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Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

Cooperation has been "invented" in evolution many times independently and is long term stable in many species.

If your comment was true that fact wouldn't exist.

We may consider the world we live in today competitive, but at the end of the day, humanity is a globe spanning machine that exists due to cooperative behavior at all scales.

Comments such as yours are really missing the forest for the trees.

I suspect that it's really the fact that cooperation is so powerful and pervasive that makes it normal to the point where any deviation from it feels outrageous.

So you focus on the outrageous due to availability bias (seeing the trees rather than the forest).

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You seem to be misunderstanding the GP.

Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.

> Evolution does not work maximizing individual success.

Yes it does. In fact, unless you want to get nit-picky about intra-gene, inter-allele selection, that is _exactly_ what it does.

But it does? What do you think it optimizes other than individual fitness?

I think I understand the GP pretty well. Cheating, or defection in the language of evolutionary theory, is subject to frequency based selection, meaning it is strongly selected against if its frequency is too high in the population. It's not a stable strategy.

It can be a winning strategy for a few individuals in a cooperative environment, yes, but it breaks down at a point because the system collapses if too many do it.

And yet, cooperative systems are common and stable, which is my point.

>What do you think it optimizes other than individual fitness?

Chance to pass genes forward. This is only equivalent to individual fitness for very solitary species and humans aren't.

As an extreme example, take soldier termites - their chance to pass their genes is zero, but the chance for the colony to survive grows. Also gay people exist (they also - usually - don't reproduce, but help others instead).

Humans naturally care about their family and tribe because this increases the chance of their bloodline to survive.

That's a distinction without a difference. Worker ants have high individual fitness if their colony successfully reproduces because they pass their genes forward.

In evolutionary theory this is made clear by using the term "inclusive fitness" - worker ants actually pass their genes on to future generations more effectively by taking the detour, if you will, through the queen.

If you want to be nitpicky and argue we should consider the individual gene the unit of selection, as Dawkins famously argued, I'm not going to disagree, you can see it that way too.

That specific distinction very rarely leads to different predictions though.

A world where everyone is a Giver is not a stable world. Ask Gemini or Claude to explain. Cheating by definition works only in minority. If everyone is in line to buy tickets, only few cheaters can get early tickets and it is a stable strategy. But everyone is a cheater, everyone is worse off.

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