Should Darwinists Play Games with Government?
For years now, evolutionary biologists have been employing “game theory” to try to understand human social behavior. Presumably, game theory applies just as well to robots and ants as it does to humans – any population in which the whole benefits from collective behavior of individuals.
The latest example of evolutionary game theory was published in Nature last week.1 Two Japanese scientists with Martin Nowak of Harvard tried to prove that “costly punishment” is inefficient:
Indirect reciprocity is a key mechanism for the evolution of human cooperation. Our behaviour towards other people depends not only on what they have done to us but also on what they have done to others. Indirect reciprocity works through reputation. The standard model of indirect reciprocity offers a binary choice: people can either cooperate or defect. Cooperation implies a cost for the donor and a benefit for the recipient. Defection has no cost and yields no benefit. Currently there is considerable interest in studying the effect of costly (or altruistic) punishment on human behaviour. Punishment implies a cost for the punished person. Costly punishment means that the punisher also pays a cost. It has been suggested that costly punishment between individuals can promote cooperation. Here we study the role of costly punishment in an explicit model of indirect reciprocity. We analyse all social norms, which depend on the action of the donor and the reputation of the recipient. We allow errors in assigning reputation and study gossip as a mechanism for establishing coherence. We characterize all strategies that allow the evolutionary stability of cooperation. Some of those strategies use costly punishment; others do not. We find that punishment strategies typically reduce the average payoff of the population. Consequently, there is only a small parameter region where costly punishment leads to an efficient equilibrium. In most cases the population does better by not using costly punishment. The efficient strategy for indirect reciprocity is to withhold help for defectors rather than punishing them.
They noted first off that “Human societies are organized around cooperative interactions.” Then they wondered, “But why would natural selection equip selfish individuals with altruistic tendencies?”, adding, “This question has fascinated evolutionary biologists for decades.” Other evolutionists have employed game theory to study the evolution of religion (09/25/2006, 05/27/2008), the evolution of responsibility (11/22/2008), the evolution of patriotism (11/20/2005) and the evolution of altruism (03/16/2005); even weird things like the evolution of spite (01/21/2006). This paper did not address altruism. Instead, they focused on whether costly punishment is effective. They reviewed earlier research with games like Prisoner’s Dilemma that illustrate the outcomes of cooperation and punishment between individuals. After pages of sterile equations and diagrams, they decided punishment is a poor strategy: “The evolution of improved mechanisms of indirect reciprocity therefore leads to societies in which costly punishment between individuals is not an efficient behaviour for promoting cooperation.” This has direct bearing on whether governments should impose costly punishment (e.g., imprisonment) for lawbreakers instead of just withholding help from them.
What do their colleagues think of their analysis? An economist and an evolutionary ecologist from Germany weighed in on the paper with a review called, “Game theory: How to treat those of ill repute.”2 They explained the roles of players in the game (think of the parable of the Good Samaritan):
When you meet someone needing help, you can help (cooperate), refuse to help (defect) or not only refuse to help but, in addition, decrease the needy person’s wealth (punish). Both cooperation and punishment are costly for you, but respectively create a larger benefit or larger loss for the person needing help. Defection is cost neutral.
This makes the Good Samaritan the cooperator, the thieves the punishers, and the priest and Levite who passed by the defectors. But the roles could be redistributed differently in government, a football game, people fighting over parking, or any other situation in which individuals interact. The eight “action rules” of the game also take into account the reputations of the participants and whether the players know those reputations or not. Presumably this includes knowledge of whether others are honest and trustworthy.
The reviewers’ own experiments showed a slightly different outcome: people prefer to live in societies that mostly cooperate and defect (i.e., ignore the slight infractions), but that also punish the worst offenders. Other than that, they liked the paper. “Ultimately, study of the joint evolution of social norms and action rules under natural constraints is the goal for the future,” they ended. “Ohtsuki et al. have prepared the ground for that endeavour.”
1. Ohtsuki, Iwasa and Nowak, “Indirect reciprocity provides only a narrow margin of efficiency for costly punishment,” Nature 457, 79-82 (1 January 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07601; Received 11 June 2008; Accepted 3 November 2008.
2. Bettina Rockenbach and Manfred Milinski, “Game theory: How to treat those of ill repute,” Nature 457, 39-40 (1 January 2009) | doi:10.1038/457039a; Published online 31 December 2008.
Beware the day when the Darwinists set the rules of the Justice Department. If you thought Social Darwinism went out of fashion in the 1940s, after millions perished from that awful legacy (11/30/2005), guess what: it’s back in new dress. Its practitioners seem less racist and activist but they are just as dangerous. Why? Because their views are completely amoral. There is not the slightest hint of rightness or wrongness in their approach. They speak only of “outcomes” as they play games with human souls. Their vocabulary is morally sterile: preference, equilibrium, strategy, reciprocity, interaction, cooperation, defection, punishment, cost. Human beings are pawns on their chessboard. In their imaginations, this is the “scientific” way to evaluate the evolution of human social behavior.
But is it really morally neutral? Is it scientific? No way. Notice the paper’s concluding sentence: “The evolution of improved mechanisms of indirect reciprocity therefore leads to societies in which costly punishment between individuals is not an efficient behaviour for promoting cooperation.” Did you catch the judgment calls? If this were scientifically objective and morally neutral, they would have to reject concepts of improving and promoting certain outcomes. In evolution, whatever happens, happens. There is no light side and dark side. If the human society collapses in a bloody heap, so be it. Jot it down in the lab notebook and move on to the ant farm.
Their whole approach tries to be a covering law for any and all outcomes of social behavior. It would not make any difference to them whether the laboratory is Hamas or the Mayflower Compact. Gaza, for that matter, has cooperators (the Hamas terrorists and suicide bombers), punishers (the Hamas leadership) and defectors (the Gaza Baptist Church). The reviewers would have to judge that their ideal society would be to reward the best terrorists and punish the Baptists. Would this not meet their stated goal? – the “study of the joint evolution of social norms and action rules under natural constraints,” they said, where natural is whatever happens, morality be hanged. Then let the reviewers move to Gaza. That is the ideal society to them. They said people preferred to live where cooperation was rewarded and the worst offenders were punished.
Don’t be deceived into thinking that this amoral approach to human society is somehow scientific. In the first place, the scientists disagreed with each other. Their standoff required another promissory note: “study of the joint evolution of social norms and action rules under natural constraints is the goal for the future” (as is everything in evolutionary theory). Secondly, it commits the Ratomorphic Fallacy – treating complex human beings as lab rats. Thirdly, it exposes their mental illness known as the Yoda Complex – a delusion of thinking of oneself on a higher plane than the rest of mortals. And fourthly, they plagiarize but deny the existence of the most important word in human government and social relationships: JUSTICE.
America’s founding fathers were not just playing games. They knew we all have a “human nature,” but that nature is not naturalistic: it is moral. We have a fallen nature, a selfish nature, a desire to exercise personal freedom at the expense of others. Justice provides rewards and punishments not because it is the best strategy, but because it is a necessity for morally selfish individuals who nevertheless are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (eudaimonia, the responsible satisfaction of worthy goals). One may occasionally find overlap in the Darwinist study with the Protestant work ethic, as stated in II Thessalonians 3:10, “if a man will not work, he shall not eat” (i.e., withhold help from the defector), but for entirely different reasons. The Christian wants the defector to be ashamed of his lack of moral responsibility, while the Darwinist plagiarizes Christian morality by assuming the outcome is “better” for the society when help is withheld from the defector.
That difference in motivation makes all the difference in the world. Despite occasional overlap in outcomes, the Christian pursues the strategy because he believes in moral absolutes: good exists and should be rewarded; evil exists and must be punished whether or not the strategy is costly. The Darwinist strategy leads to moral equivalence, because morality is merely a social construction in their world view. Evolutionary game theory, for instance, cannot employ moral judgments in the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, but only determine what is “better” by the outcome. That use of better, however, is loaded with moral overtones. Presumably an outcome is “better” if it is less costly. Says who? Notice how they are assuming that costliness is bad and improved strategies are good. They end up deciding what is better only by plagiarizing and twisting Christian values. In practice, Darwinists usually end up as leftist liberals making moral judgments (e.g., condemning Israel for retaliating against Hamas rocket launches) but on the basis of a morality that cannot be derived from their world view.
Bad ideas are precursors to bad policy. Since the Darwinists are defectors from righteousness, they are dangerous and need to be punished. So we offer a win-win situation. Since they love to play games, and need empirical evidence to lend an air of science to their game-playing, give them a lab to work in: prison. The best lab for playing Prisoner’s Dilemma is, after all, a real prison. To get out, they have to “cooperate” with the “punishers” who have the power to set the rules (the rules, remember, are completely amoral according to the Darwin Party’s own definitions, so they cannot complain if they happen to wind up on the losing side). The “action rule” of this game is to state the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with LIBERTY and JUSTICE for all.” Guard, don’t let them out unless they shout JUSTICE with appropriate emphasis. The outcome? They get out, they write up their results in Nature, everybody wins. Defect, punish, repeat as necessary.