At the receiving end of reciprocation

My last post on evolution was on the topic of altruism, though it covered only relationships involving fertile kin. This completely ignored any discussion of kindness and cooperation between friends. Any anecdotal evidence will suggest to you that friendship can inspire great feats of bravery or loyalty in times of need and of peace. One of the key themes in most American drama is the idea of a partnership. Cops, Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar, House and Wilson. So on, so forth. You will have friends you would sacrifice time or energy for at a moment's notice. Without sharing genes or considering them viable partners, this seems, again, fairly contrary to evolutionary principals. Hamilton suggested that altruism would only occur if the level of sacrifice was balanced by the potential movement of your genes into the next generation. Was this just wrong?

The way evolution could be expected to work as summed up nicely in a thought experiment called the Prisoner's Dilemma. Imagine the scene in which police have arrested two suspects of a serious crime. They are guilty, but there is not enough evidence to convict either of them as things stand. All that the police need is for one of the suspects to testify against the other to be able to convict him. So the police offer the criminals a bribe. They will get a large amount of money if they reveal the part their partner played in the crime. In separate rooms, they now have a choice to make.

Choosing to betray is statistically the best chance of avoiding becoming jailbait.

Either party can betray the other at any point, and considering the options shown above, choosing to betray avoids the worst situation (you act nice but get screwed) and, at worst, gives you a monetary award. At best you get the money and get to go free! If that is how people act, and it really is in a large way, than altruism between non-kin should have been selected against long ago (those who chose to play nice would have gotten the crappy end of the poo-stick).

But, BUT. That only works when you can bugger off and host a party whilst the other guy rots in a cell. Most of the time, in most of our interactions with people, we are subject to meeting them repeatedly. Axelrod (1984) performed the prisoners' dilemma study in which he had participants go through the same problem with each other repeatedly, to see what would happen. Very rarely did any pair descend into mutual betrayal over and over. The three key features that facilitated cooperation were established pretty quickly. Never be the first to defect (go in with the intention of being helpful, have moral ground). Retaliate if your partner betrays you (punish him/her for being a back stabbing little dick). Finally, always be forgiving; if your partner goes back to cooperating, join them. Following these rules, the circle usually ends up in beneficial cooperation.

Evolutionary speaking, this works out fine. Animals have repeated interactions and repeated betrayal would be a pain in the ass in a number of ways for the group as a whole. For one, it doesn't exactly endear you to be their chum, does it? The explanation for reciprocal altruism is simple enough then. Doing members of your group favours in return for help later on is a much more beneficial way to live for any species. It isn't so simple as the prisoners' dilemma would suggest though, before you vastly intelligent devils pour criticism over me and my blog.

In that study, the implications to the 'prisoners'' actions was immediate. You were either punished or rewarded on the moment and that was that, but in reality social contracts are made over a longer period; extending even over years. Two features need to co-evolve with altruism in order to achieve that longevity of relationship: A way of identifying individual faces (or physical forms) and associate them with specific character, and a form of autobiographical memory to allow the animal to remember past interactions with those individuals.

This is displayed in vampire bats, according to a study performed by Wilkinson (1984). The bats he examined lived in groups of around twelve females and their young. Like most small mammals their metabolism was very high, and so they needed to feed every few hours to avoid the risk of starvation and death. The researcher noted that the bats would regurgitate blood meals for other bats. At first he thought these were going towards more helpless young, in the manner of a mother bird giving her young a worm. After closer examination he saw that a lot of the blood was going towards non-kin group members. By shaking things up and mixing different bats into different roosts, he was able to see that the bats would give blood meals more readily to those that they recognised from their previous group. It was through this that he believed the bats had entered reciprocal relationships with 'friends'.

The bats who gave the blood meal were sacrificing nutrition that they could spare without dying, in order to save the life of a 'friend' who could not feed for itself on that occasion. In exchange for the help, the saved bats would likely share on a future occasion.

Unless she came along. Which I'm pretty sure Wilkinson would be ok with.

Coalitions in primates are another example, one that ranges across many conditions. In their groups, dominant males have first choice of females, leaving lower ranking males with less appealing breeding options. Whilst the large chap follows his female(s) around to make sure any babies had are likely to be his, chances are slim that the smaller guys are going to get any luck with her/them. So they enter agreements called coalitions. One of the males distracts the larger male whilst his friend slips in and has a quickie behind the banana tree. This favour is paid back at a later date, creating mutual benefits for the wily apes (e.g. Packer, 1977).

Palmer (1991) looked into displays of reciprocation amongst lobster fishing communities, both large and small. Lobster fishing is difficult as the lobsters tend to congregate together in bulk, but choose a completely random location it often seems. Fishermen have trouble keeping track, and Palmer wanted to check how often they would communicate positive and negative information regarding their locations to other fishers in the area. It was shown that the small village shared almost 4 times as much information. As the small village was more communal than the 'passing through' large village, captains were likely to be closer. "I'll tell you today if you tell me tomorrow" explained the results, but the true level of shared help was kept obscure due to the difficulties in checking pay back in other domains. "I'll tell you today if you give my son a job/ help build a fence" etc.

With differing levels of help on offer from different people, altruism has varying costs depending on what is going on. Stewart-Williams (2007) handed hundreds of undergraduate students a questionnaire asking them how willingly they would give different levels of support to people with different relationships to themselves. Low help would be emotional support. Medium is helping with chores, helping a person during an illness and such, where-as high is donating a kidney or giving emergency aid.

Cousins and acquaintances received much less help than either friends or siblings, but there is where things got interesting. Students would give friends much more medium and low help than siblings, but they were very hesistant to provide friends with high help compared to how readily they would give it to siblings. Wow, we want family to shut up, but we'll hand them a kidney if they're lacking. What this displays, if you are confident in the questionnaire as an (a?)effective methodology, is that we are willing to give friends help they can reciprocate, but we are more likely to take a deep risk for those with our genes.

"Dude... you gave me your kidney." - "You owe me a G'damn helicopter!" 

So as a handy check into how important altruism (and associated rules) is to us as a species, Olson and Spelke (2008) performed a study into early cooperation in children under 4 years old. These children were, individually, introduced to 6 dolls who were on a table beside a collaborating adult. 2 of the dolls were strangers to the adult, it was explained. 2 were friends, and 2 were siblings. The children were asked who the adult should give sweets to, and predictably the child chose siblings over friends, over strangers. Though this may have been down to the social learning of manners (which is a form of altruism in itself) or personal relationships with siblings, it is a stronger possibility that the differences were washed away given a large enough sample size. Not every child would have a closer relationship with a sibling than a friend.  Additionally, the story was kept about the adult. This made it less likely the child would place his or her personal emphasis on it all.

Later on, the children were told a wee story about some other dolls. It went along the lines of "You're at the park, Dawg. Susie and Laura clamber up and say "Yo. We got pennies, we're going to share them with you". After which Bertha and Gertrude saunter over and say "We got pennies too, man. We're going to share them with your experimental collaborating adult type instead"." When asked who they would share their own pennies with, the children almost always picked Susie and Laura - Reciprocation. Nifty, but even better was their demonstration of why having a good reputation is nothing but helpful in terms of receiving help from others you have not helped. The same scenario was developed but the pennies were either shared with the adult, or not shared at all (bad for street cred). The children followed this, and chose to share with the dolls who had given the adult money.

In response to some common questions asked about this whole topic, Clare (our lecturer) had researched explanations for behaviours which seem to go against any sense of the evolutionary explanations we have just discussed for altruism between non-kin. Firstly, blood donation. This one was embarrassingly obvious after she tricked us a bit. She asked who had given blood, and those who had shot their hands up into the air with a level of poorly concealed pride *shakes head*. She then went on to explain that it is a behaviour we like to be seen doing. The whole process is anonymous, we don;'t know where our blood goes or if it even goes anywhere or is discarded, so we cannot have the action reciprocated. Despite this, we gain a reputation for kindness and selflessness that helps convince people to cooperate with you in the future. The sacrifice, in others words, will eventually award us a net gain. Evolution likes the term 'net gain' in regards to a trait.

Adoption could be seen as a compromise made by women who can't or don't want to go through pregnancy and birth; allowing them to transfer their lessons and experience into the next generation if not their genetics (memes but not genes). Clare was more convinced that it was a way of fulfilling the strong biological need expressed in most females to actually be a mother. That's understandable, the maternal instinct is strong.

Altruism between non-related members of a species is shown based on the assurance of payback later on. If you get help, you owe the guy a favour. It just makes things work much easier for everyone involved.

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I finished this at the start of the week but only added some finishing touches tonight. The last few days have been a perfect example of lethargy in the face of a heck of a lot of work to do.

Additionally, I searched 'fist bump' in google to get one of the pictures above. Not a single damn picture result that wasn't some sort of "let's beat racism / religious differences" campaign. Seems fist-bumping is the rad way to make the world a better place.