Ownership psychology as a “cognitive cell” adaptation: A minimalist model of microbial goods theory

Abstract

Microbes perfect social interactions with intuitive logics and goal-directed reciprocity. These multilevel, cognition-resembling adaptations in Dictyostelid cellular molds enable individual-to-group viability through public/private bacterial farming and dynamic marketspaces. Like humans and animals, Dictyostelid livestock-ownership depends on environmental sensing, cooperation, and competition. Moreover, social-norm policing of cosmopolitan colonies coordinates farmer decisions, phenotypes, and ownership identities with bacteria herding, privatization, and consumption.

Boyer, using what he describes as a sound computationally tractable logical calculus, tries to deconstruct then rebuild decades-old dueling sociocultural and cognitive theories of ownership psychology, rendering a so-called minimalistic or reductionistic cognitive systems explanation of agent-driven market behavior. Historically, advocates of strictly social or cognitive economic models fail to capture the full complexity of public, common-pool, private, and club systems of ownership and goods exchange (cf. Kagel, Battalio, & Green, 1995). Boyer's account is no different and needlessly further skews the narrative of agent economic perceptions and interactions by favoring an a priori narrow anthropocentric framework of ownership intuition. Markets for exclusive and nonexclusive goods are observed within and across systematics classifications to include microbe to animal sociality (Ben-Jacob, Becker, Shapira, & Levine, 2004; Chung, Alós-Ferrer, & Tobler, 2021; Clark, 2010a, b, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2021c; Crespi, 2001; Dunny, Brickman, & Dworkin, 2008; Hellingwerf, 2005; Lyon, 2015; Marsh & Kacelnik, 2002; Pion et al., 2013; Ross-Gillespie & Kümmerli, 2014; Schultz, Stauffer, & Lak, 2017; Velicer & Vos, 2009). Such phylogenic and sociogenic breadth of economics expression requires more details about the nature of ownership inferences and decision making than found in Boyer's proposal. The author, eschewing any contributions from supposed ad hoc social norm influences, argues ownership intuitions emerge from the workings of and relationships between two human cognitive systems. One system processes aspects of agent competition associated with resource possession and scarcity, such as rivalry-motivated goods privatization. The other system processes mutually beneficial cooperation between agents, such as communal sharing and collective bargaining and trade. According to Boyer, these human neurocognitive systems enable agent attention to specific environmental cues and produce definite agent intuitions about ownership status, providing a testable paradigm for identifying, defining, and understanding conventional, edge or boundary, and unusual sorts of ownership conditions. Conditions may include, for instance, those linked to simple physical and intellectual property cases, intricate and possibly controversial human rights cases, and fuzzy cases involving disputes over ridership claims to public transportation seating or patron placement in public service or resource queues. Although Boyer's framework succeeds in representing some credible features of human psychology and economic markets, it lacks external validity, power, and thus relevance for nonhuman ownership scenarios, leaving his computational model fundamentally incomplete for adaptive organisms without brains or even nervous systems, such as social amoebae and ciliates in Earth and possible extraterrestrial biospheres.

Evolutionary psychology weaknesses in Boyer's framework may be isolated and challenged by a well-known comparative economics model of social eukaryotic microbes – Dictyostelid primitive livestock agriculture (Brock, Douglas, Queller, & Strassmann, 2011; Brock, Read, Bozhchenko, Queller, & Strassmann, 2013; Clark, 2019, 2021a, b; Stallforth et al., 2013; Werner et al., 2014). Application of economics theory in sociobiology often excites scientists as a means to explain and predict the evolution and behavior of organismal clades older than the Ecdysozoa–Lophotrochozoa divergence, such as taxa of social bacteria, protozoa, and roundworms (Tarnita, 2017; Thutupalli et al., 2017). Analogous to human and animal phenomena, microbes perfect social interactions through intuitive social logics and flexible goal-directed social reciprocity mediated by cell–cell communications (Clark, 2015). These cellular decision-making capabilities, sometimes termed “conscious cell” or “cognitive cell” adaptations (e.g., Lyon, 2015; Margulis, 2001), enable careful scientific examination of microbial economics theory. Microbial economics typically involve the same kinds, yield, transfer, and possession of goods as commonly ascribed to human and animal foragers, hunters, cultivators, and harvesters. For example, private and club goods compel property owner rights or some level of excludability, whereas public and common-pool goods exhibit nonexclusive possession traits. Commodities scarcity drives rivalry between consumers and may affect acquisition of private and common-pool goods. Alternately, public and club goods encourage little-to-no property rivalries. Notable findings reported for Dictyostellid cellular slime molds suggest multilevel selection pressures force individual-group economic tradeoffs supporting exploration–exploitation strategies and specialized cell-response systems, which sustain cell, colony, and kin viability through both public and private bacterial farming over ecoevolutionary timescales. Like Boyer's cognitive view of human property ownership, Dictyostelid ownership of bacteria depends on environmental sensing as well as social cooperation and competition. But, Dictyostelid social norm policing, far from being an unwanted ad hoc sociocultural stipulation, also plays central roles in switching farmer phenotypes and cell decisions, in determining ownership identities, and in herding, privatizing, and consuming bacterial livestock.

Dictyostelid markets, and therefore property ownership, rely on microbial symbioses restricted to caste-like cosmopolitan (super)colonies (Brock et al., 2011, 2013; Stallforth et al., 2013). Social mobility, induced by supply stressed environmental resources and cell–cell communications reporting community-transformation needs, obliges management of individual-group tradeoffs to optimize survival and reproduction. Sometimes individual or group goals are achieved through ruthless, selfish Machiavellian-type rivalry and deception and other times more peaceable, honest altruistic actions are taken. These remarkable social constraints permit Dictyostelids to harness intracolony resources to cope with their niche and to conquer additional ones. Dictyostelid farming evolved as a clone-specific trait that influences life history and fitness. While Dictyostelids cannot match the farming technology and financial market sophistication of humans, their prowess to survive, reproduce, and establish kin-dependent niche dominance via complex strategies and behaviors is impressive. Dictyostelid farmers proliferate in ecological conditions of low nutrient availability, when solitary hunting becomes abandoned and ordered motile social collectives, called slugs, are formed to begin fruiting body differentiation and sporulation. Slugs comprised of farmers, rather than non-farmers, migrate shorter distances to relocate in more favorable, if imperfect, ecological settings. They also prudently harvest bacteria to reserve stores for later consumption during spore codispersal. Farmer–livestock symbiosis is furthermore selective. Farmer amoebae carry proportionately higher populations of preferred-eating bacteria, with additional mixed populations of herd–dog bacteria to help secure and privatize livestock. Together, qualities of Dictyostelid primitive agriculture support dynamic consumer marketplaces, with structural and operational capabilities of kinship groups effecting sound trading partner choices, creation of strong local business connections, efficient diversification and specialization, high-return indispensable partnerships, ruthless competition elimination, and prudent saving for lean times (Werner et al., 2014). As such, a “cognitive cell” systems approach to Dictyostelid ownership addresses competition, cooperation, and social norms in ways that help rectify, translate, and extend the essential points of Boyer's human-cognition interpretation of ownership into a more universal species-invariant ownership framework.