Fusion and sex in protocells & the start of evolution

In 1864, five years after reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Pyotr Kropotkin — the anarchist prince of mutual aid — was leading a geographic survey expedition aboard a dog-sleigh — a distinctly Siberian variant of the HMS Beagle. In the harsh Manchurian climate, Kropotkin did not see competition ‘red in tooth and claw’, but a flourishing of cooperation as animals banded together to survive their environment. From this, he built a theory of mutual aid as a driving factor of evolution. Among his countless observations, he noted that no matter how selfish an animal was, it still had to come together with others of its species, at least to reproduce. In this, he saw both sex and cooperation as primary evolutionary forces.

Now, Martin A. Nowak has taken up the challenge of putting cooperation as a central driver of evolution. With his colleagues, he has tracked the problem from myriad angles, and it is not surprising that recently he has turned to sex. In a paper released at the start of this month, Sam Sinai, Jason Olejarz, Iulia A. Neagu, & Nowak (2016) argue that sex is primary. We need sex just to kick start the evolution of a primordial cell.

In this post, I want to sketch Sinai et al.’s (2016) main argument, discuss prior work on the primacy of sex, a similar model by Wilf & Ewens, the puzzle over emergence of higher levels of organization, and the difference between the protocell fusion studied by Sinai et al. (2016) and sex as it is normally understood. My goal is to introduce this fascinating new field that Sinai et al. (2016) are opening to you, dear reader; to provide them with some feedback on their preprint; and, to sketch some preliminary ideas for future extensions of their work.

Hadza hunter-gatherers, social networks, and models of cooperation

At the heart of the Great Lakes region of East Africa is Tanzania — a republic comprised of 30 mikoa, or provinces. Its border is marked off by the giant lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, and Malawi. But the lake that interests me the most is an internal one: 200 km from the border with Kenya at the junction of mikao Arusha, Manyara, Simiyu and Singed is Lake Eyasi. It is a temperamental lake that can dry up almost entirely — becoming crossable on foot — in some years and in others — like the El Nino years — flood its banks enough to attract hippos from the Serengeti.

For the Hadza, it is home.

The Hadza number around a thousand people, with around 300 living as traditional nomadic hunter-gatherers (Marlow, 2002; 2010). A life style that is believed to be a useful model of societies in our own evolutionary heritage. An empirical model of particular interest for the evolution of cooperation. But a model that requires much more effort to explore than running a few parameter settings on your computer. In the summer of 2010, Coren Apicella explored this model by traveling between Hadza camps throughout the Lake Eyasi region to gain insights into their social network and cooperative behavior.

Here is a video abstract where Coren describes her work:

The data she collected with her colleagues (Apicella et al., 2012) provides our best proxy for the social organization of early humans. In this post, I want to talk about the Hadza, the data set of their social network, and how it can inform other models of cooperation. In other words, I want to freeride on Apicella et al. (2012) and allow myself and other theorists to explore computational models informed by the empirical Hadza model without having to hike around Lake Eyasi for ourselves.

Diversity and persistence of group tags under replicator dynamics

Everyday I walk to the Stabile Research Building to drink espresso and sit in my cozy — although oversaturated with screens — office. Oh, and to chat about research with great people like Arturo Araujo, David Basanta, Jill Gallaher, Jacob Scott, Robert Vander Velde and other Moffitters. This walk to the office takes about 30 minutes each way, so I spend it listening to podcasts. For the past few weeks, upon recommendation from a friend, I’ve started listing to the archive of the Very Bad Wizards. This is a casual — although oversaturated with rude jokes — conversation between David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers on various aspects of the psychology and philosophy of morality. They aim at an atmosphere of two researchers chatting at the bar; although their conversation is over Skype and drinks. It is similar to the atmosphere that I want to promote here at TheEGG. Except they are funny.

While walking this Wednesday, I listed to episode 39 of Very Bad Wizards. Here the duo opens with a Wilson & Haidt’s TIME quiz meant to quantify to what extent you are liberal or conservative.^[1] They are 63% liberal.^[2]

To do the quiz, you are asked to rate 12 statements (well, 11 and one question about browsers) on a six point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Here are the three that caught my attention:

6. If I heard that a new restaurant in my neighborhood blended the cuisines of two very different cultures, that would make me want to try it.
7. My government should treat lives of its citizens as being much more valuable than lives in other countries.^[3]
10. I wish the world did not have nations or borders and we were all part of one big group.^[4]

Do you strongly agree? Strongly disagree? What was your overall place on the liberal-conservative scale?

Regardless of your answers, the statements probably remind you of an important aspect of your daily experience. The world is divided into a diversity of groups, and they coexist in a tension between their arbitrary, often artificial, nature and the important meaning that they hold to both their own members and others. Often this division is accompanied by ethnocentrism — a favoring of the in-group at the expensive of, or sometimes with direct hostility toward, the out-group — that seems difficult to circumvent through simply expanding our moral in-group. These statements also confront you with the image of what a world without group lines might look like; would it be more cooperative or would it succumb to the egalitarian dilemma?^[5]

As you know, dear reader, here at TheEGG we’ve grappled with some of these questions. Mostly by playing with the Hammond & Axelrod model of ethnocentrism (2006; also see: Hartshorn, Kaznatcheev & Shultz, 2012). Recently, Jansson’s (2015) extension of my early work on the robustness of ethnocentrism (Kaznatcheev, 2010) has motivated me to continue this thread. A couple of weeks ago I sketched how to reduce the dimensionality of the replicator equations governing tag-based games. Today, I will use this representation to look at how properties of the game affect the persistence and diversity of tags.

Misbeliefs, evolution and games: a positive case

A recurrent theme here in TheEGG is the limits and reliability of knowledge. These get explored from many directions: on epistemological grounds, from the philosophy of science angle, but also formally, through game theory and simulations. In this post, I will explore the topic of misbeliefs as adaptations. Misbeliefs will be intended as ideas about reality that a given subject accepts as true, despite them being wrong, inaccurate or otherwise mistaken. The notion that evolution might not systematically and exclusively support true beliefs isn’t new to TheEGG, but it has also been tackled by many other people, by means of different methodologies, including my own personal philosophising. The overarching question is whether misbeliefs can be systematically adaptive, a prospect that tickles my devious instincts: if it were the case, it would fly in the face of naïve rationalists, who frequently assume that evolution consistently favours the emergence of truthful ways to perceive the world.

Given our common interests, Artem and I have had plenty of long discussions in the past couple of years, mostly sparked by his work on Useful Delusions (see Kaznatcheev et al., 2014), for some more details on our exchanges, as well as a little background on myself, please see the notes^[1]. A while ago,  I found an article by McKay and Dennett (M&D), entitled “The evolution of misbelief” (2009)^[2], Artem offered me the chance to write a guest post on it, and I was very happy to accept.

What follows will mix philosophical, clinical and mathematical approaches, with the hope to produce a multidisciplinary synthesis.

Short history of iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments

Nineteen Eighty — if I had to pick the year that computational modeling invaded evolutionary game theory then that would be it. In March, 1980 — exactly thirty-five years ago — was when Robert Axelrod, a professor of political science at University of Michigan, published the results of his first tournament for iterated prisoner’s dilemma in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Game theory experts, especially those specializing in Prisoner’s dilemma, from the disciplines of psychology, political science, economics, sociology, and mathematics submitted 14 FORTRAN programs to compete in a round-robin tournament coded by Axelrod and his research assistant Jeff Pynnonen. If you want to relive these early days of evolutionary game theory but have forgotten FORTRAN and only speak Python then I recommend submitting a strategy to an analogous tournament by Vincent Knight on GitHub. But before I tell you more about submitting, dear reader, I want to celebrate the anniversary of Axelrod’s paper by sharing more about the original tournament.

Maybe it will give you some ideas for strategies.

An approach towards ethics: primate sociality

Moral decision making is one of the major torrents in human behavior. It often overrides other ways of making judgments, it generates conflicting sets of cultural values and is reinforced by them. Such conflicts might even occur in the head of some unfortunate individual, which makes the process really creative. On the other hand ethical behavior is the necessary social glue and the way people prioritize prosocial practices.

In the comments to his G+ post about Michael Sandel’s Justice course, Artem Kaznatcheev invited me to have a take on moral judgment and social emotions based on what I gathered through my readings in the recent couple of years. I’m by no means an expert in any of the fields that I touch upon in the following considerations, but I’ve been purposefully struggling with the topic due to my interest in behavioral sciences trying to come up with a lucid framework to think about the subject. Not everything I write here is backed up very well by research, mainly because I step up a little and try to see what might come next, but I’ll definitely do my best to leave my general understanding distinct from concepts prevailing in the studies I have encountered. It is not an essay on ethics per se, but rather where I am now in understanding how moral sentiments work. A remark to make is that for the purposes of that text I understand behavior broadly, e.g. thinking is a behavior.

From realism to interfaces and rationality in evolutionary games

As I was preparing some reading assignments, I realized that I don’t have a single resource available that covers the main ideas of the interface theory of perception, objective versus subjective rationality, and their relationship to evolutionary game theory. I wanted to correct this oversight and use it as opportunity to comment on the philosophy of mind. In this post I will quickly introduce naive realism, critical realism, and the interface theory of perception and sketch how we can use evolutionary game theory to study them. The interface theory of perception will also give me an opportunity to touch on the difference between subjective and objective rationality. Unfortunately, I am trying to keep this entry short, so we will only skim the surface and I invite you to click links aggressively and follow the references papers if something catches your attention — this annotated list of links might be of particular interest for further exploration.

Defining empathy, sympathy, and compassion

When discussing the evolution of cooperation, questions about empathy, sympathy, and compassion are often close to mind. In my computational work, I used to operationalize-away these emotive concepts and replace them with a simple number like the proportion of cooperative interactions. This is all well and good if I want to confine myself to a behaviorist perspective, but my colleagues and I have been trying to move to a richer cognitive science viewpoint on cooperation. This has confronted me with the need to think seriously about empathy, sympathy, and compassion. In particular, Paul Bloom‘s article against empathy, and a Reddit discussion on the usefulness of empathy as a word has reminded me that my understanding of the topic is not very clear or critical. As such, I was hoping to use this opportunity to write down definitions for these three concepts and at the end of the post sketch a brief idea of how to approach some of them with evolutionary modeling. My hope is that you, dear reader, would point out any confusion or disagreement that lingers.

Useful delusions, interface theory of perception, and religion

As you can guess from the name, evolutionary game theory (EGT) traces its roots to economics and evolutionary biology. Both of the progenitor fields assume it impossible, or unreasonably difficult, to observe the internal representations, beliefs, and preferences of the agents they model, and thus adopt a largely behaviorist view. My colleagues and I, however, are interested in looking at learning from the cognitive science tradition. In particular, we are interested in the interaction of evolution and learning. This interaction in of itself is not innovative, it has been a concern for biologists since Baldwin (1886, 1902), and Smead & Zollman (2009; Smead 2012) even brought the interaction into an EGT framework and showed that rational learning is not necessarily a ‘fixed-point of Darwinian evolution’. But all the previous work that I’ve encountered at this interface has made a simple implicit assumption, and I wanted to question it.

It is relatively clear that evolution acts objectively and without regard for individual agents’ subjective experience except in so far as that experience determines behavior. On the other hand, learning, from the cognitive sciences perspective at least, acts on the subjective experiences of the agent. There is an inherent tension here between the objective and subjective perspective that becomes most obvious in the social learning setting, but is still present for individual learners. Most previous work has sidestepped this issue by either not delving into the internal mechanism of how agents decide to act — something that is incompatible with the cognitive science perspective — or assuming that subjective representations are true to objective reality — something for which we have no a priori justification.

A couple of years ago, I decided to look at this question directly by developing the objective-subjective rationality model. Marcel and I fleshed out the model by adding a mechanism for simple Bayesian learning; this came with an extra perk of allowing us to adopt Masel’s (2007) approach to looking at quasi-magical thinking as an inferential bias. To round out the team with some cognitive science expertise, we asked Tom to join. A few days ago, after an unhurried pace and over 15 relevant blog posts, we released our first paper on the topic (Kaznatcheev, Montrey & Shultz, 2014) along with its MatLab code.

Cooperation, enzymes, and the origin of life

Enzymes play an essential role in life. Without them, the translation of genetic material into proteins — the building blocks of all phenotypic traits — would be impossible. That fact, however, poses a problem for anyone trying to understand how life appeared in the hot, chaotic, bustling molecular “soup” from which it sparked into existence some 4 billion years ago.

Throw a handful of self-replicating organic molecules into a glass of warm water, then shake it well. In this thoroughly mixed medium, molecules that help other molecules replicate faster –- i.e. enzymes or analogues thereof — do so at their own expense and, by virtue of natural selection, must sooner or later go extinct. But now suppose that little pockets or “vesicles” form inside the glass by some abiotic process, encapsulating the molecules into isolated groups. Suppose further that, once these vesicles reach a certain size, they can split and give birth to “children” vesicles — again, by some purely physical, abiotic process. What you now have is a recipe for group selection potentially favorable to the persistence of catalytic molecules. While less fit individually, catalysts favor the group to which they belong.

This gives rise to a conflict opposing (1) within-group selection against “altruistic” traits and (2) between-group selection for such traits. In other words, enzymes and abiotic vesicles make an evolutionary game theory favourite — a social dilemma.