By Alexander J. Field
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Extra info for Altruistically Inclined?: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity
Example text
Persisting in regarding the mechanism(s) producing behavior as a black box, and continuing to rely only on our intuition, we are likely to end up with emended models that provide ex post rationales for anomalous observa tions but lack out-of-sample predictive power because they have not ade quately captured relevant cognitive or behavioral mechanisms . In many cases we can do better predictively than has the standard model by considering what the black box was designed for, how natural selection achieved this, and the relevance both of experimental data focused on its mechanisms and what scientists who have opened it up can tell us about its workings .
Each individual following the egoistic Nash-prescribed strategy hopes he or she will be the only one failing to contribute and will thus be able to free ride on the voluntary con tributions of others . Contributing to the common pool is a risky strategy since, in the worst case, if one is the only contributor, one will end up with substantially less than if one had retained the entire initial endowment. Such voluntary contributions can legitimately be characterized as altruis tic, because they result in a benefit to others and, whatever the contribu tion profile of the other players, an individual would, ex post, have done better by contributing nothing.
In contrast, uniformities in "folk biologies" have no counterpart in taxonomies of inanimate objects, many of which have been part of the human environ ment only in recent centuries or millennia (Atran 1 990, 1 998). His argu ment is that evolutionary advantage accrued to organisms born with pre formatted categories for recurring features of the natural world . For items of more recent provenance, we lack this head start, and must expend energy devising and transmitting filing systems, which are consequently more culturally variable .