Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [118]
His own tree moved gently back and forth. Rock a bye baby. It seemed like it would be okay. He was liking it already. “Ooooop!”
He crawled over to his duffel, opened it and pulled out his largest tent, a North Face South Col. It was very strong and stable, therefore quiet, as tents went. It was meant for two people and a lot of gear.
He screwed ringbolt screws into the plywood, measuring carefully and staking down the tent as he went to make certain it was stretched out tautly.
He pulled the tent poles into their sleeves and posted them into their grommets, leaning into the windswept fabric of the tent until they were secure and all was well. He stepped in; it was really big for a two-person tent, expedition scale for sure, with room to stand right at the high point, sloping quickly down to the four corners. Nylon blue, and in the lantern’s glow the color of twilight. It smelled like the mountains.
He moved his duffel and the rest of his stuff inside. Zip the door shut, zooop! and he was in a nylon-walled room. Like a kind of yurt. People had lived in yurts through entire ice ages. This one swayed, but that still seemed okay. It reminded him of waterbeds, back in the day. Rock a bye baby!
He pulled out his sleeping bag, sat on his groundpad, draped the bag over his legs. Arranged his pillows. Everything was slightly blue, including his laptop screen. He regarded all of it with pleasure; this was the bedroom he loved most in all the world, the only constant in all his years of wandering. Nothing lacking, everything at hand, the taut walls curving up aerodynamically.
He got comfortable and tapped around on the laptop. A little reading to help him to sleep. An article in Nature, linking paleoclimate and human evolution in a manner similar to the killer frisbee guy’s argument: many rapid and severe fluctuations in climate had islanded small human numbers in various refugia, where gene pool and behavioral pockets survived in isolation. When the weather improved, these were the only people left. Thus ice ages as repeated selectors for flexibility, innovation, and cooperation.
Another altruism-as-adaptation argument, in other words. Frank wasn’t sure it made the case that cooperation had been key. It was a group selection argument, and evolutionary theory was still struggling with the concept of group selection, as opposed to the solid case for kin selection, which one tended to see everywhere in nature. Living things would clearly sacrifice for their kin; whether they would for their group was less sure.
Still, it was interesting to think about. And it combined in a very interesting way with another article in Nature, describing the latest in game theory studies of altruism. Prisoner’s dilemma was part of it, of course; this simple game had been studied for decades. Two prisoners, kept separately, were asked to testify against the other, to benefit themselves. Rewards were quantified for easy computer trials: if both refused to defect, each earned three points; if they both defected, they earned one point; if one defected and the other didn’t, the defector got five points while the sap got zero. A simple game, with a simple if depressing result: in most scenarios one accumulated points fastest by always defecting.
But there were other strategies that sometimes outperformed always-defect, expressed for the computer trials as algorithmic formulas, but given names like tit-for-tat, or firm-but-fair, or irregular firm-but-fair, or even always-generous, which under certain circumstances (climate fluctuation?) could create an upward spiral of maximizing points for both players.
This Nature article described some new experiments. Researchers had first tried the game using only