Customer Reviews

Darwinian Dynamics

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I regret that my shallow knowledge of biology and biochemistry did not allow me to fully appreciate this very interesting book, making me to search for references every time I needed to get a better understanding of mechanisms of genetics. It is not an easy-to-read book, and its fragmented style, which requires a thorough attention, does not help the reader. I remember that in university math courses it was said that "economists learnt how to use mathematics, whilst biologists did not", and I believe that this book is a good example of that (as a comparison term, I found much clearer the papers by Maynard Smith). But it is really worth reading it and facing these difficulties, and its price, compared to the deepness of its content, is quite low.

My interest is in the cultural group evolution (dual heritance theory) of Boyd and Richerson. Especially I have tried to understand the evolution of co-operation in human societies by weak reciprocity and strong reciprocity and the relevance of the altruistic punishment.

The research of Boyd and Richerson has created a multidisciplinary tradition in economy (Samuel Bowles, Ernst Fehr), policy studies (Elionor Ostrom), antrpology (Boyd, Richerson, Henrich) etc.

This book does not diectly belong to that tradition - but has a clear and very interesting linkage to that. B&R's approach can be seen as a special case of the major transition theory Michod is elaborating.

Michod mentions Boyd and Richerson several times when he discusses the first adaptations of the emerging new unit of selection. Those adaptations are the one's which emerge to decrease conflicts between lower level units - and which are the core to the major transition. I.e. separation of germ line and soma on the other hand and so called worker policing on the other hand.

Even if worker policy is potentially relevant for any major transition a well studied example is the altruistic punishment of humans by B & R. (Another is the worker policing of aunts.)

This book showed to me a new way of utilizing the multi-level selection approach promoted by DS Wilson - and so well adapted for long time in a creative way by the Boyd - Richerson tradition.

For a non-biologist this book was pretty heavy but very much worth reading. I had to read e.g. Maynard Smith's Evolutionary Genetics as support literature.

The mathematical models were difficult to follow - even for one with some experience on mathematical modelling in evolution - because the models were only partially elaborated. In other words details were left out.

Michod's Darwinian Dynamics is the best book I know of on the subject of biological fitness. My only criticism would be that although it is often assumed that a set can be completely ordered by the preferences of some agent (utility in economics) or evolution (fitness in biology) it is not possible, in general, to define on that set a real valued order preserving function (utility, fitness). See, for instance, "The non-existence of a utility function and the structure of non-representable preference relations" (Beardon, et al, Journal of Mathematical Economics, vol. 37, pg 17, 2002) and references therein. In place of a scalar economists have experimented with vector utilities (see, for example, Hausner, "multidimensional utilities" chap. XII in Decision Processes,
R. M. Thrall, Wiley, 1960). Perhaps biologists should be using a vector fitness. In fact Michod mentions a vector fitness on page 90 of Darwinian Dynamics but he doesn't develop it any further. Perhaps that is the direction future research should take. I have used a vector fitness in my artificial life worlds (Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, vol. 109, pg 159, 2006).