Abstract
W.D. Hamilton’s Inclusive Fitness Theory explains the conditions that favor the emergence and maintenance of social cooperation. Today we know that these include direct and indirect benefits an agent obtains by its actions, and through interactions with kin and with genetically unrelated individuals. That is, in addition to kin-selection, assortation or homophily, and social synergies drive the evolution of cooperation. An Extended Inclusive Fitness Theory (EIFT) synthesizes the natural selection forces acting on biological evolution and on human economic interactions by assuming that natural selection driven by inclusive fitness produces agents with utility functions that exploit assortation and synergistic opportunities. This formulation allows to estimate sustainable cost/benefit threshold ratios of cooperation among organisms and/or economic agents, using existent analytical tools, illuminating our understanding of the dynamic nature of society, the evolution of cooperation among kin and non-kin, inter-specific cooperation, co-evolution, symbioses, division of labor and social synergies. EIFT helps to promote an interdisciplinary cross fertilization of the understanding of synergy by, for example, allowing to describe the role for division of labor in the emergence of social synergies, providing an integrated framework for the study of both, biological evolution of social behavior and economic market dynamics. Another example is a bio-economic understanding of the motivations of terrorists, which identifies different forms of terrorism.
Highlights
The present paper does not pretend to present novel facts nor brand new theory. It aims at producing a synthesis of known facts that open novel windows that allow for fresh views on established knowledge, favoring the flux of ideas between areas of science that have developed quite independently from each other
Benefits of an extended inclusive fitness theory? The challenge of Extended Inclusive Fitness Theory (EIFT) is to explain in more detail how biological and economic systems produce synergies by favoring specialization and division of labor, conferring the individuals in a cooperative society with fitness benefits that are much higher compared to a solitary life
A synergistic interchange of theoretical knowledge between economics and biology looks promising for a novel attempted to deepen our understanding of social dynamics and should help to bridge the gaps in studies of evolution of social cooperation between economist, physicists, biologists, and others, providing for a common language in the quantitative assessment of the importance of specific features that aid social evolution
Summary
The present paper does not pretend to present novel facts nor brand new theory. It aims at producing a synthesis of known facts that open novel windows that allow for fresh views on established knowledge, favoring the flux of ideas between areas of science that have developed quite independently from each other. Agent based computer simulations studying the evolutionary dynamics of inclusive fitness on haploids, diploids, haplo-diploids, asexual and sexual organisms, showed that social cooperation without social synergy is unable to emerge and sustain itself in scenarios for biological evolution (Jaffe 2001) and in scenarios of economic markets (Jaffe 2002a).
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