Cohousing-L Mailing List: Consensus

[John Faust (wjfaust]

This 
article<http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/13th_tipping_point.html>titled
"The Thirteenth Tipping Point" by Julia Witty writing for Mother
Jones has some interesting commentary on consensus in the animal world and
how it might have evolved. I've extracted the relevant part and copied it
below. The entire article addresses the issue of arriving at consensus and
acting on climate change before its too late.

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*THE GAME THEORY OF COCKROACH DEMOCRACY*

Recent research out of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium shows
that cockroaches live in a democracy composed of individuals with equal
standing that consult to reach consensus on decisions affecting the whole
group. These decisions are made nonhierarchically and in the absence of
perfect knowledge. Somehow these simple creatures balance the inevitable
conflicts between cooperation and competition in ways that benefit all.

Some dolphins manage this social dilemma ingeniously, too. At 5.5 feet long
and 150 pounds, Tahitian spinner dolphins are among the world's smallest
cetaceans, inhabiting the tropical waters of the globe, often in close
proximity to coral reefs. They live in flexible, ever-changing groups
composing what the late Ken Norris of the University of California-Santa
Cruz called "a society of remarkably cooperative friends."

This day in French Polynesia, a group of about 25 spinner dolphins is
sleeping behind the barrier reef protecting Moorea's lagoon from the open
sea. Like all dolphins, they remain conscious during sleep, resting only the
hearing parts of their brains while relying on their sight to identify
predators. In this state, they move as stealthily as ghosts, surfacing
quietly, breathing low. But by the late afternoon the school begins to
awaken and the dolphins pick up speed, with individuals bursting through the
surface to perform the dramatic aerial leaps and spins for which the species
is named.

Then almost as quickly as they awoke, the dolphins slow down again. The
spinners have entered the phase of their day Norris and colleagues dubbed
"zigzag swimming," with the group oscillating between sleep and wakefulness,
as some individuals wish to awaken and others wish to lounge abed in the
lagoon a while longer.

Underwater, the split in intentions is even more obvious. When the group is
persuaded to sleep, the dolphins fall silent. When the group is urged to
awaken, the sea explodes with the whistles, clicks, quacks, moos, baahs,
barks, and squawks of their varied calls. In short order, these sounds are
accompanied by an artillery barrage of dull booms and hissing bubble trains:
the percussion of belly flops and back flops at the surface.

Like howling wolves and cawing crows the spinners are consolidating their
intentions, using zigzag swimming to cast and recast their votes until
consensus is reached. As the afternoon progresses, their phonations grow
louder, eventually merging into the congested cross talk that Norris et al.
jokingly called the Yugoslavian News Broadcast. This is the buoyant clamor
of true democracy. Since there is no leader or hierarchy in this or any
other aspect of spinner life, every dolphin is awarded the same voting
power. However many individuals reside here today is the same number that
must now agree on when to leave and where to go.

It's no easy decision. At stake are their lives. By leaving the lagoon the
spinners face real danger. To catch fish they must venture offshore and dive
alone or in mother-calf pairs to depths of 1,000 feet or more in the
nighttime sea. They will be hunting alongside many larger predators,
including sharks hunting them.

Throughout the night the school maintains auditory contact as members share
information (location of a food source) and resources (the food), even when
that sharing might diminish their own wellbeing (less food left for them).
This trade-off enables individuals to survive conditions they could not
survive alone.

Curiously, cockroaches and spinner dolphins have learned to share in ways
both prudent and wise—despite the predictions of game theory, which in its
simplest guise posits that cheaters will beat altruists every time. Clearly,
nature knows otherwise.

A recent study hints at the evolution of altruism. A team of Swiss and
American mathematicians and population biologists ran a variant of game
theory known as a public goods game, in which players contribute money to a
common pot that an experimenter doubles, divides evenly, and returns to the
players. In ordinary play, if all players contribute all their money,
everyone wins big. If one player cheats, everyone wins small. If an altruist
and a cheater go head-to-head, the cheater wins consistently. This paradox
is known as the Tragedy of the Commons.

But in the new computer variant, population dynamics were introduced into
the game. Players were divided into small groups that played among
themselves. Each player eventually "reproduced" in proportion to the payoff
received from play—thereby passing her cooperator or cheater strategy to her
offspring. Mutations and dispersions were introduced, creating a shifting
population of individuals divided into groups of changing sizes and
allegiances.

After 100,000 generations, the results were surprising. Rather than
succumbing to the cheaters, the cooperators overwhelmed them.

This is because cooperators flourish in smaller groups where their high
investments begin to pay off, says Thomas Flatt, one of the study's authors.
They reproduce at higher rates, gain a toehold in a group, eventually come
to dominate it, then launch their offspring to spread their altruism to
other groups.

Cockroaches have been on earth about 300 million years and dolphins about 50
million years—what amounts to millions of rounds of play. During those eons
they have evolved what ethologists call "obligate cooperation": an
evolutionarily stable strategy that reflects the individual's inescapable
dependence on the group.

Somewhere along the way, these two very different life-forms found the
tipping point and slipped from selfishness toward altruism, transforming
what we perceive as the Tragedy of the Commons into something more like a
triumph.
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