Opinion: A fishy Nobel Prize

President Obama has been lauded for his willingness to cooperate with even the shadiest leaders at home and abroad. That quality helped earn him the Nobel Peace Prize, which he accepts today (December 10) in Oslo, Norway, despite criticism that the award was premature, given that his efforts towards cooperation have been more promises than actions. Indeed, three of the five Nobel committee members had early reservations, and a recent poll suggests 61 percent of Americans think the president did not deserve it.

Drawing by Nick Lepard

From an evolutionary perspective, Obama's win is indeed fishy -- not because he didn't deserve it, but because research into cooperation began with an experiment using fish.Rewind to 1985, when ecologist Manfred Milinski, with whom I am currently designing a new cooperation experiment, noticed something curious. His three-spined fish called sticklebacks avoid eating -- during which their guard is down, making them more vulnerable to attack -- near a predator, a hungry 18-centimeter cichlid kept in a neighboring fish tank. Milinski, now at the linkurl:Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology;http://www.evolbio.mpg.de/abteilungen/evolutionsoekologie/index.html in Germany, also noticed that the sticklebacks get closer to the cichlid when together rather than alone. If each swish of the tail forward was considered one act of cooperation, it seems sticklebacks were cooperating to inspect their predator. In the 1980s, a decade in the throes of free market economics, cooperation was a hot potato. True, people tend to be selfish if they meet once or even several times. But political scientist Robert Axelrod had shown selfishness didn't work over the long term. He and his colleagues ran computer tournaments testing 76 different game strategies. After 200 rounds, one strategy was far more successful than the others. Tit for tat, where a player initially cooperates and then responds in kind to the opponent's next move, was the champion. Cooperation, not selfishness, had won. Axelrod's tournament was based on the prisoner's dilemma game, where two individuals can either cooperate or defect with four potential outcomes. Similarly, there were four options for each pair of sticklebacks approaching the cichlid. They could: swim side by side, one could lead while the other followed (or vice versa), or both retreat. Axelrod's experiments would suggest that it's most beneficial for the sticklebacks to cooperate by approaching the cichlid together. To test this theory, Milinski used mirrors in fish tanks to act like two different stickleback companions. In one, a parallel mirror imitated a cooperative companion. In the other set, an oblique mirror system imitated a slacker stickleback that appeared to fall uncooperatively behind. With the cooperating mirror, the stickleback was doubly as likely to venture into the half of the tank closest to the cichlid. In the wild, this risk sharing would translate to more food, more space, and more overall success for the species. Milinski's study, linkurl:published in 1987 in Nature,;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3808044 was the first to show that cooperation based on reciprocity had evolved among egoists. We now understand that cooperation is a cornerstone of success for many species, especially humans. Whether you agree or not with Obama's Nobel Prize, if he were a stickleback, he'd just be conforming to the cooperative rules of the school -- and benefiting the species as a whole.Jennifer Jacquet is an American postdoctoral researcher at the UBC Fisheries Centre in Vancouver and volunteered for the Obama campaign. She blogs at linkurl:Guilty Planet.;http://www.scienceblogs.com/guiltyplanet
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