Soft wetware mostly, and indeed hard wetware sometimes (midwives in Europe regularly "redisigned" the cranial features of newborns, a few centuries ago) , is not a product of DNA/RNA. Our societies have been able to invent concepts such as homosexuality. Our societies have been powerful enough to destroy such a basic wetware necessity, for survival of the species, as maternal instinct : most children in urban Europe two centuries ago were sent to the countryside to be fed, nobody actually caring if they died in their first two years.
The variability of genotypes in the human species is quite weak - it's not unthinkable the whole species went through a narrow bottleneck 100 000 years ago, a short time for evolution. If you put an European child in a pre-Columbian American tribe or civilization, he'll become undistinguishable from his peers socially, if you go beyond skin and hair colour. This regularly happened when American Indians kidnapped white settlers... The DNA mix is very weakly impacted by environmental conditions, beyond skin colour, in human societies.
Human societies' mores and behaviour are very strongly determined by social pressures, which are way, way stronger than genetical hardwiring.
And that game theory piece is hogwash too. Human beings aren't rational selfish utility-maximisers, and although game theory can inform the ways we can develop institutions to design our society, game theory theorems and computations don't apply literally to human societies. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
There are two key errors: first, talking about the incorporation of elements related to social science in a mathematical model as if it were entirely unproblematic (not requiring substantial interpretation and discussion). Second, imputing radical novelty to an approach that has many antecedents. Just from my limited overview of policy analysis and political economy, related analyses have been around since the early 1990s at the latest. See e.g. Rules, Games and Common Pool Resources.
The importance of the study is also wildly overstated. I at least don't see concrete policy advice on how to use the findings to come to well-functioning global cooperation. It's just a study saying 'people may be more willing to cooperate than our previous model predicted when we incorporate factors x and y'.
It's just a study saying 'people may be more willing to cooperate than our previous model predicted when we incorporate factors x and y'.
If we look from Taleb's "Black Swan" perspective of theoretical vs empirical fallacies, the selfishness imperative is more a logical ("Platonic") conclusion of a few simplistic assumptions than an empirical truth. Simplest evolutionary models indeed predict that the world must be robustly selfish, non-altruistic - and selective evidence may "confirm" that. But examples of nasty bugs and free-riding cuckoos form a rather isolated set of malicious tricks employed by relatively few species. Nasty viruses are pretty overwhelmed by endosymbiotic bacteria; similarly, the "common good" role of insects is probably much larger than their bugging.
If evolution must make lineages so selfish, why "tragedy of commons" situations are relatively unnoticeable in the nature?! But oops... if you run yourself into a tragedy of commons, you are already a looser, apparently.
Neo-darwinists are wrong assuming that all survival is differential, that is, that doing just better than others beats anything. (Oh, how this fallacy is affecting banking, politics and much else today). Genetically, our greed can only be so much different. We have genes both for greedy and altruistic behavior or feelings. What inclination are switched on, depends on what we learned or experienced in early ages, and on cultural circumstances. What is really in human nature is the tendency to copy or follow each other - so most repeated ideologies and opinions do matter.
The force of selfishness is not to be denied - but firstly, it's effects are not immediate: "naive" altruists do not die off immediately. On the other hand, massive greed is powerful enough to eat itself in a matter of few generations. But as evolution is a game of many thousands of generations, those episodes of greed "discoveries" do their equilibrium punctuations, but eventually they are in effect handled, adopted and rerun with ever growing sophistication.
Dealing with greedy fools is a complicated problem - but solutions, be they partial, "temporarily" and complicated, do evolve. Why not?
The opiodergic system doesn't describe behaviour any more than gravity does. Stimulating the opiodergic system provokes a wish to repeat the activity. Gravity provokes a need to put a roof over our heads to protect from stuff falling, to put things down rather than up. That's not describing behaviour, that's describing conditions for behaviour. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
