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Example research essay topic: Short Term Goals Theory Of Evolution - 1,604 words

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According to Darwin, the theory of natural selection would suggest that every individual seeks only to further their own goals at the expense of all others, as only those individual organisms that win the battle for resources get the chance to reproduce and pass on their genes, creating a new generation of individuals who are good at serving their own interests. Conversely, those who are good at serving the interests of others will not be rewarded, but will instead become extinct as those whom they help succeed at their expense. In spite of this, the natural world has many examples of behaviour that is not directly, or even in any deliberate long-term manner, self-serving (Gleitman) The way in which the apparently maladaptive theory of altruism is explained depends onthe precise nature of the altruistic acts being studied. Altruistic behaviour can be broadly divided into three categories: kin selection, symbiosis, and reciprocal altruism. Any of these behaviours can be said to be adaptive, and hence consistent with the theory of evolution, if they can be demonstrated to increase the likelihood of the genes that cause them being reproduced. Altruism on the basis of kin selection, or favouring individuals closely related to oneself, is a theory often observed in the animal kingdom.

Species as diverse as Belding s ground squirrels, deer and robins have been observed to give alarm calls when a predator is spotted. This behaviour is altruistic because the alarm call makes the caller very conspicuous, hence increasing its likelihood of being caught by the predator, but at the same time it alerts the other animals in the area, and increases their chances of survival. In all of these species, research has found that individuals with a high chance of being related to those whom they are warning are considerably more likely to give alarm calls than strangers (Gleitman, ). This has been explained in terms of selfishness of the gene (Dawkins, 1989). This interpretation of Darwinism holds that what is important is not the survival of the individual organism, but only of the genetic material.

Viewed in these terms, it becomes clear that altruism towards relatives is adaptive, because if an organism helps a close relative, it helps an organism that shares most if its genetic material. Thus even if its genes are not directly passed on, it is helping to propagate very similar genes, so kin-selection based altruism can be seen to have evolved as a result of its adaptiveness for the genes that produce it. A more complex form of altruism is symbiosis, the situation in which two different species have developed behaviours which aid each others survival. Symbiotic relationships very from the relatively simple case of the cleaner fish which feed on scraps of food inside the mouths of larger fish, in exchange for the favour of not being eaten by the potential predator, to the extremely complex relationship of organisms that have evolved total interdependence such as figs and fig wasps. The relationship between figs and fig wasps is such that a given species of fig is the only source of food and breeding ground for a given species of fig wasp, and conversely the species of wasp will be the only pollinator for its particular species of fig (Dawkins, 1996). Every species of fig has a corresponding species of wasp, and their interdependency is such that the extinction of either organism would be immediately followed by the extinction of its companion.

The species involved have evolved elaborate means of helping each other, in that the wasps have special pollen-carrying pockets, for the sole purpose of fertilizing figs (Dawkins, 1996, p 275), and the trees have some flowers which can not develop into fruit, but serve the purpose of providing food for baby wasps (p 286). Thus both species can be seen to give each other some sort of altruistic assistance, in that their behaviour is directed towards serving each others short-term goals, and only serves their own long-term goals in terms of the survival of the species being dependent on the survival of its companion. This seems to run counter to the theory of evolution, because the theory assumes a total lack of foresight, implying that short-term goals would override the long-term goal of keeping the partner species alive (Dawkins, 1996, p 287). By this token, organisms that cheat should evolve, because a fig that stops the wasps from feeding on it would have more energy to expend on reproduction, and conversely a wasp that does not spend energy gathering and carrying pollen could produce more offspring. The reason that such organisms are not observed in great numbers is that their short-term success would cause their eventual extinction, as the species on which they depended died out. Thus, once again, behaviour that does not necessarily serve the individual organism s interests can be seen to help propagate the genes which cause it.

Symbiosis can be regarded as a particularly specialised example of the third form of altruistic behaviour: reciprocal altruism. This is where favours are exchanged. It is clear that in many situations co-operation is in the collective interests of the partners, but in almost all of these each individual could profit more by being selfish and taking advantage of their co-operative partner. Yet in spite of this disincentive, reciprocal altruism has evolved in a huge variety of species.

One example of this is that of vampire bats (Dawkins, 1997), in which food-sharing has been observed. It is relatively difficult for a bat to find food on a given night, but if they do manage to feed, they will eat considerably more than is necessary to survive. This unevenness in food supply is compensated for by the fact that bats who successfully feed share their bounty with those who fail; a favour which is returned when the roles are reversed. This raises the problem of why bats seem not to take advantage by accepting food from others without returning the favour, even though to do so would benefit them enormously.

Robert Axelrod (1984) considered the Prisoner s Dilemma model, which described interaction between two organisms in terms of each having the option to co-operate or defect (take advantage). The goal of each organism is to score as many points as possible, with the scoring as follows: if both players co-operate, they score 3 each, if one co-operates and one defects (exploiting the other), the defector scores 5 and the co-operative player who has been exploited scores nothing, but if both defect they only score 1 point each. The dilemma comes from the fact that whatever the opponent chooses, a player will score more if they defect than if they co-operate, yet if both players (as seems rational) defect, they score less than if they both co-operate. This creates a conflict between reciprocal altruism (both co-operating when for either one to defect would be advantageous) and mutual selfishness (both defecting in an attempt to exploit the other). Axelrod investigated the possible ways of playing this game by inviting people to submit strategies in the form of computer programs, and having these strategies play a computer tournament. In the tournament, each strategy would interact with the others thousands of times, and could respond to the others previous moves.

This allowed the potential for an atmosphere of mutual co-operation, if two strategies interact in such a way as to foster it. The findings from this tournament were that the highest scoring strategies were invariably those that did foster this mutual co-operation, which would seem to support the claim that reciprocal altruism is better for the individuals involved than selfishness. It was also found, however, that the most successful rules punished attempts to exploit them, thus preventing the equivalent of a bat that takes food but does not give from taking advantage of them. An equivalent behaviour has been found in vampire bats, in that bats recognise which of their peers have been giving their fair share of food to each other, and those that do not pull their weight eventually find that the others stop feeding them (Dawkins, 1997). Thus it can be seen that reciprocal altruism profits the organisms that take part in it, but the question remains of how it could evolve, as the first altruistic organism in a world populated by selfish species would surely be taken advantage of so much that it could not survive.

To answer this, Axelrod (1984) ran an ecological version of the tournament, in which each game-playing strategy was regarded as the behaviour of a species, and points were equivalent to chances to reproduce. Thus the strategy which scored the most points would have the most copies of itself in subsequent rounds, and low scorers would become extinct. There were two key findings of this study: firstly, co-operative (reciprocally altruistic) strategies flourished because their interactions with each other were so profitable, and secondly that strategies which took advantage of the co-operative ones flourished early on in the game, but went on to suffer because of their attempts to exploit each other, and eventually died out. This is strong evidence that reciprocal altruism is a trait which is genetically selective.

It seems in general that most forms of altruism can be reduced to some kind of selfishness in the final analysis. In many cases, the behaviour is selfish simply because furthers the agent s goals, such as the live and let live system, which helps those on either side to survive. In others, the behaviour can be explained in terms of the unselfishness of the individual organism furthering the propagation of its selfish genome.


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Research essay sample on Short Term Goals Theory Of Evolution

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