2log

"Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved — that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure."
Stanley Kubrick

Despite the mountains of evidence that humans are vengeful creatures, we still have the ability to show compassion. It's tempting to think of these examples of compassion as proof that humans are not animals. Optimistic, but untrue.

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a simple game studied in game theory. Two prisoners are separated and forced to choose between "cooperating" or "betraying" the other prisoners. If both prisoners cooperate with each other, they each serve a one year sentence. If they both betray each other, they each serve a five year sentence. If one prisoner betrays while the other cooperates, the prisoner who cooperated serves nine years while the other goes free. From your point of view, when choosing whether to cooperate or betray, you have no idea what the other person has chosen. Here's the possible outcomes:

Prisoner A Cooperates Prisoner A Betrays

Prisoner B Cooperates
A: serves 1 year
B: serves 1 year
A: goes free
B: serves 9 years

Prisoner B Betrays
A: serves 9 years
B: goes free

A: serves 5 years
B: serves 5 years

It's notable because, the best possible outcome is for each person to cooperate. But rational people will always betray each other. When you're in the room, this is how you think:

If the other person is cooperating, you have the most to gain by betraying them. Rather than serve a yearlong sentence, you'll go free.
If the other person is betraying you, it's also in your best interest to betray them. Rather than serve a nine year sentence, you'll only serve five.

The result is that people always betray each other, even when it's in their best interest to cooperate.

Where it gets interesting is if you play the game repeatedly, and remember what the person did to you before. At this point, cooperation becomes possible. What's the optimum strategy in this instance? Game theorists have solved this:

The second best strategy is "an eye for an eye". Start off cooperating, until the second that somebody betrays you. If somebody betrays you, you betray them for the rest of your life.
The best strategy is "an eye for an eye, with forgiveness". Start off cooperating. Once somebody betrays you, you punish them. You betray them a lot. But roughly 1-5% of the time, you go ahead and forgive them, trying to get out of the cycle of vengeance and back to the "nice guy" way of things.

This is an exceptionally interesting outcome of game theory. It means that agents can cooperate with each other for purely selfish reasons.

Now, what if you wanted to program a tribe to embody this rule when it came to warfare with other tribes. To retaliate most of the time, but to forgive every 1-5% of the time. What if a small percentage of the population was, by its nature, very heavily pro-forgiveness, while the remainder tended to prefer retaliation? You might end up with a situation where this society tended to retaliate, although occasionally the minority opinion would convince people to simply forgive.

I can't pretend this is exactly how things went down, but I do suggest it's possible that:

A strategy like "an eye for an eye with forgiveness" could be the optimum strategy for governing competition between groups.
Natural selection can apply to groups, (so that a group following the above strategy has an evolutionary advantage over groups following other strategies)
Evolutionary pressure on a group may cause individuals within a group to evolve individualized traits that offer the group a competitive evolutionary advantage (for example, the way a colony of ants produces a certain amount of workers or soldiers... more on this in a future nerd post)

Basically, I accept these three points at some level. I think societies will always war because we're just like animals. And the people, like me, who oppose these wars are also just following our animal instincts. We don't oppose war because of some higher power or some kind of human civility. We're just giving in to our primordial urges, a weaker urge that exists to occasionally check our stronger thirst for vengeance.

In essence, we oppose war not because we're civilized, but because we're barbarians.