[ExI] NYT: Rock-Paper-Scissors Is Universal

PJ Manney pjmanney at gmail.com
Sun Jan 20 18:32:38 UTC 2008


This was part of many wonderful tidbits in the New York Times' year
end wrap up in science.  But this particular idea -- that
Rock-Paper-Scissors, or the rotation of success through
force>fraud>cooperation is a universal behavioral function throughout
biology -- was so mind tickling on so many levels, I had to separate
it out and throw it in the pool for discussion.  Talk about an EB/EP
meta-concept!

And to think I used to laugh at the World RPS Championships!
http://www.worldrps.com/

PJ

December 9, 2007
Rock-Paper-Scissors Is Universal
By JAMES RYERSON
The children's game rock-paper-scissors has a simple yet elegant
structure: rock beats scissors; scissors beats paper; paper beats
rock. Of the three possible moves, each defeats one, only to be
defeated by the other. It's almost karmic. Indeed, it's a kind of
equilibrium that scientists now say may govern conflict throughout the
universe.

At least among lizards. In an article in last month's issue of The
American Naturalist, a team of biologists described the curious mating
strategies that they observed in a species of European lizard. Some of
the male lizards (call their type "rock") use force, invading the
territory of fellow males to mate with females. Others ("paper") favor
deception, waiting until females are unguarded and sneaking in. Still
others ("scissors") work by cooperation, joining together to protect
one another's females.

The three types of lizard, which the scientists monitored over several
years in the French Pyrenees, are locked in a cyclical sort of
standoff. For a time, the deceivers flourish at the expense of the
intruders, who are too busy marauding to pay attention. Then the
cooperators win out over the deceivers, who can't slink past the
guards. And then the intruders vanquish the cooperators, whose
openness exposes them to aggression. Then the cycle repeats. It takes
about four years.

Barry Sinervo, the lead author of the paper and a biologist at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, has seen all this before. In the
'90s, he came across the same four-year cycle of mating strategies in
a genetically distant species of North American lizard. Even the
behavior of the North American lizards was not a complete surprise: in
1982, the evolutionary game-theorist John Maynard Smith predicted,
using mathematical models of conflict, that such arrangements would be
found in nature.

It's a phenomenon big and small. In 2002, the biologist Benjamin Kerr
announced his discovery of "a real-life game of rock-paper-scissors"
among bacteria. In their recent paper, Sinervo and his colleagues even
speculate that such games may describe human behavior in the corporate
world, where strategies of force (takeovers), deception (fraud) and
cooperation (mergers) also seem to supplant one another in an endless
loop.

The pattern is "quite deep," Sinervo says. "I think it's a
philosophical point. You have 'take by force,' deception and
cooperation. Each beats one but not the other. It's the way the very
fabric of social systems is structured."



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list