OK, I admit the scientists at MSU weren't studying Republicans. The research in question isn't about politics at all, but about behavior and outcomes and nuances of game theory. Still, if we accept my initial premise, that Republicans are selfish, greedy bastards, the connection between the research I am speaking of and the fate of the GOP seems a fair one to make, or at least speculate about.

I'm hardly the first to jump to conclusions about connections between evolution theory and how we treat each other. Ayn Rand's philosophies and the other benighted posturing that passes for thinking among conservatives in America didn't spring up from nowhere. Before Rand, the idea of Social Darwinism proposed the superiority of the strong over the weak. It doesn't take very long to get from there to makers and takers and the essential paradigm of modern political discourse in the USA.

Then last year, a couple of scientists proposed that they had confirmed the value of selfishness using game theory and a classic logic problem called the "prisoner's dilemma".

This is the Prisoner's Dilemma:



You and a friend have committed a crime and have been caught. You are being held in separate cells so that you cannot communicate with each other. You are both offered a deal by the police and you have to decide what to do independently. Essentially the deal is this. If you confess and your partner denies taking part in the crime, you go free and your partner goes to prison for ten years.

If your partner confesses and you deny participating in the crime, you go to prison for ten years and your partner goes free.

If you both confess you will serve six years each.

If you both deny taking part in the crime, you both go to prison for six months. What will you do?

The two-player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game is a model for both sentient and evolutionary behaviors, especially including the emergence of cooperation. It is generally assumed that there exists no simple ultimatum strategy whereby one player can enforce a unilateral claim to an unfair share of rewards. Here, we show that such strategies unexpectedly do exist. In particular, a player X who is witting of these strategies can deterministically set her opponent Y’s score, independently of his strategy or response, or enforce an extortionate linear relation between her and his scores. Against such a player, an evolutionary player’s best response is to accede to the extortion. Only a player with a theory of mind about his opponent can do better, in which case Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is an Ultimatum Game.

Last year, a study suggested , contrary to previous theoretical presumption, the possibility of greed based success in the Prisoner's Dilemma, summarizing:

That boils down to a claim of scientific proof that, at least in a certain situation, greed and selfishmess and a willingness to exploit others for the sake of self is a winning strategy.

Science being what it is, other scientists, according to sources including the Christian Science Monitor, questioned the findings:

Nature is cold, hard, and ruthless, and only the most aggressive - and selfish - survive and pass along their genes. So would suggest one standing school of thought about the nature of the world, a philosophy that plays itself out in the writings of authors like Ayn Rand, who elevated selfishness to high ideal, the most powerful force of creativity and industry possessed by humankind. As it turns out, this isn't merely an oversimplification of the natural order of things - it's probably mostly wrong. A team from Michigan State University used a logic model to demonstrate that exhibiting only selfish traits would have spelled the end of the human race a long time ago, and that cooperation and mutual benefit are, in fact, core to our success.

Two Michigan State University evolutionary biologists offer new evidence that evolution doesn’t favor the selfish, disproving a theory popularized in 2012. “We found evolution will punish you if you’re selfish and mean,” said lead author Christoph Adami, MSU professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. “For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn’t evolutionarily sustainable.” The paper appears in the current issue of Nature Communications and focuses on game theory, which is used in biology, economics, political science and other disciplines. Much of the last 30 years of research has focused on how cooperation came to be, since it’s found in many forms of life, from single-cell organisms to people.

- See more at: http://msutoday.msu.edu/...

These scientists, Layne Cameron and Christoph Adami, have now published a different view, based upon new research and described by their own campus paper as follows:Gee whiz. Cooperation is looking to be part of the natural order of things, or, as I might say to conservative friends, one of God's creations. Competition and conflict, on the other hand, seem to be anti-survival aberrations of human behavior with poor prospects of enhancing the long term survival chances of our species.

Evolution requires patience, so I'm not expecting Republicans to become extinct anytime soon. But it is important that they do so, and soon. Humanity will survive and prosper, if it does, because humanity learns better ways, as it has always done, for all of us to move forward more or less together. The arc of history, though slowly, has always bent toward more civil and social justice, though we still have a long way to go.

However, if Randian thinking became more widely dominant as such figures as Congressman Paul Ryan and others might wish, then the anti-evolutionary effects of their success could doom all of our progeny to extinction.

