Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [119]
A variant of the game was then introduced, called Snowdrift, in which players were supposedly stuck in cars in the snow, and could either get out and shovel, or not. The generous got points even if the other defected, because eventually their car would be clear. Here cooperators and defectors coexisted stably, in a mix determined by the details of the game rules.
The researchers then mapped the Snowdrift results onto a graph program, finding long tendrils of association between clusters of cooperators. When the tendrils were cut by rule changes, the clusters were destroyed by defectors. The implication was that islanding was dangerous, and that some rules allowed cooperation to prosper while others didn’t. It was also interesting to consider what the analog of tendrils would be in real-world situations. Extending help to people from other groups, perhaps—as Anna had, for instance, when welcoming the Khembalis into her family’s life after they appeared in the NSF building. This kind of generosity could be explained as group selection, but only if the definition of the group was enlarged, perhaps even by some leap of the imagination. Empathy. Someone in the Journal recently had suggested this was the story of human history so far, successive enlargement of the sense of the group.
The authors of this Nature article went on to tentatively suggest that generosity which held no advantage at all to the giver might be structurally sounder in the long run than generosity that brought some kind of return to the cooperator. The paper concluded with the reminder that at the beginning of life, RNA had had to cooperate with proteins and other molecules to band together and form cells. So clearly cooperation was a necessary component of evolution, and a strong adaptive strategy. The authors of the paper admitted that the reasons for the success of cooperation were not well understood. But certain proteins now ubiquitous in cells must have gotten there by being always generous.
Falling asleep in his tent, swaying gently, Frank thought: Now that is interesting . . . suggestive . . . something to be tried. I will be like that protein . . . or like Anna at work . . . I will be
always generous.
Winter came.
His treehouse was now visible from the ground, if one knew what to look for. But who was looking? And if anyone saw it, what could they do about it? Theoretically someone could lie in wait nearby, then arrest him or ambush him. But as he hiked in the park under the bare-limbed skeletal trees, over ground thick with rime-frosted and snow-drifted leaves, he could see sometimes half a mile in all directions, and in truth the park was nearly depopulate. He was much more likely to see deer than people. The only humans out in the area near his treehouse tended to be park staff or other FOG volunteers; and many of these were acquaintances by now. Even strangers did not represent a danger, during the day anyway. People out there in winter were often interested in being alone. You could tell when you spotted them whether this was true or not, in another of those unconscious calculations that the savannah brain was so good at. But mostly he just saw deer. He hiked the empty forest, looking for the aurochs and seeing only deer; although once he spotted what looked to him like an ibex, and Nancy ID’ed as a chamois.
The other ferals he spotted were often suffering from the cold, and the sudden absence of leaves. Many of these animals were tropical or subtropical, and even if they could have withstood the cold, the disappearance of the leaves meant their food was gone. Seeing an eland snuffling in a pile of leaves packed into a windrow gave one a new respect for the native animals, who could survive such drastic changes in the environment. It was a tough biome, and the natives were tough customers. The coyotes were even getting kind of brash.