Tani Rules

 

도서관에서 책을 빌려 씐~나게 읽기 시작.
어느정도 진도가 나가자 주춤주춤.
…. 이거 무슨 말인지 모르겠어 -ㅅ-
그다~지 어려운 책인거 같지도 않고 전문적인 배경지식이 필요한 책이 아닌게 확실한데
무슨 말인지 정말 알쏭달쏭해 -ㅅ-!!

할 수 없이 원서를 구해 읽으니
알쏭달쏭하던 말이 무슨 말인지 확실하게 해결되는. 끙.
하아… 번역하신 분들.
번역에는 소질이 매우 없으시니 다음 번역 프로젝트를 또 진행하지 않으시길 강력 권고드리는 바입니다.

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1. Why are people?

This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.

– Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the ‘fittest’. But are we talking about the fittest individuals, the fittest races, the fittest species, or what? For some purposes this does not greatly matter, but when we are talking about altruism it is obviously crucial. If it is species that are competing in what Darwin called the struggle for existence, the individual seems best regarded as a pawn in the game, to be sacrificed when the greater interest of the species as a whole requires it. To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of ‘group selection’, long assumed to be true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory, brought out into the open in a famous book by V. C. Wynne-Edwards, and popularized by Robert Ardrey in The Social Contract. The orthodox alternative is normally called ‘individual selection’, although I personally prefer to speak of gene selection.

2. The replicators

At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator. It may not necessarily have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself.

I suppose the scholars of the Septuagint could at least be said to have started something big when they mistranslated the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’ into the Greek word for ‘virgin’, coming up with the prophecy: ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son .. .’

They did not know they were struggling, or worry about it; the struggle was conducted without any hard feelings, indeed without feelings of any kind. But they were struggling, in the sense that any mis-copying that resulted in a new higher level of stability, or a new way of reducing the stability of rivals, was automatically preserved and multiplied. The process of improvement was cumulative. Ways of increasing stability and of decreasing rivals’ stability became more elaborate and more efficient. Some of them may even have ‘discovered’ how to break up molecules of rival varieties chemically, and to use the building blocks so released for making their own copies. These proto-carnivores simultaneously obtained food and removed competing rivals. Other replicators perhaps discovered how to protect themselves, either chemically, or by building a physical wall of protein around themselves. This may have been how the first living cells appeared. Replicators began not merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continued existence. The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines for themselves to live in.

3. Immortal coils

It is its potential immortality that makes a gene a good candidate as the basic unit of natural selection. But now the time has come to stress the word ‘potential’. A gene can live for a million years, but many new genes do not even make it past their first generation. The few new ones that succeed do so partly because they are lucky, but mainly because they have what it takes, and that means they are good at making survival machines.

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes.

lethal genes & semi-lethal genes
– We have already asked what are the most general attributes of a ‘good’ gene, and we decided that ‘selfishness’ was one of them. But another general quality that successful genes will have is a tendency to postpone the death of their survival machines at least until after reproduction.
– According to this theory then, senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.
– The aspect that Medawar himself emphasizes is that selection will favour genes that have the effect of postponing the operation of other, lethal genes, and it will also favour genes that have the effect of hastening the effect of good genes. It may be that a great deal of evolution consists of genetically-controlled changes in the time of onset of gene activity.

As far as the gene is concerned, the gene pool is just the new sort of soup where it makes its living. All that has changed is that nowadays it makes its living by cooperating with successive groups of companions drawn from the gene pool in building one mortal survival machine after another.

4. The gene machine

– One of the most striking properties of survival-machine behaviour is its apparent purposiveness.
– Each one of us knows, from the evidence of our own introspection, that, at least in one modern survival machine, this purposiveness has evolved the property we call ‘consciousness’.
– it is easy to talk about machines that behave as if motivated by a purpose, and to leave open the question whether they actually are conscious.

Negative feedback
The ‘purpose machine’, the machine or thing that behaves as if it had a conscious purpose, is equipped with some kind of measuring device which measures the discrepancy between the current state of things, and the ‘desired’ state. It is built in such a way that the larger this discrepancy is, the harder the machine works. In this way the machine will automatically tend to reduce the discrepancy—this is why it is called negative feedback—and it may actually come to rest if the ‘desired’ state is reached.

5. Aggression-stability and the selfish machine

ESS: Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.
An evolutionarily stable strategy or ESS is defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.
dove / hawk / retaliator / bully / prober-retaliator
If all the five strategies I have mentioned are turned loose upon one another in a computer simulation, only one of them, retaliator, emerges as evolutionarily stable. Prober-retaliator is nearly stable.

The point about the prey being paralysed rather than killed, by the way, is that they don’t decay but are eaten alive and are therefore fresh. It was this macabre habit, in the related Ichneumon
284 Endnotes to chapter 5
wasps, that provoked Darwin to write: ‘I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ich-neumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars …’ He might as well have used the example of a French chef boiling lobsters alive to preserve the flavour.

Paradoxical ESS, DSS: Developmentally Stable Strategy
B. A. Baldwin and G. B. Meese trained pigs in a Skinner sty, but there is an added twist to the tale. The snout-lever was at one end of the sty; the food dispenser at the other. So the pig had to press the lever, then race up to the other end of the sty to get the food, then rush back to the lever, and so on. This sounds all very well, but Baldwin and Meese put pairs of pigs into the apparatus. It now became possible for one pig to exploit the other. The ‘slave’ pig rushed back and forth pressing the bar. The ‘master’ pig sat by the food chute and ate the food as it was dispensed. Pairs of pigs did indeed settle down into a stable ‘master/slave’ pattern of this kind, one working and running, the other doing most of the eating.
Now for the paradox. The labels ‘master’ and ‘slave’ turned out to be all topsy-turvy. Whenever a pair of pigs settled down to a stable pattern, the pig that ended up playing the ‘master’ or ‘exploiting’ role was the pig that, in all other ways, was subordinate. The so-called ‘slave’ pig, the one that did all the work, was the pig that was usually dominant.

6. Genesmanship

The reason this error has grown up is largely historical. The evolutionary advantage of parental care is so obvious that we did not have to wait for Hamilton to point it out. It has been understood ever since Darwin. When Hamilton demonstrated the genetic equivalence of other relationships, and their evolutionary significance, he naturally had to lay stress on these other relationships. In particular, he drew examples from the social insects such as ants and bees, in which the sister/sister relationship is particularly important, as we shall see in a later chapter. I have even heard people say that they thought Hamilton’s theory applied only to the social insects!

7. Family planning

Individuals who have too many children are penalized, not because the whole population goes extinct, but simply because fewer of their children survive. Genes for having too many children are just not passed on to the next generation in large numbers, because few of the children bearing these genes reach adulthood. What has happened in modern civilized man is that family sizes are no longer limited by the finite resources that the individual parents can provide. If a husband and wife have more children than they can feed, the state, which means the rest of the population, simply steps in and keeps the surplus children alive and healthy. There is, in fact, nothing to stop a couple with no material resources at all having and rearing precisely as many children as the woman can physically bear. But the welfare state is a very unnatural thing. In nature, parents who have more children than they can support do not have many grandchildren, and their genes are not passed on to future generations. There is no need for altruistic restraint in the birth-rate, because there is no welfare state in nature. Any gene for overindulgence is promptly punished: the children containing that gene starve. Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused.

Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth-control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.

8. Battle of the generations

– Parental Investment (P.I.) is defined as ‘any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving (and hence reproductive success) at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring.’
– A woman could not invest fully in her grandchildren if she went on having children of her own.
– The reason why the fertility of males talis off gradually rather than abruptly is probably that males do not invest so much as females in each individual child anyway.

This seems a good moment to mention the puzzling phenomenon known as the menopause, the rather abrupt termination of a human female’s reproductive fertility in middle age.

As soon as a runt becomes so small and weak that his expectation of life is reduced to the point where benefit to him due to parental investment is less than half the benefit that the same investment could potentially confer on the other babies, the runt should die gracefully and willingly. He can benefit his genes most by doing so. That is to say, a gene that gives the instruction ‘Body, if you are very much smaller than your litter-mates, give up the struggle and die’, could be successful in the gene pool, because it has a 50 per cent chance of being in the body of each brother and sister saved, and its chances of surviving in the body of the runt are very small anyway. There should be a point of no return in the career of a runt. Before he reaches this point he should go on struggling. As soon as he reaches it he should give up and preferably let himself be eaten by his litter-mates or his parents.

9. Battle of the sexes

At the moment of conception, therefore, the father has invested less than his fair share (i.e. 50 per cent) of resources in the offspring. Since each sperm is so tiny, a male can afford to make many millions of them every day. This means he is potentially able to beget a very large number of children in a very short period of time, using different females. This is only possible because each new embryo is endowed with adequate food by the mother in each case. This therefore places a limit on the number of children a female can have, but the number of children a male can have is virtually unlimited. Female exploitation begins here.

A male can enforce a period of prolonged courtship before he copulates with a female, driving away all other males who approach her, and preventing her from escaping. In this way he can wait and see whether she is harbouring any little step-children in her womb, and desert her if so.

My partner would “know” that if he/she left as well, the child would surely die. Therefore, assuming that my partner will take the decision that is best for his/her own selfish genes, I conclude that my own best course of action is to desert first.

10. You scratch my back, I’ll ride on yours

hymenopterous insect
– Kamikaze behaviour and other forms of altruism and cooperation by workers are not astonishing once we accept the fact that they are sterile.
– A male has only a single set of genes in each of his body cells, not a double set. Every sperm must therefore receive the full set of genes rather than a 50 per cent sample, and all sperms from a given male are therefore identical.
– It follows that a hymenopteran female is more closely related to her full sisters than she is to her offspring of either sex. As Hamilton realized this might well predispose a female to farm her own mother as an efficient sister-making machine.
– Therefore the relatedness between hymenopteran full sisters is not 1\2 as it would be for normal sexual animals, but 3/4.

grudger/sucker/cheat
– Grudger does indeed turn out to be an evolutionarily stable strategy against sucker and cheat, in the sense that, in a population consisting largely of grudgers, neither cheat nor sucker will invade.
– Cheat is also an ESS, however, because a population consisting largely of cheats will not be invaded by either grudger or sucker.
– If a population arrives at an ESS that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad.

11. Memes: the new replicators

N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter:’… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.

– The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.
– The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the soup’ in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off.

The meme of Darwin’s theory is therefore that essential basis of the idea which is held in common by all brains that understand the theory.

– The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
– Blind faith can justify anything.
– Keith Henson has coined the name ‘memeoids’ for ‘victims that have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential…

12. Nice guys finish first

But real life, both human life and plant and animal life, is not set up for the benefit of spectators. Many situations in real life are, as a matter of fact, equivalent to nonzero sum games. Nature often plays the role of ‘banker’, and individuals can therefore benefit from one another’s success. They do not have to do down rivals in order to benefit themselves. Without departing from the fundamental laws of the selfish gene, we can see how cooperation and mutual assistance can flourish even in a basically selfish world. We can see how, in Axelrod’s meaning of the term, nice guys may finish first.

The longer his estimate, the more he will play according to the mathematician’s expectations for the true iterated game: in other words, the nicer, more forgiving, less envious he will be. The shorter his estimate of the future of the game, the more he will be inclined to play according to the mathematician’s expectations for the one-off game: the nastier, and less forgiving will he be.

It is important, for any member of the Tit for Tat family of strategies, that the players are punished for defection. The threat of retaliation must always be there. Displays of retaliatory capability were a notable feature of the live-and-let-live system.

13. The long reach of the gene

phenotype
The technical word phenotype is used for the bodily manifestation of a gene, the effect that a gene, in comparison with its alleles, has on the body, via development.

meiotic drive / segregation distorter
Suppose it happened to bias meiosis in such a way that it, the mutant gene itself, was more likely than its allelic partner to end up in the egg. There are such genes and they are called segregation distorters. They have a diabolical simplicity. When a segregation distorter arises by mutation, it Will spread inexorably through the population at the expense of its allele. It is this that is known as meiotic drive. It will happen even if the effects on bodily welfare, and on the welfare of all the other genes in the body, are disastrous.

Biologists ask why organisms do this, why organisms do that. They frequently ask why organisms group themselves into societies. They don’t ask—though they should—why living matter groups itself into organisms in the first place.

The key point, to repeat it, is that a parasite whose genes aspire to the same destiny as the genes of its host shares all the interests of its host and will eventually cease to act parasitically.
Destiny, in this case, means future generations.

Genes, then, reach outside their ‘own’ body to influence phenotypes in other bodies.

Our own genes cooperate with one another, not because they are our own but because they share the same outlet— sperm or egg—into the future.

The point is summed up in one of Aesop’s fables: ‘The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.’ My colleague John Krebs and I have dubbed this the ‘life/ dinner principle’.

Natural selection favours those genes that manipulate the world to ensure their own propagation. This leads to what I have called the Central Theorem of the Extended Phenotype: An animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes ‘for’ that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

We must not forget that, at least in modern bodies like our own, the cells are a clone. All contain the same genes, although different genes will be turned on in the different specialist cells. Genes in each cell type are directly benefiting their own copies in the minority of cells specialized for reproduction, the cells of the immortal germ line.

They make a clean start in every generation. Every new organism begins as a single cell and grows anew. It inherits the ideas of ancestral design, in the form of the DNA program, but it does not inherit the physical organs of its ancestors. It does not inherit its parent’s heart and remould it into a new (and possibly improved) heart. It starts from scratch, as a single cell, and grows a new heart, using the same design program as its parent’s heart, to which improvements may be added. You see the conclusion I am leading up to. One important thing about a ‘bottlenecked’ life cycle is that it makes possible the equivalent of going back to the drawing board.

To sum up, we have seen three reasons why a bottlenecked life history tends to foster the evolution of the organism as a discrete and unitary vehicle. The three maybe labelled, respectively, ‘back to the drawing board’, ‘orderly timing-cycle’, and ‘cellular uniformity’.

The fundamental unit, the prime mover of all life, is the replicator.