JimJ's post - The Evolutionary Difference Between Republicans and Democrats

From the comments section of the Daily Kos via Mary at the watch (Natasha has some guest posters now. I should get my brother to contribute to this as I will have to cut back soon.)

Please pardon the long post, but I don't think that most of this could be available anywhere else on the web and I'm not really interested in making my own blog right now.

I want to advance some wide ranging speculation on the sociobiological implications of the Bush administration. What really got me thinking about this was a post the other day by Mary which suggested that cooperation is the favored and most successful form of interaction between countries and individuals. I thought that we should consider statement a bit more.

Before I get going, I want to say that I am a professional evolutionary biologist, but I am not an expert in sociobiology or human behavior. I will try to confine my remarks to things that are fairly well understood in biology and only speculate a little (but that's the fun part).

In biology, there are essentially two ways in which organisms evolve altruistic or cooperative behavior:

1) Kin selection (which E. O. Wilson called hard-core altruism in his book On Human Nature) which focuses the benefits of altruistic acts on close relatives and;

2) Reciprocal altruism which is more complex and benefits those individuals in the population which are likely to engage in reciprocal acts of altruism with individuals who provide benefits to them. E. O. Wilson called this type of altruism "soft-core" altruism.

Kin selection is very important in the altruistic behaviors of animals ranging from social insects like bees and wasps to social mammals like the Belding ground squirrel and chimpanzees. It probably also plays an important role in human evolution, but I want to talk more about reciprocal altruism today.

Reciprocal altruism has been compared to the actions of a person shoving another person (even an unknown person) out of the way of an oncoming bus. For the altruistic individual this action poses grave risks because he or she could be hit by the bus and killed, so why do people engage in altruistic behavior if natural selection favors individual (Darwinian) fitness (measured by reproductive success)?

The explanation of most altruistic behavior owes much to game theory and the work of Robert Trivers. If we imagine a simple game called the prisoner's dilemma which deals with how two prisoners arrested as accomplices and locked in different cells decide to cooperate or betray each other. If we think about it, there are four possible outcomes from player A's prospective:

1) Both players cooperate and receive a reward for not ratting each other out. This reward is typically moderate.
2) Player A cooperates and player B defects, so player A incurs a strong penalty and reduction in fitness.
3) Player A defects while player B cooperates, so player A gets a reward greater than mutual cooperation (Outcome 1).
4) Both players defect and both players are punished and reduced in fitness.

If this game is only going to be played once, it is in a player's best interest to defect, but if players engage in this game over and over, altruistic behavior and mutual cooperation is the best strategy (The Evolutionary Stable Strategy, ESS).

For reciprocal altruism to evolve within a population, the population should have the following characteristics:

1) Individuals within the population must interact frequently and group membership must be relatively stable.

2) Many opportunities to act as an altruist or a beneficiary must occur in the individual's lifetime and with approximately equal proportions.

3) Individuals must have good memories for past acts of altruism and to rapidly identify and remember cheaters.

So if we think about altruism and cooperation from an evolutionary perspective, they are ultimately selfish acts done with the expectation of future altruism and cooperation from the individuals who receive benefits from the altruistic acts. It also predicts that in populations of sufficient complexity that meet the criteria, reciprocal altruism should be the dominant, but not only mode of behavior. There will always be cheaters in the population because cheating can provide great short term rewards.

Now let's consider the Bush Administration. This administration is basically an administration of defectors or cheaters (to use the terminology of the prisoner's dilemma game). It would appear to me that they cooperate only with those who share their objectives, "You are with us or against us."

How much did it benefit Mary Landrieu to cooperate with the Bush administration? She played the part of the good altruist and cooperated with them repeatedly, then when she came up for reelection, the Bushies defected.

How much has it benefited Tony Blair to cooperate with the Bush Administration? Tony Blair has staked his political future on cooperation with the Bush Administration, but they show no signs of cooperating with him on the things that are important to him.

Even congressional Republicans are learning that the Bush administration cannot be trusted to cooperate despite past cooperation on the part of congress.

One other important aspect of reciprocal altruism as it appears to work in biology is that the players must be able to identify defectors or cheaters and NOT COOPERATE WITH THEM. It is not in the interests of the other players in the game to cooperate with cheaters, it costs them long term and short term fitness.

The United States and members of the government of the United States government have a long history of using cooperation and reciprocal altruism to accomplish things, but by having a "cheater" administration we are teaching the world that this government cannot be trusted, and it will take a long time to regain that trust.

It seems to me that the "scorched Earth" unbending positions taken by this administration and many prominent Republicans can only lead to an erosion of cooperative behavior in the world (between governments) and between individuals in our society. They must be identified as "cheaters" and eliminated from the political structure because they are not reliable players. This erodes the quality of our political discourse and causes grid-lock as Democrats learn that it is not in their best interest to cooperate with the administration.

It would also appear to me that many aspects of basic Republican ideology favor hard-core or kin selected forms of altruism. For example, they favor eliminating the inheritance tax which would focus benefits on close relatives, and they object to affirmative action used as a criteria for admissions at universities and law schools but don't object to using legacy status for the same thing. Their opposition to many aspects of the social welfare system would fall into the same category, since they would appear to want to limit altruistic behavior to unrelated individuals to largely voluntary charity institutions (and since charity donations are tax deductible, it is hardly altruistic).

Democrats, on the other hand tend to see government institutions as a vehicle for soft-core or reciprocal altruism. The social safety net is a good example of this. We utilize government institutions to spread benefits to individuals to the population with the expectation that, should we need them, they will be there for our benefit too. This is reciprocal altruism in a nutshell.

This, it appears to me, is the fundamental difference in ideology between Democrats and Republicans, and I don't think there is any real doubt as to which form of altruism fosters a richer, more inclusive, and more dynamic society. Ultimately I think that the Republicans are taking us to a place that the vast majority of Americans will not like and the pendulum will swing back the other way, but there will always be this conflict between reciprocal altruists and non-altruists or hard-core altruists.

I tend to agree with this. I have an optimistic view of human nature and mostly criticize fundamentalists and Republicans for being greedy hypocrites. They see nothing wrong with their behavior and think everyone acts in their own self-interest and people who say otherwise are liars or fools or both.