"I do not believe the fashionable dogma. Here is my argument to show that group selection is important. Imagine Alice and Bob to be two dodoes on the island of Mauritius before the arrival of human predators. Alice has superior individual fitness and has produced many grandchildren. Bob is individually unfit and unfertile. Then the predators arrive with their guns and massacre the progeny indiscriminately. The fitness of Alice and Bob is reduced to zero because their species made a bad choice long ago, putting on weight and forgetting how to fly. I do not take the Prisoner’s Dilemma seriously as a model of evolution of cooperation, because I consider it likely that groups lacking cooperation are like dodoes, losing the battle for survival collectively rather than individually."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Freeman Dyson, "The Prisoner's Dilemma" (2012).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Prisoner's dilemma
3 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Prisoner's dilemma →
Related Quotes
"The two-person iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is the E. coli of the social sciences, allowing a very large variety of st…"
"I will argue that group selection is important, contrary to the prevailing dogma among biologists. If group selection…"
"In the higher degrees of Scottish Freemasonry, there are two mottos whose meaning is related to some of the considera…"
"In absolute clarity, one sees as little as in absolute darkness. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids, they are…"
"Deus est Diabolus inversus."
"The oxymoron is preferred by the mystic because it allows him to express something ineffable, because it is the best …"
"Ecotourism began to gain prominence in the late and exploded in the , due to several factors such as (i) being an alt…"
"Ecotourism arguably would not exist, and certainly would not exist in the form it is now, were it not for the active …"
"Between 1991 and 2001, the number of American adults who participated in hunting declined by 7 per cent whereas the a…"
"Adventure means different things to different people. For the past 5 or 10 years the tern 'adventure', and images of …"