Ms. Siv

John Maynard Smith: The Evolutionary Stable Strategy.

To noted evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, life is essentially about information -- how information is stored, passed on, and used by organisms as they live and reproduce. "And evolutionary theory is about how that information got there in the first place," he says.

In probing evolution from this point of view, Smith has employed mathematical tools, including what is called "game theory," to explain and predict evolutionary behavior. Originally developed by John von Neumann to study poker, chess, and other games, game theory analyzes complex situations in which the best strategy of one player depends on the actions of another.

But Smith, a professor at the University of Sussex, England, since 1965, is no dry theoretician. "I was a naturalist as a kid and have been ever since," he says, claiming an interest in everything from birds to bacteria.

Smith's best known work incorporated game theory into the study of how natural selection acts on different kinds of behavior. The old idea had been that selection inevitably favors organisms to act aggressively. Smith showed that this isn't necessarily true, and that selection may actually favor both aggressive and non-aggressive behaviors.

As an example, imagine that two populations, one of them aggressive (hawks) and one passive (doves). Hawks will always battle their neighbors over any resource. Doves won't fight under any circumstances. A population made up entirely of doves would be unstable; that is, if a mutation caused the introduction of a single hawk, it would have an immediate advantage, and the hawkish behavior would bully the doves out of existence.

But a hawks-only population would also be unstable. A single dove introduced by mutation would have a long-term advantage. That's because the hawks' constantly aggressive behavior leads to frequent injury, while the dove, refusing to fight, escapes that risk.

Through application of game theory, Smith showed that there is a particular ratio of hawks to doves that forms what he called an "evolutionary stable strategy" for the species. Thus, selection actually works to maintain a balance of different characteristics in the population.

Brian63

Somewhat related to this:

The book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465021212/qid=1012490801/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_107_1/104-7076349-0759915" target="_blank">Evolution of Cooperation</a> by Robert Axelrod is a pretty short but very interesting read. Among other things, it discusses game theory and how two parties opposed to each other and wishing to achieve their individual goals can work together to achieve some mutually beneficial goal, even if not volitionally. It got very good reviews on Amazon as well.

Brian

Oolon Colluphid

Just so you know, Sivakami's post is a direct lift from <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/06/2/l_062_03.html" target="_blank">this page</a>. I thought I'd read it somewhere before!

Sivakami, fascinating though ESSs are, I'm not sure what the point of your post is...? As I'm sure you know, people such as Maynard Smith and Richard Dawkins are amongst the first to point out the naturalistic fallacy: how the world is is no guide to how it ought to be or to how we ought to behave.

But at least EESs help explain altruism in nature.

Cheers, Oolon

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Ms. Siv

Well.. since I'd specified John Maynard Smith explicitly, you surely could not have thought it was original

My point was that inherent morality is just our inherent knowledge of ESS - game theory.
Therfore I thought I'd post it on this forum.
Did I make a mistake ?!

- Sivakami.

God Fearing Atheist

I think Hume's law can be attacked on a couple of different fronts, actually.

Oolon Colluphid

Sivakami, no not at all! It just seemed odd that a whole web page turned up without the slightest bit of annotation from you to explain why it was here. But then maybe I spend too long in E/C. Your point was too obvious for me to see it, but very useful in other fora! Chances are, non-specialists wouldn't know of ESSs, so 'twas a good post!

Cheers, Oolon

Ms. Siv

Thanks (?).
Explaining morality in terms of ESS is quite a recent phenomena.

- Sivakami.