, wherein survival is a group or team effort.

The examples most often quoted to illustrate this are typically a biochemical feature: an autocatalytic process. There are many groups of proteins within our bodies and those of many other organisms that depend on each other for synthesis and production from their simpler component parts. In other words, they simply cannot survive in isolation; but need to co-exist with each other.

In fact, with hindsight our social history is almost embarrassingly about collective effort, rather than individual triumph: all primates form tribes and engage in degrees of communication; the family ‘unit’ in primates invariably involves the male as much as the female; ancient civilisations worshipped their ancestors as symbols of the ‘collective wisdom’ of their culture.

Recent research at the Max Planck Institute found after playing the Ultimatum Game with chimpanzees, reported in Science, say;

“A number of researchers in the field of human evolution think that a sense of fairness — and a willingness to punish the unfair even at some cost to oneself — is humanity’s “killer app”.

The Economist article goes on to say; “It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value. Dr Jensen’s previous experiments have shown that chimpanzees are willing to punish actual thieves. But his new data add weight to the theory that the more sophisticated idea of fair shares, which underpins collaborative behaviour, appeared in the hominid line only after the ancestors of the two species split from one another.”

In other words an individual’s sense of fairness is genetic. Of course this is dangerous ground to tread but reading this reminded me of the experiments carried out by Bob Altemeyer described in his book The Authoritarians.

This is a fascinating account of the analysis and results of a game he devised for small teams to represent a country or region. The teams choose leaders and negotiate deals for their people. It’s a sort of offline version of Microsoft’s Age of Empires or the board game called Risk where 100 years is played out in less than a day. The experiment, carried out hundreds of times in universities and colleges all over the world, pitches two distinct types of group against each other; Right Wing Authoritarians (think politicians, leaders, businessmen, petty tyrants, corporations) and Liberals (everyone else).

With few exceptions, RWAs always, always end up completely destroying the world. In many cases, the game is stopped early to advise RWAs their course of action will lead to global destruction, and are given the chance to restart the game. Guess what happens? Yes, they destroy the world again.

So perhaps the future of humanity will rely on the survival of the nicest?