Slashdot Mirror
Paper: Evolution Favors Cooperation Over Selfishness
Beeftopia writes "Conventional wisdom has suggested selfishness is most beneficial evolutionary strategy for humans, while cooperation is suboptimal. This dovetailed with a political undercurrent dating back more than a century, starting with social Darwinism. A new paper in the journal Nature Communications casts doubt on this school of thought. The paper shows that while selfishness is optimal in the short term, it fails in the long term. Cooperation is seen as the most effective long term human evolutionary strategy."
How oh how do we counter these academic papers that show us individualism is the path to failure?
Hey, I know, with empirical evidence!
Stalin
Mao
Pol Pot
and last but not least, a couple of hundred million dead in the name of social justice, equality, and cooperation.
That's not cooperation. That's exploiting useful idiots who go weak-kneed because tjpse sociopaths talked about cooperating. Hell, some of them even openly admitted they were exploiting useful idiots, and the idiots still allowed themselves to get exploited.
Similar to "hope and change". Yeah the US just added a weak 162K jobs last month, but 130K of them were part-time. The labor force participation rate actually fell - again. Some "recovery"
Yay. Hopey-changey dopey-wopey.
The benefits of cooperation and how cooperation is also a selfish act is well covered in Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene. That book is, what, thirty years old now, more? At the time it was fairly well established that cooperative behaviour would typically benefit the species and further "selfish" genes. Nothing about this story is new, it was old twenty years ago.
That *is* pure Communism. Karl Marx explicitly demanded a centralized, totalitarian state. Which invariably led to the development of the idea of the "vanguard" as a way excuse the exploitation of the workers by the new political class.
It's why the Anarchists split away and became enemies of the Communists, because they abhorred the idea of the state and of violent political coercion. Many of the idealistic characteristics you attribute to Communism are actually only attributable to Anarchists. It's why Stalin supported the Republican Fascists in the Spanish Civil War instead of the Anarchists.
Wikipedia is your friend. Ignorance has no excuse in the 21st century if you have a computer and an internet connection.
(Feel free to correct my ignorance. I don't excuse myself, either.)