Heritage Day Address
by Nils Ahbel
Math Department Faculty/Academic Technology Coordinator
Given at the outset of Heritage Day, September 22, 2000

At Deerfield, time is one of our most precious commodities. Each morning, we as individuals, and we as a community, plan carefully what we are doing and why we are doing it. The total amount of time that students and faculty devote, collectively, to one academic day is about 20 million seconds. When we take a day out of the academic calendar to discuss racial issues, drugs and alcohol, gay and lesbian issues, or to do community service as we are doing today, we need to justify a precious 20 million seconds lost to academics.

For some of you, community service is a way of life, but others might be thinking, "this community service stuff won't help me get into college, will it? This is a college preparatory school. If we have a day off and we can't sleep in and just relax, then at least let's focus on something that will help me get into a good school. Let's spend the day working on college essays or taking practice SAT tests".

I think we would all agree that someone should help the underprivileged, the elderly, the mentally ill, animal shelters, etc., but why us? Don't we all really have better things to do? If our purpose for being at Deerfield is to be as successful as possible, then can we afford 20 million seconds of community service?

This summer I found an interesting answer to this question in a book by K.C. Cole entitled, The Universe and the Teacup - The Mathematics of Beauty and Truth. Cole, intentionally provoking, writes, "Charles Darwin's idea of survival of the fittest suggests that only the meanest, most competitive, most selfish individuals will make it to the top of the evolutionary heap. Compromise, cooperation, and kindness are for losers and wimps." Cooperation and kindness are only for losers and wimps? I have participated in the last three Heritage Days, and have felt like anything BUT a loser or a wimp - in fact, those three days have been some of the most powerful and enriching days of my time at Deerfield. What's going on here? Who's right, Darwin or Deerfield?

Mathematicians usually have elegant ways of approaching and dealing with logical issues and this one is no exception.

Mathematicians have been studying different survival strategies for the past two decades in a subset of mathematics called game theory, and one of game theory's most famous problems is the so-called "Prisoner's Dilemma". Here's the scenario: two co-conspirators are caught by the police and kept in isolation from each other. Each one is told that if he rats on the other, he'll go free. If both remain silent, they know that there won't be enough evidence to convict either one of them...unless one of them rats on the other. Which is the better strategy - to keep quiet, or to make a deal with the police?

Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan became intrigued with this problem in the 1980s and invited game theorists from around the world to a prisoner's dilemma tournament. Each participant created a strategy, and the various strategies played against each other over and over by means of computer simulation. Points were awarded for various outcomes and score was kept. For many, the results were counterintuitive. Selfish strategies (strategies of betrayal) scored very poorly and, surprisingly, the most successful long-term strategies were ones that involved cooperation. Paradoxically, Axelrod's experiment demonstrated that when you live in a community, cooperation and altruism are the best strategies when trying to maximize your own success.

This seems to fly in the face of the outcome of the TV show, "Survivor", where the nicest people got kicked off of the island soonest, and the cunning and selfish people lasted the longest. The selfish strategies proved successful because the players did not have to face fellow survivors again. If they were forced to reconcile their differences in the context of a stable community, then Axelrod's experiment predicts that the cooperative participants would be the true survivors.

Well, we do live in a community - actually many communities - our families, dorms, Deerfield Academy, Franklin County, and yes, the world.

The late Lewis Thomas, American physician, author, educator wrote,
"Altruism is essential for the continuation of the species, and it exists as an everyday aspect of living. We are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of that fondness, for the genetic message is like a distant music and some of us are hard of hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, crowding out the sound of ourselves and our connection. Nonetheless, the music is there, waiting for more listeners."

Heritage Day is about hearing and making that music together. So, in the same way that we fill this Auditorium with music when we loudly and proudly sing, "Deerfield days are days of glory", let us fill this entire valley with the music of community service!