[lit-ideas] Do the fittest survive? Not necessarily
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Kate & Pat Glynn <kathryn.m.glynn@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:22:37 -0400
From D. Easley and J. Kleinberg (forthcoming), Nefworks, Crowds and Markets:
Reasoning About a Highly Connected World. From the chapter on "Evolutionary
Game Theory", summarizing the results of what happens when a population of
large beetles invades a population of small beetles, where large land small
beetles compete for the same food, but large beetles are individually less fit
than small beetles.
"Here is a different way to summarize the striking feature of our example:
Starting from
a population of small beetles, evolution by natural selection is causing the
fitness of the
organisms to decrease over time.
"This might seem troubling initially, since we think of natural selection as
being fitness-increasing. But in fact, it’s not hard to reconcile what’s
happening with this general principle of natural selection. Natural selection
increases the fitness of individual organisms in a fixed environment ― if the
environment changes to become more hostile to the organisms, then clearly this
could cause their fitness to go down.
"This is what is happening to the population of beetles. Each beetle’s
environment includes
all the other beetles, since these other beetles determine its success in food
competitions;
therefore the increasing fraction of large beetles can be viewed, in a sense,
as a shift to an
environment that is more hostile for everyone."
Read this as a parable, substituting communities, nations or corporations for
beetles. Thought-provoking stuff.
John
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