Social Critters Win

Introduction
This week's Nature(subscription required) brings us a report that social bacteria win over cheating bacteria [Kevin R. Foster, "Sociobiology: The Phoenix Effect." Nature 441, 291-292 (18 May 2006)]. This simple experiment has far reaching implications in biology, ecology and other fields, particularly political-economy. What's at stake is the anecdotal Tragedy of the Commons, which Conservatives use to show the wisdom of private property. According to Conservatives, holding things in common is an invitation to a piracy which degrades the commons. What the experiment shows is things don't work that way ...

Introduction

This week's Nature(subscription required) brings us a report that social bacteria win over cheating bacteria [Kevin R. Foster, "Sociobiology: The Phoenix Effect." Nature 441, 291-292 (18 May 2006)].

This simple experiment has far reaching implications in biology, ecology and other fields, particularly political-economy. What's at stake is the anecdotal Tragedy of the Commons, which Conservatives use to show the wisdom of private property. According to Conservatives, holding things in common is an invitation to a piracy which degrades the commons.

What the experiment shows is things don't work that way ...

Foster's summary of the report is,

A spore-forming bacterium can escape from social collapse and extinction with a single mutation that has a dramatic effect. Here is evidence that a cooperative system can recover from the very brink of destruction.

Where there is society, there are cheaters that threaten to ruin it. The evolution of such selfish behaviour can destroy cooperation, and may even drive a species to extinction. When Fiegna, Velicer and colleagues (page 310) mixed a cheater strain with a cooperative strain of a bacterium, therefore, tragedy seemed assured. Many populations of the bacteria did indeed die out but, in one, a new social strain arose phoenix-like from the social collapse. This new strain resisted the cheater, produced more spores than the original strain and, most amazingly of all, evolved these abilities through just a single mutational change.

The article has this handy diagram which explains what is going on in the experiment:

Figure 2: Four possible outcomes when a cheater evolves in a social species.

A cheater is an organism that exploits a cooperative adaptation for selfish gain.
a, Preadapted resistance to cheating. It is typical to assume that social systems arise in such a way that cheaters can have only a limited impact (as shown), or do not succeed at all. Examples of preadaptations include high relatedness and pre-existing constraints that link cheating to a cost to the cheater. Policing and enforcement systems may evolve later to further constrain cheaters.
b, Extinction. The cheater causes extinction of the social trait, or species (evolutionary suicide). This selects for species preadapted to resist cheating.
c, Unstable recovery. A social strategy arises that resists the cheater but cannot out-compete the original strategy. The original strategy may reinvade and perpetuate a cycle of reinvasions in a rock–paper–scissors dynamic.
d, Stable recovery. Sociality is restored by a strategy that out-competes both the cheater and the original strategy, as occurred with the Phoenix mutant. The result is a stable adaptation that protects the social system from the cheater. This process may be behind the policing and enforcement systems in other social species.

While it is not a foregone conclusion that the social species will survive cheaters, it is clear that social bacteria have many more chances of survival than cheaters. In half the cases the cheaters become extinct, whereas that happens to social bacteria in only one case of four. The best outcome for the social species is case d, in which a mutation (invention) promotes its own recovery while the cheaters end up extinct.

Cheating is always destructive, as even the anecdotal Tragedy of the Commons points out. Cheaters abuse the commons, thereby destroying it and everything that depends on it. However, there are several means by which the co-operators (social species) can avoid the depradations of cheaters. In case a, cheaters survive at controlled low levels. In case c, waves of cheaters are successfully resisted at great cost. (Case c is like the way it is now in the U.S.)

I think this experiment supports my contention, anecdotally the "Tragedy of Private Property." Socialized species (i.e., socially controlled economies) have a far better chance of surviving and thriving than individualistic ones. The experiment suggests several methods of policing Capitalists; e.g., keeping them at low levels.

It also suggests the best method is socialized invention and adoption. The real human world example would be drug development. The experiment suggests that socialized R&D would work better than the U.S. system of putting drugs in private hands. As it is, most of the basic work in medicine and pharmaceuticals is already done at taxpayer expense. The U.S. system exists to allow corporations to benefit mightily from the final stages of drug development, which then taxes consumers heavily. Following the low-level model a, it would be better to nationalize medicine and drug development and allow the cheaters only marginal access. The best result, as in model d, is to find ways to encourage innovation within the socialized sysytem. Apparently the bacteria found a way to do that, so why not people as well?