“A child is a ticket in the natural selective lottery.”
(Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior, p. 145)
(Human) Mating: What It Takes and Why It Is Costly
Trade-offs that separate the mating agenda of men and women, as it appears, stem from genetic selfishness. Two stags locking horns in combat reflects the competing strength, attractiveness, and perhaps health. Because only the last one standing can get sexual access to the opposite sex, indicating greater success in these characteristics would allow genes underpinning them to pass on. Winning more means mating more, more genetic copies then unleashed to spread out. This one type of sexual selection, according to Darwin, is competition-based.
“… to an extraordinary degree, the predilections of the investing sex — females — potentially determine the direction in which the species will evolve. For it the female who is the ultimate arbiter of when she mates and how often and with whom.”
—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved
However, not only do these genes strive to survive but wish to thrive, as well. Selection, meanwhile, is delighted to test their prospect by putting them in such a competitive pool along with a hundred thousand others that also,—want the same thing. Only those that can stay longer will stand a chance, not just because ‘good genes’ are appealing to members of the opposite sex and, perhaps, be passed down, but would have impact on the quality of the future generations that may continue onwards. This another type of sexual selection, given is very context-dependent, according to Darwin, is preference-based. Alternatively, animals that neither could shine in the mating arena nor meet the standards of their opposite sex would have to allow the genes to perish.
It is not very clear whether monogamous pair bond in humans is statistically proven to be rare among mammalian species, but if this is the case—it is not surprising. Sperms are way easier to produce, impinging the baseline on parental investment by male species relatively low. This leads to the explanation of their propensity towards short-time mating, as well as their stronger emphasis on the female’s physical attractiveness.
Unlike women—having menopausal constraint and monthly ovulation, men are unbounded by time to conceive as many partners as the potency of their abundant sperms follows. This is mainly prompted by men’s unique hormone: testosterone, whose roles, one of which is involved in seeking for fertile females that are naturally biased towards beauty standards—such as youth, waist/hip ration, breast size, facial symmetry, and other feminine physical attributes—as signals for fertility and fecundity. Could this great amount of sperms have fallen for nothing, in light of this, access to more females does increase male fitness. This is especially true in the case of which decent paternal care and figure were absent.
“Man is the only animal who eats when he is not hungry, drinks when he is not thirsty, and makes love in all seasons.”
—Montesquieu
Female choice, on the other hand, centers more around good health, status, wealth, cognitive abilities, added by their subjective assessment whether these markers enough to warrant the overall partner’s willingness to invest materially and, emotionally—as though a snippet of a potential posterity, whose future, would require enduring resources. Considering a minimum nine-month energy-intensive gestating followed by an extended period of lactation, nursing and rearing afterwards, these are critical reproductive resources that cannot be allocated indiscriminately. These physical, emotional, and material burdens then propel her partner towards joint care, albeit come at the expense of fitness. Given also throughout evolutionary history women have already built this maternal integrity upon a high-risk ground of life, evolution favored women who were selective about their mates.
Reproductive fitness unique to men becomes reproductive costs in women, especially in those who rear an offspring that requires joint care.
However, the opposite is also true.
Fidelity is a deeply-held value for both sexes who want a long-term commitment regardless of the unconscious motives underlying the desire may be. Sexual infidelity for men, however, has proven to be more upsetting than for women. The female will always be certain that the fetus she is carrying in her belly is genetically related to her, the male, on other hand, cannot always know for sure that it is not the sperm of another male she carries. Genetic cuckoldery is deeply threatening for men, which does not rule out the possibility of domestic conflicts, if not abuse, ahead. For a misplaced investment in the wrong DNA is untenable, this paternity uncertainty mediated by women, in turn, becomes a reproductive cost in men.
Jealousy may or may not be adaptive depending on whether the energy it entails able to warrant the fitness returns toward one’s partner in response. Female jealousy is adaptive only to the extent to which that suspicious urge is enough to ensure joint resources can be shared proportionally. Similarly, male jealousy is adaptive only to extent to which that suspicious urge is enough to keep his partner’s egg from being fertilized by another sperm. Women tend to be emotionally jealous; whereas, men tend to be sexually jealous.
Here’s the evolutionary biologist David Buss writes in The Evolution of Desire:
“The adaptive functions of jealousy to prevent infidelity and ensure paternity are hard to reconcile with the seemingly maladaptive act of killings one’s wife, which interferes with reproductive success by destroying a key reproductive resource.”
He continues:
“In the first place, if a wife is going to abandon her husband, not only will he lose her reproductive resources anyway but also may suffer the additional cost of finding that those resources are channeled to a competitor, which is a double blow to relative reproductive success.”
It shouldn’t be surprising if the extreme version of jealousy reflected through homicide, statistically, appears to be more prevalent in men than in women. We have learned that committing to a long-term relationship already comes with the price of suppressing the male's “second nature,” now also having got to be robbed by the progeny not of his own he might have unwittingly been investing all this time. For men, it’s unthinkably debasing.
Without wanting to condone anything, no wonder if during human evolutionary history acts of killing used to be the best option. Men who fail to anticipate the damaging costs imposed by their wives to the absence of performing retaliatory action are subject to ridicule. Especially, in a polygynous marriage, for instance, the only way that can reinstate his reputation to his name is by committing a crime against the one who destroys it. Except, there is no such thing as crimes. This act of violence, through the lens of evolutionary forensic psychology, is evolutionarily selected as an extreme adaptive solution to an extreme adaptive problem that is great enough to interfere fitness consequences.
Having said that, neither maternity load on women nor paternity uncertainty inflicted on men should be swept under the rug. The fact that reproductive success is preceded by problems towards solutions that both are only deemed adaptive upon different sex, it’s not unreasonable to assume different mating strategies to have been implicitly and subtly deployed toward different sex. To preempt the unintended consequences each would otherwise have to bear on its own, we shall see how it gives room for deception.
Jedi Mind Tricks and the Allure of Immune Genes
To cheat death means to deceive life. Strategic intelligence fortifying the many chains of life delays the imminent decay. To get around immune recognition, parasite toxoplasma gondii, for example, has to reverse-engineer the host’s dopamine engine by releasing special protein that would cripple the cell from reaching out to ‘immune 911’ so that their dwelling existence remains safe from detection. By discriminately targeting brain areas, whose dopamine system only involved in self-amplifying behaviors (e.g., motivations, dependency, and pleasure), with their unique tactic called “bradyzoite stage”—a dormant life cycle of protozoan parasites, they are able to proliferate on the loose. It’s a neat ride of Trojan horse.
Then again, extinction to any biological systems has always stood out as a very imposing threat by which, as a consequence, the organism is driven to perform defense in the face of defeat. When evolutionary success lives and dies by uncanny means, deceptive sword is all there to deploy. While faking death, mimicry, camouflage are among the most common survival strategies between prey and predator, parent-offspring resource arms race, on the other hand, results in diverging tendency of parental investment toward different siblings.
“One expects the offspring to be preprogramed to resist some parent manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.”
—Robert Trivers, Social Evolution
To keep up with a varying degree of parasites that is continually evolving, our immune system has to ensure variety within its army—ideally, as diverse as possible. After all, there is no ultimate goal other than reinstating fitness against the other. And given the competitive nature of arms race is game-changing—for better or worse, it thus prompts the host to be cautiously demanding with whom it mates. Females, whose reproductive success is heavily measured by the quality of the resulting offspring, are doing just fine in maintaining their choosy reputation. ‘Good genes’ are the immune system’s bread-and-butter. Despite how contentious women’s mating strategies might look like, such as their unusual sensitivity to body odors (heightened, especially when ovulating), they’re doing it out of the mercy of a system that bears agenda much bigger than just mere infatuation. Of course, none of it implies consciousness is playing in the background, cells are not conscious agents, neither is this female host necessarily aware of what she’s up to. The same is true for the opposite sex in response.
If there is any more important thing to bear in mind, it should be the unforgivable penalty from which any biological systems must averse—inbreeding depression, or simplistically known as incest. For mating between two closely-related individuals confers mutations way harder to compensate than homozygote alleles and/or heritable diseases (or disorders) combined. The underlying reason why the offspring of cousin marriage tends to be less intelligent is because cognitive apparatus, compared to personality traits, is more liable target of deleterious alleles. They breed a fatal blow reflected some ratchet effect in subsequent generations, therefore, must be avoided at all costs. For many centuries and many shifting generations across species ranging from humans, birds, insects, reptiles, parasites, to even plants, natural selection has been on to something unbeknownst to them,—manifested through preferences they are wired to have, and reflected inside out to like one and dislike another based on which actions are, unwittingly or not, enacted.
For what it’s worth, there are good reasons behind this immune system's heavy reliance on good genes. But few know, this demanding impetus is in fact run by the proxy of Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC)—a set of genes involved in immune detection, genetic incompatibility, and kin recognition. Via odor transmission, vis-à-vis to mate choice, they are communicating information, if not advertising, about the carrier’s identity. Just like body language is a part of natural communication in social animals, olfactory language is, too, another part of that which. Contrary to popular belief, no such thing as the latter would successfully be disguised by mere artificial scent of fragrance because, curiously enough, they have been shown to bring out the true nature of one’s odor—instead. With this in mind, the saying that goes, “one is never fully dressed without perfume,” has successfully defeated the purpose of its creation to begin with.
We can all agree, perfume may promise fitness returns to the mating candidate, but we should also agree that that is not obvious. Once these MHC genes detect similar genotypes (or, technically about recruiting different immune members but found to be typical), it’s deal-breaker—regardless of the liberal amounts you put that thing on. While artificial factors might be a default recommendation, ensuring one’s odor is dissimilar to your own is a biological rule. This flashes back to the shirt study conducted by Wedekind et al.: women undergoing her ovulating cycle—independent of contraceptive pill—given t-shirts that had been worn for two night’s sleep by men, whose MHC genotypes dissimilar to their own and scented free—attracted them.
The prowess of MHC genes is far from coming to a halt. It is imperative for these instructions, not only must they help the immune cells recognize foreign invaders, but even greater, a wider variety of antigens—self or nonself, as rigorously accurate and efficent as possible. Especially for non-benign parasites, neither are they ever going to have too many replicates nor to become any lesser than what they have become. Therefore, the more complex is our histocompatibility in counteracting their next thing, the better. (See: A Catch-22 Selection). The building blocks of MHC genes have, fortunately, been found to be generally robust and relatively exuberant enough to support the expensive workflow of immune machine. While its polymorphism is maintained by sexual selection, we learned quite ironically, is driven-forced by pathogens themselves. Considering the frequency and the level of its risk-exposure, no wonder if immune genes are demanding. This particular biological propensity is also shared by our fellow mammals, mice.
The underlying logic is quite simple—when the instructions appear to be lacking updates, and the presented information is only limited to the past exposures, the dependent immune workers are going to be suboptimal and be compromised a lot, simply due to this informational “blind-spot” the MHC protein failed to lubricate. So when a new set of foreign invaders occupies the system, the body is left unprepared, if not overwhelmingly helpless, without proper defense—since no right antibodies at the immune’s disposal to bind them.
Here’s John Holland (renowned for genetic algorithm) writes in Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity:
“The human immune system is a community made up of large numbers of highly mobile units called antibodies that continually repel or destroy an ever-changing cast of invaders called antigens. The invaders—primarily biochemicals, bacteria, and viruses—come in endless varieties, as different from one another as snowflakes. Because of this variety, and because new invaders are always appearing, the immune system cannot simply list all possible invaders. It must change or adapt (Latin, “to fit”) its antibodies to new invaders as they appear, never settling to a fixed configuration.”
Which, reminds me of that famous war strategist, Sun Tzu, saying:
“When I have won victory I do not repeat my tactics but respond to circumstances in an infinite variety of ways.”
A Catch-22 Selection
In his book Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons, Simon Levin emphasizes diversity as something emerging from the competitive interplay among individual organism by which survival can only be achieved. In other words, natural selection doesn’t actually care whether that which was successful benefits the system at the expense of the other or not. Evolutionary mechanisms are disinterested at least until diversity comes at its own peril. As soon as extinction leans a bit closer on one side, that then selection would have to rush in to hedge the bet so that population collapse can be avoided, and balance restored. Essentially, it reflects the push and pull between the two competing adversaries that, paradoxically, keeps one another from going to that which natural selection “fears” the most. To the ‘goliath’ natural selection: one only needs his enemies as long as they help him improve, and vice-versa. This racing vortex of arms race, at the end of the day, might only seem invigorate each other, but in the middle of it, breeds one another resilience. As the old adage said, “you already win when your enemy keeps you playing.” Only that we see, the real victory is far from being one-off—it is about the ability of maintaining that winning.
Just like sexual selection, diversity is also maintained by the fast-pacing pathogens. As soon as collapse is approaching, mutations (or genetic recombination) are going to get in the way to play it out anew. “The game’s afoot!”—Sherlock would say. This means, novel MHC molecules allow offspring to recognize in different ways. In the course of DNA replication, daughter cells copy the original strands of each parent’s DNA to eventually be synthesized altogether both amidst cell division is taking place. This phase is truly fundamental, during which time selection is acting upon any multi-agentic and self-organized systems down to the very sum of their complex interacting components. Technically, it is just as complicated as multi-armed bandit decision-making: exploit or explore.
However, only if the parents’ genotypes are disparate will selection be able to co-opt both relatively well. This is because a heterozygous mixture of genetic materials provides a plethora of redundancies from which many alternatives can be explored and few useful spares can be exploited. Now imagine for materials in which there are a few alternatives to explore, then only fewer of them will get exploited. Thus, disrupting the offspring’s overall fitness, as Levin suggested. There are just lesser close-knit functions exist than that in the genetically heterozygous materials would provide otherwise way more so by comparison. So, when deleterious alleles are about to target the same genes, thanks to the compensatory dynamic derived from the diverse mixture of both parents, it will have a smaller effect on the organism’s fitness because multiple non-vertical genetic copies from ancestrally-different lineages are abundantly stored in its DNA to ‘save the day.’
By the time a newly assembled algorithm starts to develop, new possibilities will compute in its own way, providing a kind of “white noise” to the system (including but not limited to the immune system) should it outsource its defense in the face of an ever-changing parasitic moving target. Its progress, however, may or may not be scaled up forward depending on the organism’s imbuing epigenetic investments (nutrition, habits, lifestyle, etc.)—across the life span. Nonetheless, it still beckons hope. The ultimate goal of MHC genes is almost akin to Moore’s law—instead of transitioning computer chips, it’s genetic algorithm. And heterozygous MHC genotypes allow that to compound.
This is plausible because, at least in theory, if more alleles are endowed with different susceptibilities to a particular kind of threat and only the most resistant ones can spread through population, fitness would then crank up in frequency, but even if it didn’t, the probability to keep playing in the gene pool is not necessarily zero. Hence, survival of the fittest, as the name goes.
“Evolution can operate to maintain in the very devices – especially mutation and recombination – that allow adaptation within species. Within populations, mutation and recombination maintain the genetic variation on which selection can act; because variation compromises the mutated species to respond to an ever changing environment. On somewhat longer time scales, evolution has operated on the rules of the game themselves, determining mutation rates and endorsing sex and recombination as ways to maintain genetic flexibility in the face of a changing environment.”
—Simon A. Levin, Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons (p. 177)
Lest we forget though, we still owe our enemies. The very reason why immune genes have successfully gravitated the offspring’s parents towards biologically-atypical mating, it was not without the proxy of pathogen that indirectly has driven those genes to such a way, after all. Tilting further backwards, evolution was so ahead of everything that it had favored these pathogens, in the first place.
Hence, complex adaptive system, to put it another way, which also might have been encapsulated and extrapolated at length in the Durkheimian sociology:
“...for the changes which arise within it, whatever the causes, have repercussions on every part of the social organism and cannot fail to affect all its functions to some degree.”
—Emile Durkheim
The Rise and Fall of Free Riders
Good cheaters are poised in playing out their strategies in the pursuits of gaining resources. In his book The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman hypothetically argues that living system might just prosper in the front wall of order against the surrounding chaos. This persistent friction would give rise for every player involved to fine-tune their strategy so that, each own poised state can be achieved. A sweet spot for natural selection in promoting stability and adaptability.
However, the lie is halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on. As this new “attack vector” rocks the boat so unforeseeably and the rest of the world is left without a proper defense—it is, however, precisely for few trailblazing countermoves in the victim to shine in nature. More than ever, it is expected to grow in frequency as to push the dominance of the other side ahead of an equilibrium. Until at some point, an achieved balance becomes more common than necessary, these used-to-be-working defenses might have to relinquish their momentum. For they’re no longer victims of the old tricks, new tricks no longer buy old defenses. Free riders have, officially, made their comeback.
“Wonderful and admirable as most instincts are, yet they cannot be considered perfect: there is a constant struggle going on throughout nature between the instinct of the one to escape its enemy and the other to secure its prey.”
—Charles Darwin
Just like the repercussive dynamic between immune cells and parasites, this perpetual struggle between deceiver and deceived is equally considered co-evolutionary. Simply because the promising fitness on each side pushes selection to both favor the deceived developing new ways of detection and the deceiver developing new ways of deception. This is what makes intelligence, quite impartially, jack of all trades. It is especially true for birds and mammals.
While it requires a two-way street tasking: putting on an agent-and-actor clothing all at once, navigating the evolvability of intelligence through the pendulum swing of one’s unprecedented maneuver is indeed tricky, if not rarely successful. You want to maintain integrity (i.e., ensuring identity, functions and existence are secured), without unnecessarily compromising your mental plasticity from running flexibly throughout the ebbs and flows.
Through his game-theoretic calculation, the renowned geneticist John Maynard Smith extrapolates the math behind the “working nature” of natural selection in his groundbreaking book Evolutionary Genetics:
“When there is coexistence, each kind has a greater rate of increase than its competitor when it is rare, and its competitor is common.”
Behavioral strategies associated with psychopathy (cheating, lying, black-mailing, etc.) will only be effective if the majority of people around are observed to be honest and cooperative, in which, detection of deception is not going to be so. Conversely, in a population where the majority of people are dishonest and uncooperative, psychopaths cease to be effective because they have become an easy target of those rare detectors. Either way, this is how negative frequency-dependent selection works in nature, a more specific type of balancing selection. Unlike the positive frequency-dependent one, natural selection, only this time around, favors minority.
Here’s how the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers elaborates his hypothesis:
“If (as Dawkins argues) deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception...”
Therefore, women, whose eyes, are rather keen in separating the wheat from the chaff would have the selective advantage over those without. They are less likely oblivious to this individual difference. Or, more specifically, as popularly known as “difference-detecting mechanism”—which, surprisingly, can be done on the fly. If Karen can smell Johnny’s goals, motivations, or beliefs by his walk, then Karen can outmaneuver him through her stratagem and tactics, just until it fits her worldview or otherwise. Interestingly, this evolved intelligence might only spawn mental ability to counter-detect it, and so the mating arms race continues in a loop. This is why evolutionary researchers come to terms with the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis considering its indicative involvement in sexual selection that deeply permeates in our evolved genetic capacity—to better trick, manipulate, and deceive.
Taking Markovian Iterations Seriously
So when the Rubicon is crossed, there is no turning back. As the bar gets higher, the more rigorous, resilient and robust the agent has become from one iteration to the next, selection pressures acting on the very micro levels of its building block, in time and space,—will neither get ever simpler nor easier. However, there lies an autocatalytic dynamic fostering the living systems to coexist, even if that means sharing bed with arrays of different genetic forces, if not interests. For, only within conflicting diversification of both ecological and societal ecosystem combined, the rope of evolution can endure well. The evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich has elaborated profoundly in his book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter—it is the foreboding coming waves of selection that, “produce the fuel,” he said, “that propels it.” After all, probably by standing on the shoulder of giants only are we able to harness the cascading effects of an evolutionary motion that have stretched our capacity to prosper this far. And, continues… onwards.
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