“Niceness Dies a Darwinian Death”

COOPERATE and DEFECT. Those two words may seem insignificant, but when you’re playing for your grades, it’s all that counts.  As Dawkin was able to explain in Chapter 12, “niceness dies a Darwinian death” (202). This tempting strategic game is called Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it may as well have cost me -.5 in my blogs. The rules are short, if both cooperate then both win, and if both defect then both suffer a punishment, but the tricky part is when one decides to betray for even more points by playing defect while the other is left cooperating. Those .5 points are just sitting their tempting both players, and if one player risks the “mutual cooperation”, all hell breaks loose. In my case, as I was playing, I thought about playing cooperation on the first round, but my ambition to earn those extra points took over, and surprisingly my opponent did the same. From there on, there was no trust whatsoever, every time we lost points we were holding a grudge that would eventually doom us by the time we were finished.

If we look at the game theory, there are two types: cooperative and non- cooperative. It focuses on how groups of people interact in an effort to reach their own goals. The question becomes does Prisoner’s Dilemma apply to the animal world? According to Dawkin, of course it does, and not just in animal and human life, but plant life as well. His example in The Selfish Gene was the birds that removed each other ticks from their feathers. IN this activity they are in the same position as I was during class. The bird can have his own ticks removed and then remove the others ticks, but wouldn’t it be easier to trick the bird and fly away tick-free? These decisions are constantly being bombarded towards us, whether to ask for a favor and then return it, or get away with it and throw in a weak excuse.

Just like Daniela Paternina mentioned in her blog, “choices reflect a person’s true nature”. In her argument, she states that we are in a constant struggle against our selfish genes. In other words, we are creators of our own destiny and if we were raised with correct values, no situation is going to alter who we are no matter how strong the temptation. I agree with Daniela, but if only mankind was a model of Darwin’s “nice guy”, then it would be a win-win situation to every individual. Self-interest, ambition, and temptation would no longer be a leading factor in humanities constant battle to survive in the competitive world.