[Rhapso]

I think cooperation is never a locally optimal strategy. Somebody allways gets to pick second at the prisoner's dilemma table, and locally optimal behavior is to eat the trusting idiot.

Takes a lot of luck to evolve cooperation multiple times at once, much more likely to happen in a situation where the selection pressure is lower, not higher.

[dasil003]

Now you get into the definition of "locally". Gene pool local or individual local? I think it's evident that cooperation has proven highly effective at the gene pool level. Will it prove to only be effective short-term local and flame out over longer-time spans remains to be seen. Will there be anyone to document it? Not sure, but it's been a helluva ride.

[corimaith]

Pretty sure those non-cooperative strategies quickly burn themselves to extinction though. The selection pressure itself would be regulated towards an equilibrium.

The thing about evolution is that you are sampling many times in different directions. So "luck" isn't that hard to achieve.

[Rhapso]

> Pretty sure those non-cooperative strategies quickly burn themselves to extinction though.

> Pretty sure those non-cooperative strategies quickly burn themselves to extinction though.

Um, most life hanging out in the same tropic level or lower is heavily predated upon. Competition is the norm.

Luck is hard for cooperation because it is a coordination problem. You basically have to evolve cooperation entirely as a unexpressed trait then trigger it in the population almost simultaneously. The mechanisms of cell cooperation are critical dividers on our evolutionary trees for a reason, they are rare and dramatic in consequence. Cell populations regressing in terms of coordination behavior (see cancer) is one of their most problematic failure modes and it is only very weakly selected against.

[corimaith]

>Um, most life hanging out in the same tropic level or lower is heavily predated upon. Competition is the norm.

I'm referring to the predator-prey population cycles. If you overexploit your prey you are going to run out of food and see your population thin out rapidly from starvation. Hence hyper-competitive strategies would get outbreeded by less competitive but sustainable strategies.

High predation levels would require equally high cooperation levels amongst prey to ensure rapid reproduction to sustain the food supply. If we go down the food chain it's the same thing, plant life, celluar life, etc, has to be flourishing to sustain the upper levels.