ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes the suggestive language selfish and altruistic because these labels exactly describe who in the model benefits, in terms of learning, from the interaction—the one who initiates the interaction or the one who responds. Specifically, in a spatial context, target-only reproduction/learning creates more complicated and expansive social ecologies (in equilibrium) than does source-only reproduction/learning. The developmental dynamic for "selfish" source-only reproduction is depressingly simple in a spatial context. Catalytic source-only social ecologies of three or more interacting individuals inexorably and quickly collapse into isolated dyads of two specialized individuals, who then stably "feed" on each other. Perhaps the most important finding in the simulations of higher-element spatial hypercycles, however, is the fact that stable reproductive ecologies were found at all. Physical space is more than just a passive receptacle for social and chemical technologies to be located within. Dynamic barriers of technological complexity can be transcended once global is transformed into the concatenation of locals.
