The Origin of Behavior
Speaker: Andrew Lo , CSAIL, MIT
Date: September 13 2011
Time: 4:15PM to 5:15PM
Location: 32-124
Host: Dana Moshkovitz, CSAIL, MIT
Contact: Be Blackburn , 3-6098, imbe@mit.edu
Relevant URL: We propose a single evolutionary explanation for the origin of several
behaviors that have been observed in organisms ranging from ants to
human subjects, including risk-sensitive foraging, risk aversion, loss
aversion, probability matching, randomization, and diversification.
Given an initial population of individuals, each assigned a purely
arbitrary behavior with respect to a binary choice problem, and
assuming that offspring behave identically to their parents, only
those behaviors linked to reproductive success will survive, and less
reproductively successful behaviors will disappear at exponential
rates.
When the uncertainty in reproductive success is systematic, natural
selection yields behaviors that may be individually sub-optimal but
are optimal from the population perspective; when reproductive
uncertainty is idiosyncratic, the individual and population
perspectives coincide.
This framework generates a surprisingly rich set of behaviors, and the
simplicity and generality of our model suggest that these derived
behaviors are primitive and nearly universal within and across
species. Our approach also yields an evolutionary foundation for
bounded rationality and a simple version of Hawkins'
"memory-prediction" model of intelligence.
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