Prisoner's Dilemma

In the model, each person is offered a deal for freedom if they inform on the other, putting their opponent in jail for six months. However, this scenario will only be played out if the opponent chooses not to inform.

If both "prisoners" choose to inform (defection) they will both get three months in prison, but if they both stay silent (co-operation) they will both only get a jail term of one month.

Thank you, Prof. Andrew Coleman (Leicester U.). Coleman ran a study on the prisoner’s dilemma, the classic case of cooperation or “defection,” as the author calls it. Most research has concluded that the optimal behavior for the individual is to act selfishly and defect rather than cooperate. Coleman discovered that, in the long run, selfish behavior would lead to extinction, which is why cooperation is the norm in the animal world, a reality I’ve been arguing on behalf of for many, many years based solely on observation and logical thinking. Regular readers (hi, Dave) know my mantra: the chicken is the egg’s way of reproducing itself. That was one of the great intellectual epiphanies of my life. It is entirely contrary to the American gestalt which elevates individualism and competition.

Prof. Coleman stated it somewhat lengthier: "It's not individuals that have to survive, it’s genes, and genes just use individual organisms - animals or humans - as vehicles to propagate themselves"; but the message is the same. One has to understand that to understand evolution. Coleman came to that conclusion using powerful computer modeling, which is nice, but it doesn’t take precedence over simply thinking things through. Whoever came up with the line about the chicken and the egg undoubtedly did it by thinking about the necessity of how genes have to work. Once we knew about genes, the era of individualism was dead.

Except in America.

Couple this find with the finding that our brain makes it’s decisions on a course of action (move that muscle, think that thought) before we are aware of what those decisions are—i.e. eliminating the possibility of free will—and one starts to understand how our existence as individuals is illusory: we are merely expressions of the species. We are how the species lives and propagates. We do nothing; the species does it all, up to and including our thinking. One can understand that but one cannot affect it.

Which is why giving people credit or castigating them for their behavior is absurd. No one is responsible for what they do; not you, not me, not your mother. One has to question the entire system of rewards and punishment: who is one rewarding or punishing? Why? What does one expect to gain by rewarding or punishing? How do we reward and punish?

The current system is to accumulate all you can and defend it with arms. That’s the selfish scenario; that’s the American gestalt. It’s based on the theory that the individual is the most important; and if only one can survive, the species or the individual, it’s more important that the individual survive, even if it means extinction of the species. It doesn’t take a whole lot of thinking to see that such a scenario would be disastrous for the species: extinction’s about as bad as it gets. It’s called capitalism.

Okay, we’ve seen what “defection” will do.  Anyone care for cooperation? Or is that un-American?

“Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will”
George Dvorsky, io9.com, 1/14/13

As the early results of scientific brain experiments are showing, our minds appear to be making decisions before we're actually aware of them — and at times by a significant degree.… 

They had no choice but to conclude that the unconscious mind was initiating a freely voluntary act — a wholly unexpected and counterintuitive observation.

One never knows how accurate reporting is. If this report is true, it is truly shocking, but not for the reasons the reporter thinks. The shocking part is that, according to the reporter, the scientists who noticed this phenomenon—our brains working before we know it—found it a “a wholly unexpected and counterintuitive observation.” Really? What were they expecting? And “counterintuitive”? Whose intuition are we talking about?

Oh, I get it, the researchers were religious; they believe in free will. No wonder. They must have thought that god gave us an extra mental power that he skipped giving the rest of the living things: free will. Gee, what is free will? No one, it will be noted, has ever presented any evidence for free will, much less a definition, although we’re now getting evidence that there isn’t any. Trust me, if you don’t believe in free will, it’s intuitive that researchers will confirm such.

Free Will Versus Instinct

Believing in free will is akin to believing in god, except that I can understand god, while free will eludes me. Where I get lost is at the beginning; I can’t see a difference between free will and any other kind of will. Will meaning “choice,” not, say, the “will to succeed.” But choice. How are there two kinds of choice? Either one has a choice or one doesn’t. If one has a choice, one has the option of making said choice. One is always equally free to choose either of two options. The consequences may be radically different, but one is always free to make the choice. There isn’t, though, room for but one kind of choice; if there’s another, I haven’t run across it yet.

The term “free choice,” though, implies that there are at least two kinds of choice, right? Free and not free. The implication is that there are fundamentally different kinds of choices available, one which one is compelled to make, and another which one is free to choose anyway he or she likes. We tend to think of this latter kind of choice as, if not uniquely human, then confined to the larger animals. Primates, maybe. Don’t know about dolphins. The implication is that this kind of choice appeared somewhere along the evolutionary line; that prior to the appearance of such kind of choice, there was only instinct, which, everyone agrees, is no choice at all. We pride ourselves on not being instinctual, on being able to think for ourselves, to make good and bad decisions.

We are, perhaps, a bit prideful.

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that it’s unexplained from whence this new manner of thinking comes. And how it works differently from other manners of choice. How there can be two methods of making choices has not been approached by the philosophers, much less by the neuroscientists. It seems mixed up with the notion of consciousness and self-consciousness; the difference between them isn’t clear either.

Fundamentally, the simplest living organism possible has to be able to find food, recognize it as distinct from non-food, and decide to process it. At its most basic level, finding and recognizing food is akin to deciding to process it. Still, the organism has to know how to position its body in order to process the food it has found. It has to have a sense of where its body is and where it isn’t, and it has to have a sense of how to move its body to another place. Conscious or self-conscious? You can call it what you will; regardless, it has to be conscious of itself and its surroundings in order to survive. Every living thing has the same requirement. Every.

So, how does this little, primitive, one-celled critter go about processing the signals it receives from its environment; and how does it communicate within itself? Chemistry and electricity, right? Nothing but. Chemical signals and electric currents transmit all the information the cell needs. What’s more, when two cells decided to get together and become a multi-celled critter, they retained the same methods of communication: chemicals and electricity. In fact, no matter how many cells clump together to make no matter how big a critter—a redwood or a whale—the communication channels never change: chemistry, electricity.

It’s not that these were the best channels available to living things out of which to build communications platforms, it’s that they’re the only channels available. Gravity, for example, doesn’t work well as a communications devise. Yet messages can only be sent using the materials at hand. Chemicals make good triggers; electricity is fast.

But as we noted, once that one-celled critter found something to eat, its triggers said “eat,” and the processing process began. The choice to eat was automatic. But it was a choice; theoretically, the critter could eat or not eat.

How the critter made the choice to eat was because it operated with an algorithm (paradigm/software/criteria) that said when triggers X, Y, and Z fire, swallow that puppy.

As the critters (I call them “critters” to lump together all living things, animal or vegetable) get larger and competition appears and predators appear, the algorithms become more and more complex. They evolve. Yet, the mechanisms of communication between the various cells and the ruling algorithms remain the same: chemistry and electricity. Even when you get to people, the only way the various parts of the body communicate with each other is through chemical signals and electrical charges. There is, fortunately or unfortunately, nothing that Mother Nature can add to the mix.

Needless-to-say, when sex was invented, the algorithms became hopelessly complex. Understandably so, though, given the kinds and complexity of sense and response organs. Choice and decisions, necessarily, must be made virtually instantaneously, especially as mobility and predation increase. The algorithms have to be acted upon sans debate.

In the end, all living things possess the same three things: sensors, output terminals, and CPUs. They can read the environment; they can interact with the environment; and they have a pile of software to work out the details and coordinate things. The bacterium has these. You have these. The bacterium uses those three capacities to find and consume food; we do too. (We also use them to facilitate DNA mixing.) In both the bacterium and us, all the interior communication is done by the same chemical/electrical routes; nothing new has been added to the mix. The signals that make the dog’s mouth move when it barks or our mouths move when we speak, are made and processed the same way. Neither us nor the dog, of course, is aware of the millions of interactions required for every bark, every word. What could awareness of that even be like? (Zen masters and LSD aficionados?)

As you can imagine, this has profound implications as to where another form of choice could come from. So far, we can only envision a mechanical, albeit highly complex, method of functioning. Essentially, we have only instinct at this point in the discussion; there is no place for anything else. Even thought, no matter how complex and self-reflexive it seems, has, at this juncture, only a mechanistic explanation, an instinctual explanation. No other explanation—other than God—has been put forward. Where would thought come from if not from a complex function of our CPUs? How is my song any less instinct that that of the nightingale?

In the end, it appears we don’t even have a definition for “will,” much less “free will.” (We carry this problem with us when we think about computers; we worry about when they’re going to be able to spontaneously write and install their own software without wondering where the computer’s existing software would generate that idea within itself; we think that at some point “will” will arrive as if the computers will be touched by the finger of god and become alive; and that being alive will be a fundamental change for the computer. We speak of the “singularity” as if a magical transformation will appear at a point in the future when machines become “alive.” We have faith that we can create life by software, if not by electro-chemistry.)

Ah, people; we’re so cocksure.

Nice is Natural

Robert Sapolsky

Robert Sapolsky,

Just recently I heard an interview with a chronobiologist. I’d never heard the term, but as my spell-checker didn’t flag it when I wrote it, it’s obviously been around awhile. As soon as he said the word, it made intuitive sense. This was followed by your interesting piece on the effects of time on decision making. The results you outlined point to curious operations in the mind’s interior.

Lately, I’ve been engrossed with the question of free will. One biologist I ran across in my readings commented that he was waiting for “a molecular explanation of free will.” That may take some time. The longer I stare at the question, the more “free will” and “thinking” become conflated in my mind; I wonder if there’s truly thinking any more than there is truly free will? I have come to question the nature of consciousness. In the end I see consciousness as a real-time way for the vast collection of cells and organisms that any creature is to function ensemble, but that consciousness is no more the thinking part of the creature than is the computer monitor of the processor. Hal might be talking to you, but the real work is done by the CPU.

In that sense, all thinking is intuitive, whether it’s an on-the-spot reaction or a long contemplated action. If my own experience is any template, no matter how long I cogitate over something, when the answer does appear, I have no idea from where. I, obviously, have little control over the processes of rumbling through and filtering all the information that impinges on any decision. For one thing, there’s way too much information informing any decision for me to have a conscious grasp of it. Try as I might, I’ve never come up with an understanding of thinking that wasn’t reduced to a bunch of switches. Oh sure, the switches might be controlled by gauges, but, in the end, the message is either go or don’t go. I appreciate your field for trying to understand the switching processes, but it’s inevitably something one can only see from the outside; one cannot see one’s self think.

In the end I can’t figure out how any thought could arise without being run through some paradigm or algorithm which determines the outcome. If one has to choose between A and B, either there is a reason for the choice (conscious nor not) or the choice is random and, hence, without meaning. So, where does randomness come from? And “random” implies no control. So, if one either has control and makes a decision according to a paradigm or they have no control and it’s a random process, it appears that the only thing in control is the paradigm. I don’t see room for free will or thinking in that scenario. Maybe we call it “free will” because we have no idea from where it comes. How does one make a choice without applying criteria?

In any event, under that thinking, why length of time given to making a decision would alter the decision would appear to be a matter of response levels in the CPU. I.e., if a quick response is required, only certain essential parts of the CPU are brought into play; whereas if one has more time to contemplate, other algorithms and data sources can be accessed by the CPU. The shorter the required response time, the more instinctual the response would necessarily be.

Which brings us to children. There may be a Lord of the Flies aspect to children, but my experience is that children have instinctive morality. Perhaps they only have gut feeling, yet.

My untutored understanding—given, as you point out, that other animals possess empathy and altruism—is that those qualities are instinctual. I don’t see how they could be otherwise. If they were selected for, it means that they have value to the species, as the species is what controls trait survival, not the individual, right? Needless-to-say, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to think that altruism, for example, would benefit the entire species, nor would it be unreasonable that it was selected for. In fact, wouldn’t it almost have to be selected for?

In that sense, it would make altruism/empathy fairly basic traits, at that; ones that would enable a species to better survive. They would, one assumes, be the traits that would rise to the surface as spontaneous reactions to situations. Selfishness, it would seem, would require some thought, it would require other algorithms have time to be expressed.

I guess that all I’m saying is that it makes sense that spontaneous reaction would be beneficial to the most people. It’s only natural.

Steven Pinker

As to Pinker’s assertion—at least as you characterized it—that “it is the regulating forces of society, rather than human nature, that have brought a decline in human violence over the centuries”; without knowing if it is a fair characterization of his argument, it is, unfortunately, a logical fallacy. The “regulating forces of society” have nowhere from which to arise, other than human nature. What he is saying is that human nature has devised operating rules expressed In “regulating forces.” But they’re very human. It is human nature to figure out mechanisms by which society can be made to better function. I would think it, too, is a trait selected for.

It’s Faith that Counts

It’s a matter of faith that people are categorically different from other animals. Not that we have spectacularly extended the skills given to us, but that we have acquired entirely new skills unavailable to the rest of the kingdom. This is not exclusively a religious faith; the social science have been very strict in admonishing people to not be anthropomorphic, to not extend human characteristics to other things, be they living or dead, which may be tautological with inanimate objects, but is much more debatable among living thing.

Free-will is a case in point. Only humans are clearly marked with the burden of free-will, or so we’re told. It is something thought to have developed during the last evolutionary spurt that humans have had (if we’re not going through one, now). Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it turns out to be a chimera.

The very concept of “free-will” implies—demands, really—at least two kinds of will, free and otherwise. The problem lies in disentangling the two. The closer one looks, the more the two kinds of will appear to be the same thing: the ability to choose. If one has an option to choose, all will is free. If one doesn’t have options, case closed. What the argument for free-will seems to be saying is that only humans are actually given choices; the rest of the kingdom has to follow innate instructions. We, on the other hand, are free, implying that we have no innate instructions, no internal behavior algorithms. In our evolution we have broken the bonds of rigid rules that one would be otherwise doomed to blindly follow because of one’s programming. We, for some reason have developed the possibility of endless choice; we’re free to do whatever we want.

But are we? And what does it mean, free-will? Isn’t the very act of wanting something a determining force and not one of free-will? One can, perhaps, ignore one’s desires, but one can hardly be said to create one’s own desires. And can one ignore a desire unless there’s a stronger desire present?

This is where we have to step back a little bit and look at what people and the other animals really are. We have to take a look at consciousness. A leg of the free-will table suggests that, while all living things might have an awareness of their surroundings, only humans are self-aware, are self-conscious. Since no one has yet devised a way to test this hypothesis, it remains a hypothesis, but it’s firmly planted in the body public. Quite how this self-consciousness would be different from the garden variety of consciousness is left to one’s imagination. A concomitant of that is the belief that only humans are conscious of their own mortality, another untested hypothesis. And, unfortunately, there’s no real reason to suspect that either of those assumptions is true other than pride: we want to think we’re different, that we’re special, that—well—we’re made in the image of god.

Fat chance.

From a scientific standpoint, it’s more accurate to say we’ve been created in the image of bacteria, of which we’re primarily composed and from which our origins, apparently, come. The technical difficulties with that observation is that it’s hard to tease out our uniqueness. Maybe we don’t have any.

There are a million obstacles to understanding everything about evolution. The minimum requirements are eating and reproducing. Obviously, sex was a huge step forward in creating complex creatures, but most of the rules of life were figured out before then. At the very least, one has to have enough consciousness to pick out what’s edible.

Not surprisingly, given the small amount of material to work with and the random, scattered nature of mutations, it took billions of years (literally) for the single-celled original creatures to figure out how to clump together to make multi-celled organisms. They couldn’t do it until they’d evolved methods of communication; they had to make agreements on how to cooperate. As far as we can tell, those methods involve chemical behavior and electronic currents. Communication between cells—and by extension, ever-expanding clumps of cells—is chemical and electrical. And as far as we know, no other methods have been employed. And that’s true no matter how big or complex those clumps of cells become, even if they become human. In other words, all the internal communication in our bodies is done on chemical-electric pathways. All of it, including brain activity, especially brain activity. There is no meta-communications pathway; we all use the same simple methods employed by the original cells. All thought, all memory, is built up of those two elements.

Now, when cells get together to form a larger creature—us, say—do they have little garden parties to set out the rules of communication and responsibility? No, the rules are built into their DNA which packages the basic instructions. A copy of the DNA goes with each cell and directs how it is to perform. It’s all quite rigid and magical at the same time. So, when this clumped-being stumbles upon something edible, the cells don’t have a conference to decide whether or not to eat it. How to deal with something edible is built into its DNA, so when given a choice to eat or not eat something edible, it’s not really a choice at all. It has to eat it. What good would debate do the creature? None, so debate isn’t selected for in evolution.

Which brings us to “natural selection”; it helps to understand how it works. For one thing, it didn’t begin until after the invention of sex. It’s commonly thought that the selecting being talked about is the selecting that two members of a species do when they’re looking for mates. The theory being that the healthier, more successful members of a species will mate and thereby spread their genes to the rest of the population. Seems logical, but, unfortunately, is not the case. The selecting being done is not that done by the individuals but rather that done by the entire species; and the selecting is very simple: if people carrying gene X outlive and out-produce their neighbors, gene X will eventually spread to the entire population. It’s immaterial who those individuals are or their overall competence; what’s important is the success of the gene packages they leave behind.

Which leads us to an understanding of who’s running the show. It’s not us. It’s the successful gene packages. It’s the DNA. Effectively, the individual members of any species are only the hosts by which the DNA reproduces itself. The DNA is immortal, we are transient. Evolution is done at the DNA level, we have nothing to do with it. And it’s random. Those things are true of all species.

Meanwhile, the goals and operational methods remain the same: eat/divide; chemistry/electricity. And they never change; they’re a constant through all living things.

But as the organisms become more complicated, the controlling algorithms become more complicated; new features are periodically added. Empathy, for example. Bacteria probably don’t have much use for empathy, but by the time you get to big animals, empathy starts to become useful to the survival of a species; hence, it gets selected for by the DNA. Ditto love, which is very similar to empathy. Love is empathy with attachment. Many species, evidently, use love to protect and foster themselves. Humans, of course, are reluctant to attribute love to other animals, but it’s hard to see that other animals’ bonding mechanisms could be significantly different than ours. It’s more likely that we’ve employed an existing model rather than having invented the wheel all over again.

It’s the same with any other human characteristic that we don’t think of as DNA controlled: inquisitiveness, say. Obviously, inquisitive people were, in the long run, more successful than those willing to live with whatever showed up. Artists? Somehow as a society we valued them enough that we made sure they were well fed and prospered and hence DNA selected for art. (Where would theater and fiction be without empathy? Do theater and fiction foster empathy and that’s why they get selected?) Those skills, the skills of artist, tinkerer, explorer, weren’t ones people invented out of whole cloth; like everything else, they are an evolutionary adaptation to life. They are, you could say, accidental. Useful, but accidental. They got selected for because of their utility, but that they arose was the result of random mutation.

What’s important here is that no one chose the skills, these attributes. No one chose to be empathetic or in love. Likewise, no one chose to be an artist or a tinkerer, they were selected for by DNA, not the individual. No one chose to be born. No one chose when to take their first breath. No one chose when to utter their first word. And in the end, no one chose to become President of the United States. All those things happened because of evolution and the iron-clad laws of the Universe.

What confuses people, in my estimation, is a poor understanding of consciousness and self, we tend to conflate the two. We fail to see that consciousness is an organizational tool that evolved to allow cell clumps to operate in real time. In other words, the clumps had to find ways to operate as a unit rather than as individual cells, and one of these adaptations was to create a consciousness that unites the entire cluster. The consciousness, of course, wasn’t the cluster but was the tool by which the cluster functioned. Consciousness is a large component of food gathering. It enabled the organism to make rapid decisions when faced with options, which one constantly is. In order for consciousness to function in real time, it has to think, unequivocally, that it is in control, that it is making the decisions. If it truly had to think about the decisions it was making and how it was making those decisions, it would be paralyzed. It would starve. Hence it’s designed to function in real time as a single entity, though it’s nothing of the sort; it’s an agreement between billions of cells and DNA. The conscious self is, in truth, an illusion that enables the individual to function.

But that’s all it is, a tool, it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s merely a data input devise. It controls nothing. Neither your movements nor your thinking. One may think that their consciousness is telling them to run when they see the lion coming towards them; but, in truth, it’s the internal algorithms which are telling the person to run; but they doing it in real time so it looks like the consciousness is actually doing the thinking; but no, all thinking is done at the subconscious level. (Got that? All those “buts”?)

So free-will? Where in this mess of evolution would free-will come from and how would it be different from the existing choice model? What does free-will really mean? Does it mean than no algorithm was applied to make a decision? Or does it mean that a new algorithm was applied? And how was that algorithm created? Does free-will imply that people can create new algorithms out of nothing? And why would they make a new one versus using another if they didn’t have a preference which would override free-will?

This would be all well and good if the algorithms were accessible to the consciousness, but they’re not. There is no free-will in setting up the algorithms of love, empathy, lust, hunger, fear, pride, etc. Each of us is only what our combination of mutable instructions produces. None of us creates or directs those instructions. None of us creates our own algorithms, because the algorithms don’t belong to us, they belong to the DNA. Consciously, we do nothing. Consciousness is only a monitoring devise, it doesn’t have directive capacity, that’s done internally and subliminally; we don’t have access to it.

Therefore, to state that we have free-will ends up being meaningless. Our consciousness, it turns out, has no will of its own and all will is directed by internal algorithms. Who would have imagined? Not the average person, because they cling stubbornly to their self-identity. No one wants to be just R2-D2. No one wants to be Hal.

Yet there it is: how is free-will different from any other kind of will? And, even if you thought decisions were really a conscious act, would it be possible to perform any act that you hadn’t thought about in context of yourself, that you used no criteria to making a decision? Because, if you applied criteria, then the criteria ruled the decision; and if you overruled the decision to express your free-will, then another set of criteria will have been brought into play, no? In the end, either decisions are governed by algorithms (criteria, circumstances, etc.) or they’re random. Then the question becomes, is it really random or does it just look that way? But, seeing as thinking is subliminal, the debate is moot.

Mostly, though, it’s moot because of logical necessity. There is no will outside physical reality. Like the soul, there’s no mysterious force out there separate from the physical universe. Thinking, in the end, is the old communication by chemistry and electricity; there’s no room for any other force. There’s nothing like “will” floating around the Universe.

The trail goes:

Apparently, all intracellular communication is done by chemical-electrical means. This is true, apparently, for all living things, animal or vegetable. At the molecular level, all elements in a living body follow strictly the laws of chemistry and physics. As far as we know, all thought is generated out of the same chemical-electric matrix; meaning, inevitably, that anything that could be considered “will” comes out of it, as well. Any choice made has to be generated out of that matrix, following, strictly the laws of chemistry and physics. There is no provision in physics for a fifth force, that of free-will to be generated.

Free-will is always posited as something, if not unique to humans, then restricted to a very few animals. Presumably, the other animals have predetermined wills. But forming a new type of desire, implies a new force, a deus ex machina. Even though it’s hard to see how there can be two independent types of wills.

One wonders, for example if all choices are either free-will or innate? Could a person have within them both free and non-free will? The innate reaction to duck, for example, would seem mostly innate; although one can, though, stand one’s ground and get clobbered. Exactly when did free-will arise in the evolution of animals? Why was it selected for? How does free-will improve one’s survival rate? All those problems pile up until it becomes clear that there are not two types of will, two strategies for making choices in the world. It becomes clear that human neurophysiology functions the same way all other animals’ neurophysiology operates.

I recently had a long debate about this via Facebook with my son. He is of the free-will school and argued for it vigorously. He’s very bright and articulate, but he could never understand the mystical nature of free-will, its magical appearance on the stage with people. He cleaved to the belief that somehow people had grown, either a second will, or an entirely new one; although the mechanics of and reasoning for and functioning of he was never able to explain. In the end, he exclaimed that I was arguing against free-will, as a way to “excuse humans for their sins”; to which I replied, “But of course.” Sins are an invention of religion as much as free-will; they aren’t real either. I don’t think my son thinks of himself as at all religious even though he holds to those religious beliefs of sin and free-will. It’s hard to escape the reach of Christianity.

Free-will fails because it has no definition; no one knows what it is.

The farming addendum:

A classic example of misunderstanding of the nature of natural selection occurs with the spread of farming, something which has bothered researchers for a long time. As Jared Diamond ably demonstrated, farming was decidedly bad for the individual; so the question has long been posed as to why it was adopted if it was so maladaptive?

Because, of course, it wasn’t maladaptive. It was only maladaptive for the individual, and not across the board, at that. The rich did quite well, thank you. More importantly, the species prospered even if the individuals did not. Farming most likely didn’t spread because people saw its advantages and adopted it; farming spread because it grew so many people and organized them so tightly that they could whomp the shit out of the hunter-gatherers. Think of the Europeans coming to America. Think of the Americans moving west. Both were done, essentially, behind armies. The difference between the Pilgrims and the Huns is who wrote the history.

Why the first group adopted farming will probably be forever debated; but once it got going, it was a juggernaut, and soon the people who were predisposed to a settled agricultural life swamped those who were not. The hunter-gatherers got selected away by the species.

The lesson to take away is that evolution happens to the species, not the individual.