Why does Evolution use a Mixed Strategy? 9/9

variation in psychological traits

Richard Hanania writes,

Evolutionary theory would suggest that most modern humans are too anxious, and therefore pathologically risk averse. For the vast majority of our species’ existence, individuals have lived on the edge. Financial ruin, physical injury, or shunning from the community could mean literal death. At the same time, there are by definition possible upsides to taking risks, in the form of gaining status, resources, or mates.

For someone living in a modern first world country, the most important downsides to risk are gone. No matter how much you fail at life, unless you join an inner-city gang or overdose on fentanyl you’re probably not going to die as a result of your mistakes. We’ve eliminated starvation, and rates of violence are a fraction of what they were in previous centuries and especially our deep evolutionary past. Instead of living in a parochial village in which any wrong step can follow one around forever, we live in the immediate vicinity of millions of people and can pick and choose which relationships to cultivate. The things we feel nervous about on a daily basis like someone making fun of us on Twitter or a romantic rejection are treated by our defective brains as issues of life and death, when in reality they matter very little. At the same time, the potential upsides to taking risk – money, power, sex – are all still there for the taking.

I disagree with most of his essay. He has positive things to say about the pickup artist genre, and I don’t. I see the PUA mindset as cultivating the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sociopathy. Not something one should aspire to.

But let’s turn to evolutionary psychology. One question that I do not think gets asked enough is why evolution sometimes follows a mixed strategy. In game theory, a mixed strategy is one where you do not always make the same move in the same situation. For example, if you play “rock, paper, scissors” with the same person many times, and you always play “rock,” that is a bad idea. You need to mix up your moves.

Evolution plays a mixed strategy when, instead of giving everyone identical traits, it gives different traits to different people. Some men are inclined to be heterosexual, and some men are inclined to be homosexual. Why would evolution preserve both traits?

If evolution were following a pure strategy, either everyone would be autistic or no one would be. Either everyone would be schizophrenic, or no one would be.

Evolutionary theorists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, point out that a male who wants to have many descendants can choose between two strategies. One strategy is to mate with as many females as possible. The other strategy is to mate with just one female and invest heavily in the offspring of that relationship. Evolution has produced some males who are inclined toward one strategy and some who are inclined toward the other. Moreover, regardless of the inclinations a man might be born with, the environment and culture affect his choice of strategy.

One intriguing example of a mixed strategy concerns conformity. Some people are very inclined to conform to the norms of those around them, and some people are inclined the other way. Why would evolution want both types of people around? A plausible answer is: if there were too few conformists, then society would probably fracture; but if there are too many conformists, then bad cultural norms would stick around too long.

Some time around the one hour mark of Bret Weinstein’s podcast with Steve Patterson, Bret asserts that the difficult problems in evolutionary theory can best be approached by looking at trade-offs. In my conformity example, might be some environments in which your society will thrive on the basis of conformity, and some environments in which the conformists will all jump off a cliff unless there are some nonconformists who can talk them out of it. Because environments vary, evolution keeps both types around, just in case.

Schizophrenia can sometimes look like an extreme form of what we see in an intensely religious or messianic individual. Maybe evolution always produces at least some people along that “spectrum,” as it were. Most of them have trouble functioning, and they have no significant impact on society. But historically, a few of them have mattered quite a bit. One relatively modern example might be Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saints. And remember how in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test so many trippers thought that they were having religious experiences, and they thought it was a good thing. See also Robert Wright and David B. Yaden.

Evolution’s mixed strategy is a bit like Chesterton’s fence. It’s hard to understand why it’s there, but it’s probably there for a reason.

I recommend the Weinstein-Patterson podcast, by the way. But it is very long.