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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."
Cooperation is seen as the most effective long term human evolutionary strategy.
Bands - tribes - of folks had to cooperate to hunt, gather food, fight off invaders, etc ....
And I am pretty sure Scientific American has had articles on this for quite a few years.
Conventional wisdom has suggested selfishness is most beneficial evolutionary strategy for humans,....
Maybe if you're reading 19th century papers ...
Voluntary cooperation.
Economists, in their cavalier way, often ignore or minimize this trumpeting their politics.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Cooperation wins big time.
Yep. Look at the effectiveness of, say, police forces and armies over individual armed men.
The radio is one of the deadliest, most precise weapons ever invented. Because it facilitates cooperation.
What? Ayn Rand could be wrong? The shock and horror of it!
Seriously though the question is difficult to answer on anything more than a philosophical level. It is a bit vague to quantify and would need to be rephrased to be practically measurable.. Maybe I should put my beer down and go read TFA....
Never put your beer down! Priorities!
I am no communist, but I think it would be difficult to argue that selfishness benefited the species as a whole in all circumstances. Communism !=Altruism.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Petr Kropotkin wrote a series of essays in the late 1800s that became the book "Mutual Aid". It lays out in beautiful and exquisite detail the premise here, that co-operation is a primary factor in evolution, rather than simple dominance, as he felt Darwin suggested. It is truly a masterpiece work and I highly recommend that anyone interested in the subject read it.
Kropotkin went on to become (very much posthumously) one of the most-read and best regarded philosophers of the Anarchist political movement; his politics were largely molded by his observations that are laid out in Mutual Aid.
Small teams only? Damn. 7 Billion is such a small team... I of course bow to your no doubt more sober analysis. But, well I still can't help but think there might be some value in co-operation for a species....
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
As a non-educated Idiot. Evolution doesn't favor one trait over the other. Instead environmental conditions favor one trait over another. So obviously in an environment with enough resources that are difficult for individuals to harness. Evolutionary pressure will favor working together. On the other hand in an environment with sparse resource that are easy for the individual to harness put difficult for groups to effectively use. It will turn the other way.
I can do more with your help than I can on my own. But to get your help, I'm going to have to cooperate with you and offer you my help in return. So it's not really a choice between selfishness and cooperation. It's a choice between selfishness and stupidity. Do I be stupid, reject your help and limit myself to only what I can accomplish without help? Or do I be selfish, cooperate with you and reap the gains of having your help?
It's the same thing as you see with a mortgage. If you're greedy you forgo the immediate benefits and make a large down-payment because long-term you'll gain a lot more in reduced interest payments. If you're stupid or desperate you'll make the minimum down-payment and keep the money in your pocket right now, but pay several times what you "saved" in increased interest payments.
XOR logic fails in understanding complex systems. It could be that Selfishness is beneficial until it isn't And I'm sure that Cooperation is beneficial until it isn't. Pure "communism" has failed every place it has been attempted, even when completely voluntary. The reason is because there is no incentive in pure cooperation.
The same lack of understanding is also available in pure selfishness. It is doomed because there are times when cooperation is required to achieve more complex goals.
I would postulate that a mix of knowing when each is optimal would be even better, which would require more than a simple XOR operation.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Here's nearly every newspaper article about science ever: "Until recently, scientists believed in $obviously_false_idea, but a recent study shows that..."
The idea that cooperation has been selected for by evolution to some extent is obviously correct, because otherwise we wouldn't have social species that can't survive without cooperation. It's also nothing new, it's one of the central themes of The Selfish Gene that everyone who feigns an interest in science pretends to have read.
I haven't read TFA, but I imagine the study was probably about some detail of how cooperation is selected for.