Paper: Evolution Favors Cooperation Over Selfishness

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 2, 2013 @07:08AM from the can't-we-all-just-get-along dept.

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."

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Re:Duh? by mcl630 · 2013-08-02 11:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

The "American Dream" as it was (house, car, giving your kids better opportunities than you had) didn't require stepping on others. Nowadays a lot of people (but far from all) think it means getting very, very rich with as little work or effort as possible, which does require stepping on people.