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Some special seasonal irrelevence!
Science explains Christmas goodwill
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 20/12/2006
Roger Highfield reveals that a leading professor has at last figured out why we are so generous to each other at this time of year.
One of the world's leading game theorists has come up with an explanation for the orgy of goodwill and giving at Christmas, a feature of the seasonal good cheer that has baffled scientists for years.
At first glance, the universal idea of survival of the fittest should have put paid to giving presents and acts of charity since the last thing any competitive creature will do is to waste its valuable resources on another.
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But in the animal kingdom, gifts are made for good reason: in many insect and some bird species, females accept males as mates only if they are offered a morsel of food to boost the chance of reproduction; and there are many other behaviours seen in insect societies where individuals help each other, so long as they are related and carry each other's genes.
In human societies, however, we are often charitable and give to people who are unrelated to us, or whom we do not even know, particularly at Christmas. Experiments also show that we often express our gratitude by being more charitable to others. The reason for all this Christmas goodwill is spelt out in a mathematical analysis carried out by Prof Martin Nowak of Harvard University, working with Sebastien Roch of the University of California, Berkeley.
In the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists examine what they call "upstream reciprocity." Prof Nowak explains: "If someone is nice to you, you feel good and may be inclined to be nice to somebody else. This everyday experience is borne out by experimental games: the recipients of an act of kindness are more inclined to help in turn, even if the person who benefits from their generosity is somebody else."
This 'upstream reciprocity' - which includes giving to a charity at Christmas - may appear to be a misdirected act of gratitude: at first glance it only makes sense if you help somebody because they have helped you. The team's mathematical analysis shows that upstream reciprocity alone does not lead to the evolution of cooperation, which would help society to thrive, despite the simple-minded view that only the fittest should survive in our dog-eat-dog world.
But the models do show that upstream reciprocity can increase the level of cooperation if it is linked to direct reciprocity, the equivalent of "if you scratch my back, I will scratch your back."
And they also show that all important cooperation thrives if there is 'network reciprocity' - giving to people who are likely to give to another, who will in turn give to another - and so on - who will eventually give a gift to you. That embodies the concept of 'I help you and, eventually, somebody else will help me'. After calculating random chains of altruistic acts between one person and another, the team reaches a heart-warming conclusion in its technical paper:
"Our analysis shows that gratitude and other positive emotions, which increase the willingness to help others, can evolve in the competitive world of natural selection." Scrooge himself would have been impressed by their arguments which show how, even in a nature that is supposed to be red in tooth and claw, a person who has just received help may go on to help several others in "an 'epidemiology of altruism' resulting in an explosive increase of altruistic acts."
In this way, science has at last explained Christmas goodwill.
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