In a related lecture, we
spoke of kinship and dispersal, which lead to altruism. To avoid
inbreeding, one sex usually disperses at maturity. Usually it's the males
who disperse since benefits of dispersal are more to them than to
females, since they get greater mating opportunities. Also, the costs are
less; access to food is reduced which isn't as important to them as to
females. When males don't leave, then females are forced to. This happens
especially in the new world primates. So, because of different patterns
of dispersal, you have variations in which sex is living with relatives.
Whoever lives with relatives has the opportunity to treat relatives
differently than non-relatives. Called kin-correlated
behaviors, these include spatial proximity, agonistic helping,
and grooming. So they treat relatives differently, but why? Can we
explain it in terms of natural selection?
You grow up with your parents so you know who they are since they're always right there. Imprinting! Lots of evidence and research on this. Probably extended farther in primates since they have more extended relationships. You learn who your mother is, then pay attention to who she hangs out with and that teaches you who your other relatives are. Some problems: You can make mistakes or get fooled. Like cuckoos- trick other parents into taking care of their egg. Question: how do cuckoos avoid trying to mate with the kind of bird that raised them if they imprint on their mom?? Another problem is how to know who your dad is in non-monogamous societies. So people hypothesized another theory- this is not based o observations, just on people sitting around thinking.
What does this mean? All your physical characteristics as opposed to genotype which is all the genes which went into guiding your development. So if you see someone who looks like you then maybe they're related and maybe you should treat them better. This isn't just visual, but also smell or sound or something. Dawkins' armpit effect- imagining people sniffing another's armpit and then their own and deciding that they're related or not. Out text says this does exists but more recent publications are really getting to doubt it. One study where it was demonstrated on macaques and one in ground squirrels but hey have both been criticized as to methods and no on has been able to repeat their findings.
You expect individuals to act selfishly. It is easy to understand and explain through natural selection. This is the easiest way to ensure that you will have the highest reproductive success. By simple mathematics, genes for altruism will die out.
There are four ways of behavior to another- it might
benefit or harm you, an it might benefit or harm the other guy.
| Benefits recipient | Harms recipient | |
| Benefits donor | cooperation | selfish behavior |
| Harms donor | altruism | spite |
Selfish behavior, we expect to see. Cooperation we can understand. Spite is hard to explain in terms of natural selection, but that's ok because you almost never see it. However, in animals you see altruism but how can we explain it?
An example- grooming. It benefits the recipient, but what does it do for the donor? Another example is helping defend a group against a predator; sometimes male colobus will confront predator instead of running away with the rest of the group. In primates there are many examples of individuals taking care of infants which aren't their own. Another example is alarm calls.
Group selection interpretation
This was the classic
explanation; it was good for the group. As people sharpened up their
logic, they debunked this theory. George Williams especially drove home
the point that if you have a bunch of altruists it's really easy for a
cheater to arise and take over.
Question; how to resolve the
paradox?
How can altruistic behavior evolve in individuals
within the framework of natural selection? The key insight in cracking
this problem was realizing that it's not individuals who are
passed down but genes. If your relatives are like you then they
carry the same genes.
Two solutions were developed to answer this question: kin selection and reciprocal altruism, which is less well established.
Remember the basics of natural selection: If there's a trait in a population which spreads, then it's favored by natural selection. Now we will complicate things by adding inclusive fitness. We are going beyond thinking about individuals and are now thinking about the genes that they carry. Alternative forms of genes, called alleles, are in us. We can copy our genes not only by having offspring ourselves, but by helping our relatives to have offspring. You can calculate exactly what is the probability that another individual will have the same genes as you.
First, what is the
probability that a copy of a particular gene in a parent is shared by one
of its offspring?
(Thanks to William Hamilton)
Remember:
(0.50)^T
To compute r, you just sum this value for all possible pathways between 2 individuals. It can get a little more complex because you can be related to the same person in two different ways. Here are some examples;
Parent and
offspring:
One link, parent to child. Thus, r=.5
Grandparent and grandchild:
Two links; child to
parent, and parent to grandparent. (.5)^2 = r =.25
Half
siblings:
Two links; up to the parent is one and back down
to the other sibling is another. (.5)^2=.25, so your relatedness
coefficient is .25
Full siblings:
These are a
little tricky because there are two ways that their genes could be the
same. Full siblings are related through both their mother and through
their father, so each pathway is .25 and when you add them together, it's
.5.
Two cousins:
Their parents are siblings, so
there are two pathways with four links each that they're connected by. 2
* (.5)^4=.125
Genetically speaking, full siblings are just as related to you as your offspring. So an individual can benefit just as well by helping its siblings as by making offspring.
If given the choice to help a grand-offspring or a half-sibling (both have r=.25), which will an individual be better off choosing? They will usually choose the younger one because the benefits t the recipient will be greater since a young helpless infant will be more helped by a single act of helping than an old established animal. (Also, lifetime reproductive potential is greater for younger individuals than for older ones.)
To formalize the concept, Hamilton introduced the concept of inclusive fitness, a measure of one's own reproduction plus a summed component of the reproduction of others, devalued by the degree of relationship.
| Inclusive fitness = individual fitness + fitness of others devalued by the degree of relationship between donor and recipient |
Hamilton's rule is for predicting whether or not altruistic behavior will be exhibited:
| B/C > 1/r | |
| OR | rB>C |
| OR | rB - C > 0 |
In ground squirrels, males disperse and don't live with relatives, but females stay so they're with more relatives. Based on their percentage of the population, females call much more than you'd expect and males much less.
Male gorillas are related to all the kids in the group, but females are only related to a few of the kids. So you'd expect males of do more alarm calls than females and they do.
Also, vervets were studied in captivity. They checked whether females did more alarm calls when offspring were present, and they did indeed call much more when offspring were present than when there were others present.
A cautionary note: To understand all this, you have to do a lot of math. You may be thinking, "Do monkeys really understand all these concepts and everything?" But you must understand that the animals don't have to be conscious beings for it to work, and they don't have to know calculus! Natural selection does all the math for them- if an individual's behavior works within the formulas, then its genes will be passed on, but if its behavior isn't within the formulas, then the overly- or underly-altruistic genes won't be around for long.
This
kin selection theory explains most acts of altruism that we see- they're
generally benefitting relatives. This is in contrast to:
Primate examples (From pg 287 in coursepack)
Our
first example is baboons: Remember their consortships- when a female is
receptive, a male will follow her around and keep others away as long as
he can. Sometimes the individual in the consortship will be the highest
male in the group and will be able of keep everyone away. But sometimes
two males will gang up to drive him away and then one of them will mate
with her. They often recruit an ally to help chase away the other guy.
The helper incurs serious costs, but what benefits does he get? He
doesn't get a female. You notice through further observations that in the
future the helper will recruit the guy he helped to help him drive away a
guy and get a female.
Our second example is vervets: Here, alliances are between females.When a fight between females breaks out, one participant will often scream for help and other individuals who hear her will come to her aid. Usually, it's relatives who come but sometimes it's non relatives. How likely is it that a non-relative comes to give help depends on how recently the recipient groomed the donor. Data from playback experiments shows that when kin hear a scream for help, they look around for the source for a long time when there was no prior grooming, while non-kin look for the source for a LOT longer when they had been recently groomed, and barely looked at all when they hadn't been recently groomed.
Conditions favoring reciprocal
altruism
To illustrate this point, we played prisoner's
dilemma. When you're playing a series with the same partner, the
'tit-for-tat' strategy works the best. When playing with a different
partner every time, it's better to defect every time.
To learn the
theory of prisoner's dilmma, check out this link:
http://newciv.org/GIB/BI/BI-36
.HTML
So, how favored by natural selection a
tit-for-tat strategy is depends on the likelihood of future interactions
with the same individuals.
Conditions necessary for the
evolution of reciprocal altruism