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Sex and the Evolution of Fair-Dealing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Neil Tennant
Neil Tennant*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Columbus
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Abstract

Brian Skyrms has studied the evolutionary dynamics of a simple bargaining game. Fair-dealing is the strategy ’demand 1/2’, competing with the more modest strategy ‘demand 1/3’ and the greedier strategy ‘demand 2/3’. Individuals leave offspring in proportion to their accumulated payoffs. The rules for payoffs from encounters penalize low- and high-demanders. The result is a significant basin of attraction for fair-dealing as an evolutionarily stable strategy. From these considerations Skyrms concludes that a disposition to fair-dealing could have evolved. A very different picture emerges, however, when one considers genetic bases for the dispositions involved. A simple two-allele sexual model produces very different stable equilibria in the distribution of behavioral phenotypes. The equilibria for Skyrms's purely phenotypic selection process will not in general be attainable once one enters some simple genetic considerations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 391 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, Ohio State University, 230 North Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210.

‡

Thanks for helpful discussion or correspondence are owed to Steven Abedon, Robert Batterman, Justin D'Arms, Florian von Schilcher, and Brian Skyrms. Comments by two anonymous referees led to improvements in the argumentation and presentation.

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