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 inasity_rules · 2013-08-02 07:17 · Score: 1, Troll

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....

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