The answer to this problem is elementary. First of all, very rarely are true prisoner’s dilemma’s going to happen in the real world. Apparently, during the time periods when humans evolved, “one-shot” interactions happened less often than interactions where the victim or his or her relatives got a chance to retaliate for the betrayal.
Also, keep in mind that ultimately the human beings are simply physical manifestations of the information in their genome—you and I are ultimately robots that attempt to copy our information to the next generation, and have no other purpose. So the back and forth of the prisoner’s dilemma does not take place over a single life span—it should be thought of as a continuous series of interactions that have been occurring since the first primates. The only reason why betrayals ever happen at all can be explained by imperfections in the process of passing on information about past interactions.
Furthermore, it could be plausibly argued that defections are harmful to the species itself, and individuals who betray or cheat in a given scenario would face punishment by other members of the same tribe.
This quite simply and rationally explains why humans have innate psychological needs to get revenge, and can attempt methods of revenge that exceed the original insult. These powerful urges to get revenge could be viewed as genetic code to discourage defectors and thus make defectors less likely to breed in the future.
Obviously, sexual betrayals are among the strongest forms of betrayal, and this would explain why homicides over infidelity take place. If you think about it rationally, killing another member of your tribe for acts of sexual intercourse than have a probability less than 1 of even resulting in a out of pair pregnancy doesn’t make sense. A fertile adult is worth many children worth of resources due to mortality to a tribe. But if the murder reduces the alleles of the betray-er in the population, thus reducing the prevalence of the actual genes making betrayals more likely, then the population as a whole benefits.
This also explains why in some cases victims of a betrayal will attempt revenge at the cost of their own life. If they are able to kill the betray-er and thus reduce the frequency of the betray-er’s alleles in the population, and the majority of the population has alleles more like the victim, then this trade-off makes rational sense.
This sounds like a Group-selection argument (revenge is for the benefit of the tribe, or even for the benefit of the species; it doesn’t actually help the avenger). See my point 4.
That’s different from the standard argument, that having a vengeful nature is of benefit to the individual concerned because others can predict he is likely to take vengeance, so don’t cross him in the first place.
The answer to this problem is elementary. First of all, very rarely are true prisoner’s dilemma’s going to happen in the real world. Apparently, during the time periods when humans evolved, “one-shot” interactions happened less often than interactions where the victim or his or her relatives got a chance to retaliate for the betrayal.
Also, keep in mind that ultimately the human beings are simply physical manifestations of the information in their genome—you and I are ultimately robots that attempt to copy our information to the next generation, and have no other purpose. So the back and forth of the prisoner’s dilemma does not take place over a single life span—it should be thought of as a continuous series of interactions that have been occurring since the first primates. The only reason why betrayals ever happen at all can be explained by imperfections in the process of passing on information about past interactions.
Furthermore, it could be plausibly argued that defections are harmful to the species itself, and individuals who betray or cheat in a given scenario would face punishment by other members of the same tribe.
This quite simply and rationally explains why humans have innate psychological needs to get revenge, and can attempt methods of revenge that exceed the original insult. These powerful urges to get revenge could be viewed as genetic code to discourage defectors and thus make defectors less likely to breed in the future.
Obviously, sexual betrayals are among the strongest forms of betrayal, and this would explain why homicides over infidelity take place. If you think about it rationally, killing another member of your tribe for acts of sexual intercourse than have a probability less than 1 of even resulting in a out of pair pregnancy doesn’t make sense. A fertile adult is worth many children worth of resources due to mortality to a tribe. But if the murder reduces the alleles of the betray-er in the population, thus reducing the prevalence of the actual genes making betrayals more likely, then the population as a whole benefits.
This also explains why in some cases victims of a betrayal will attempt revenge at the cost of their own life. If they are able to kill the betray-er and thus reduce the frequency of the betray-er’s alleles in the population, and the majority of the population has alleles more like the victim, then this trade-off makes rational sense.
This sounds like a Group-selection argument (revenge is for the benefit of the tribe, or even for the benefit of the species; it doesn’t actually help the avenger). See my point 4.
That’s different from the standard argument, that having a vengeful nature is of benefit to the individual concerned because others can predict he is likely to take vengeance, so don’t cross him in the first place.