Cooperation, conflict, sex and bargaining

摘要

The Genial Gene is an ambitious, intriguing and rather controversial book. Roughgarden seeks to establish what she sees as a radical new theory, called ‘social selection’, as an alternative to orthodox neo-Darwinist ideas about cooperative and social behaviour, particularly in relation to mating, sexual reproduction and the rearing of offspring. Her chief foil is sexual selection theory, which she rightly sees as enjoying paradigmatic status among modern evolutionists concerned with mate choice and related phenomena. The opposition between ‘sexual’ and ‘social’ selection is the book’s central organizing theme, though readers should note that Roughgarden construes both rather broadly, as umbrella terms covering a variety of different (and logically separable) ideas. The book’s sub-title—‘Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness’—reveals Roughgarden’s main objection to the evolutionary orthodoxy she seeks to undermine, namely that it portrays organisms as fundamentally selfish and treats cooperation as anomalous, even among mates. By contrast, Roughgarden argues that mates form a ‘co-operative team’, abhors talk of ‘selfish genes’, and opposes the language of conflict and competition that she sees as central to orthodox neo-Darwinist thinking about social and sexual interactions.