Crows, orcas, Nazis, maximization, competition
Recently my attention has been captured by stories of animals violating the precepts of maximization.
Consider the grief-stricken crows. In 2002, a crow population in Oklahoma was devastated by West Nile virus:
By the end of October, approximately 42% of adult population members had fallen victim to the virus (Table 1; Caffrey et al. 2003, 2005), leaving widows, widowers, and vacant territories.
Scientists were individually monitoring the crows and were able to track how they responded to this event. They were thus able to test the behavioral predictions of rational choice ecological models. If the crows were behaving as efficient maximizing replicators, non-breeding animals would have responded by moving out into the newly vacant territories and taking advantage of the free resources to reproduce. But they didn't do that. Crows did form new mating pairs, but they mostly didn't strike out into the newly vacant territories and form new groups. They had formed powerful social bonds that kept them together in their established groups; they did not easily dissolve them when theory predicted it would be advantageous to do so.
It is true that space capable of supporting successful breeding was now widely available, but the neighborhoods and community of support and protection were gone. What becomes most important then? As far as I know, no one has articulated a complex-enough social theory to make predictions about how individual animals should respond to catastrophic population loss.
Researchers were struck by what seemed to them symptoms of grief among the birds:
As crows began to die, my students and I saw differences in the postures and movements of surviving group members; at times they seemed to walk around territories aimlessly… Were they truly moving more slowly? Were their heads and shoulders actually drooped? It is difficult to pinpoint the aspect of them that had changed, but it was palpable enough to warrant, in field notes, an occasional inclusion of something akin to “All seems almost normal today.” Crows never before seen together were seen together. Orphaned juveniles and yearlings (in 2003) produced gut-wrenchingly sad and plaintive vocalizations, bringing to mind Skutch’s (1996) observation that bird sounds seem to parallel their feelings in ways similar to our own.
The obvious inference to draw here is that the social and emotional complexities of crow life falsify any simplistic interpretation of their behavior as fitness-maximizing. "Ultimately" in some sense it is, presumably, but the content of any adequate theory will have to say that they are maximizing-by-not-maximizing. At the level of everyday observation, they simply don't behave as rational agents ruthlessly producing as many copies of themselves as possible.
Or consider the story of a "refugium" population of orcas, that moved to its region of the North Pacific 20,000 years ago in response to the last ice age, and remained there.
"Orcas are conservative and tradition-bound creatures who do not move or change their traditions unless there is a very good reason for it. We see that in this population," says Filatova.
"Orcas in the Nemuro Strait had unusually high genetic diversity, which is typical for glacial [refugia], and their vocal repertoire is very different from the dialects of orcas living to the north off the coast of Kamchatka. Kamchatkan orcas are most likely the descendants of the few pods that migrated west from the central Aleutian refugium; that's why they are so different," says Filatova.
Some orcas eat fish, some only herring, some only mackerel, some only a specific type of salmon. Others only eat marine mammals such as seals, porpoises, and dolphins. Some take a little of everything, and still others live so far out in the open sea that we fundamentally know very little about them.
Orca groups are extremely culturally divergent, and extremely tradition-bound within groups. Implicit in this cultural specificity is that they are not maximizing their calorie yields and group sizes. A group that stays in one region of open ocean (perhaps on one diet) for 20,000 years is not one that has pursued active expansion. It is in a long-term chill.
I was particularly struck by an example from another orca group, near South Africa, that hunts sharks, eats their livers, and discards the rest of the carcass.
Scientists have often assumed that predators take what they can get from their prey and can’t afford to be picky. But gruesome scenes in South Africa have turned that idea on its head: killer whales are taking down a dozen or more sharks in one day—and rather than feasting on every meaty morsel, the orcas are meticulously cutting out the livers and leaving the rest of their kill to rot.
This is apparently not quite as crazy as it sounds, because shark livers are large and fatty; orcas elsewhere have previously been reported to have targeted shark livers. Livers are also easier on the teeth than cartilage. But still I was struck, perhaps wrongly, by the apparent extravagance. They could (I supposed) eat the rest of the shark, get more calories, and expand their group sizes. Instead, they keep their tradition of eating just the liver.
In the background of all biology as far as I know is the fact of natural selection. Everything alive can be conceived of as the winner of a contest to reproduce. But at the level of actual animal lives, this competition does not always appear in obvious ways. Instead there are apparently stable equilibria where animals are not competitive but instead caring, cooperative, stubborn, and so on.
This is true of course of humans as well. I saw an extremely obnoxious post on Twitter (I know, I know, but I think it's symptomatic). Someone had made a very sweet post about their dad adopting a 12-year-old blind chihuahua. The obnoxious post commented on the sweet post:
these things are a sign of a declining society
you have mental illness if you desire to provide for and nurture a creature that brings no value in return to your household
hundreds of years ago people would have never simply because they had self respect
At first I thought, this is basically a Nazi perspective. It's decadent to care for a disabled dog because it "brings no value in return to your household." Implicitly, the people who allow this softness into their heart will be extirpated in the great pseudo-Darwinian contest between peoples. But the notion that caring has to be deserved by contributing to the energy balance of the household basically contradicts the structure of caring. It is a bad way to live.
Is it a bad way to live that is forced on us by the cruelly competitive nature of the world? Actually no. If that was true, then the ruthlessness advocated by the poster would have to be the universal rule of human societies. But it's not. Graeber and Wengrow tell an illustrative story:
“Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.
Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).”
Some people will tell us that, to survive, we must be cruel and destroy what is soft about us. But this is a lie. It simply isn't so, and to live like this is to defeat the point of surviving in the first place. It is neither necessary nor desirable to turn ourselves into ruthless maximizers. Optimizing your "household" for the "value" it produces empties it of its real value.
I say at first I thought the obnoxious perspective was a Nazi perspective, but a friend pointed out that this kind of thinking is actually pretty mainstream. (Of course, a Nazi perspective can still be mainstream.)