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Ch. 10 - You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours

#71: Sept. - Oct. 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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Ch. 10 - You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours

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The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Ch. 10 - You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours
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Robert Tulip

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The second last chapter of The Selfish Gene "You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours' discusses reciprocal altruism.

Here I post the text from this chapter which I underlined on second reading.
...important idea of reciprocal altruism...racing cyclists...V-formation of flying birds...competition to avoid the disadvantageous position at head of the flock...unwilling leader...form of the delayed reciprocal altruism...

WD Hamilton in a paper called 'Geometry for the Selfish Herd'...sensible individual will try to keep his domain of danger as small as possible...immediate steps to move towards the centre...model is interesting...simple assumptions can predict aggregation...selfish-herd model...no altruism here, only selfish exploitation...

Bird alarm calls...effect of calling the predator's attention...difficult to locate...accoustic engineer would produce something very like the real alarm calls of many small song-birds....means that large numbers of individuals have died because their alarm calls were not quite perfect...danger attached to giving alarm calls...a gene for giving alarms can prosper in the gene pool...true, even if the caller pays dearly...there must be some important advantage of living in flocks, otherwise the birds would not do it...best policy is to fly up into a tree, but make sure everybody else does...warning call is seen to have a purely selfish advantage...'manipulation'...

stotting Thomsons gazelle...apparently suicidal altruism...selfish gene theory has a more exacting challenge...gazelles...inviting the predator's attention...try and catch my neighbour...go for the old and unhealthy...chase somebody else...

social insects...astonishing feats of cooperation and apparent altruism...individuality is subjugated...communal stomach...community behaves ...unit with a nervous system and sense organs...selectivity of a body’s immune reaction system...’germ line’...immortal gene continuity – flows through...the reproductives...analogues of our own reproductive cells...death of a single sterile worker bee...shedding of a leaf in autumn to the genes of a tree...temptation to wax mystical...no need...

‘What’s in it for the workers?’ Some people have answered .Nothing.’...queen is having it all her own way...ants, bees and wasps, the workers may actually be more closely related to the brood than the queen herself is!...

one of the most spectacular triumphs of the selfish gene theory...extraordinary system of sexual reproduction evolved...Hymenoptera...all sperms from a given male are therefore identical...male has only half the usual number of genes...relatedness between hymenopteran full sisters is not ½ as it would be for normal sexual animals, but ¾...predispose a female to farm her own mother...true sociality, with worker sterility...evolved no less than eleven times independently in the hymenoptera...and...in the termites...workers must try to bias the sex ratio in favour of females... worker who ‘wants’ a 3:1 sex ratio, or a queen, who ‘wants’ a 1:1 ratio...conflict of interests...optimal sex ratio strictly apply, not to numbers of males and females but to quantity of investment...just such a circumstance...critical test of the theory...slaving raids...kind of war effort...anti-slavery adaptations...evidently not fully effective...The queen of the slave-making species is now in a position to bend the sex ratio...queens ‘attempt’ to disguise male eggs...workers...’see through’ this disguise...any gene in a slave worker ‘for breaking the code’ is not represented...expect in slave making species that the ratio of investment in reproductives of the two sexes should approach 1:1 rather than 3:1 ... just what Trivers and Hare found...

honey bee...large surplus of investment...awkward spanner...young queen on her mating flight mates with several males...social insects discovered...settled cultivation of food can be more efficient than hunting and gathering...

mutual altruism...between ants and fungi...ants have their own domestic animals...aphids...symbiotic relationships...

multiple organisms...we ourselves?...mitochondria...each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit...ourselves as a colony of viruses!...

parasitic DNA...associations of mutual benefit will evolve if each partner gets out more than he puts in...

Can the theory of selfish genes account for mutual back-scratching, or ‘reciprocal altruism’, where there is a delay between good deed and payment?... Cheats do better than indiscriminate altruists because they gain the benefits without paying the costs...

two strategies...unconscious behaviour programs laid down by genes. Call the two strategies Sucker and Cheat...cheat genes ...spread...third strategy called Grudger...remember the incident and bear a grudge...after the sucker has gone and the cheats can no longer get away with selfish exploitation so easily, the grudgers slowly begin to increase at the cheats’ expense...

mice kept in isolation tend to develop unpleasant sores...

Cleaner-fish...selfish genes...ruthless, exploiting cheats have cashed in...the cheat, instead of pulling off a parasite, bites a chunk out of the large fish’s fin and beats a hasty retreat...

many of our psychological characteristics- envy, guilt, gratitude, sympathy, etc – have been shaped by natural selection to cheat, to detect cheats, and to avoid being thought to be a cheat...

man’s swollen brain...mechanism of ever more devious cheating, and ever more penetrating detection...fascinating speculation...reciprocal altruism...our own species.
I would be interested to discuss how these ideas provide analytical and empirical foundations for considering religion as a method of group selection. I will return to this theme by looking at how the Christian text ‘what you do for the least, you do for Christ’, provides a group selection ethic which is memetic, ie based on rational goals, rather than simply genetic. Memetics provides a basis to consider the sacrificial behaviour of religion as a successful evolutionary adaptation, but one that is severely constrained by the herd instinct, as the above selections from You Scratch My Back, I’ll Ride On Yours explain.
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