It depends . . .

Cooperation is central to many major transitions in evolution, including the emergence of eukaryotic cells, multicellularity and eusociality1. Cooperation can be destroyed by the spread of cheater mutants that do not cooperate but gain the benefits of cooperation from others1, 2. However, cooperation can be preserved if cheaters are facultative, cheating others but cooperating among themselves2. Several cheater mutants have been studied before, but no study has attempted a genome-scale investigation of the genetic opportunities for cheating. Here we describe such a screen in a social amoeba and show that cheating is multifaceted by revealing cheater mutations in well over 100 genes of diverse types. Many of these mutants cheat facultatively, producing more than their fair share of spores in chimaeras, but cooperating normally when clonal. These findings indicate that phenotypically stable cooperative systems may nevertheless harbour genetic conflicts. The opportunities for evolutionary moves and countermoves in such conflicts may select for the involvement of multiple pathways and numerous genes.

And it could be the same in humans. These are oldish ideas discussed in the day ^1,2. The idea of gene-culture coevolution adds plausibility to the notion that the attributes of these slime bags may also be true for humans, and the idea of situationally appropriate behavior being evolutionarily stable has compelling support from models.

One illustration of this robustness comes from spatial evolutionary games (briefly mentioned by Grossman's informants). Spatial Prisoners' Dilemma can give you very nice pictures, where there are clusters of very forgiving, cooperative agents, all being nice to each other, surrounded by a periphery of unforgiving TFT players, with completely uncooperative, defection-prone hordes beyond. This works because TFT does pretty well against both the nasties and the good citizens; the good citizens prosper because they have the TFT types to ward off those who would take advantage of them. (As Karl Sigmund says someplace in his wonderful popular book about theoretical biology, Games of Life, this is the scenario of innumerable westerns and samurai movies.)

The clever thing the Southampton group did was to engineer a situation that TFT couldn't cope with, namely collusion among the competing players. If, indeed, one agent is willing to be stomped on, forever, to the greater glory of another, without getting anything out of it, then its master will indeed get all the benefits that the dilemma is capable of providing. (At this point, you can add your own allusions to Hegel, or "safe, sane and consensual" jokes, as you prefer.) This does not seem to me at all an evolutionarily stable situation, however, since the slave agents have, by construction, exactly no incentive to participate in the arrangement. In fact, a mutant which used the coding scheme to recognize supposed masters and always defected against them, but played TFT with everyone else, should do better than a slave, and without slaves the master-type agents are not going to do well. (I will leave it to others [Bill? Gary? Tim?] to draw the obvious morals.) So I strongly doubt that in the wild, e.g., in actual social dilemmas, we will ever see Southampton-type strategies, which means that TFT should still be robust, and strong reciprocity is saved for another day.

The capacity for facultative behavior, switching strategies depending on circumstances, seems very valuable for long term survival. Things change, and change again, sometimes rapidly. Those who whinge about the lack of uniformity in humans and their societies fail to grasp the dynamics of life.

It seems that collectivists get confused about defectors - cheats who betray their communities and free ride on the sociality of others. Though prosociality is dominant and stable it isn't universal. It is in the pursuit of perfection, the elimination of cheats, that collectivists go wrong and end up destroying all prosociality. They don't understand that prosociality is voluntary - must be voluntary - and the existence of a minority of cheats is necessary to stability. They don't understand that punishing cheats - personally - is one of the foundations of prosocial behavior.

The mechanical world view of old fashioned cybernetic thinkers - Fordists who think in terms of mobilized masses, mobs goose stepping to the tune piped by some power, following a leader - is slowly fading as the mass production phase of human civilization passes. Old timers and reactionaries resist but the socio-economic forces that created them are waning, making it ever more clear that they were deluded about human behavior, mistaking a temporary cultural overlay for something more basic, and failing to see that cultural overlays do not change human nature.

The world Tocqueville saw was largely pre-industrial since the world was in the early phases of that era when he wrote. His subject was a nation of dissidents who had escaped or been driven from regimented old societies in which humans had long been oppressed by military domination and monarchy. Modern collectivists still labor under a kind of monist world view that seeks to subsume independence and pluralism, to eliminate the messy individuality of free humans, to turn society into a machine that obeys command. They have retreated a bit from their purely mechanical metaphors and now prefer ant colonies to clocks as their guiding metaphor for domesticated human society, but it is still a cybernetic view seeking to simplify and control humanity. At a very deep level they are anti-humanist and anti-natural, revolted by the muck and mystery of life

We need our rogues and opportunists. That doesn't mean that we should stop catching and punishing them when we can, but it does mean that we shouldn't seek to eliminate them by establishing institutions that are capable of doing so. That would destabilize society and make it vulnerable to change. Besides, the politicians who would control such institutions would most likely be cheats and defectors themselves, criminal types. Life is necessarily messy.