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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
Everyone has to choose one or the another as their sole guiding principle?
Wait, there's another research funding application....
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 ...
Cooperation wins big time. Look at ants and bees. Only use selfishness with subject unwilling to cooperate and still, I have a hard time doing it sometimes...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So what should the cooperative society do with all the less cooperative human-individuals? Probably exterminate them. Together and cooperatively.
That would be the smartest thing to do. Unfortunately, the competative jerks are the ones with all the guns.
The good news, humanity is not long for this world, which will mean the world will soon be a better place (but alas, without us)
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.
here in NYC i see this all the time. a lot of the newer immigrants the adult kids live with parents. kids with trust funds have lots of money to pay the rent in nice apartments and have lots of cash to spare.
meanwhile all the independent minded people spend all their money on rent and living expenses and have nothing for the future
then later in life the leeches get help from the old people to buy property and get further ahead in life than the perpetual renters
the native americans did this too. they had huge homes where large extended family units lived and the older people helped with the kids while the younger people worked.
and in my case i'm not 40 and have almost 50% equity in my home due to living with parents a long time ago and saving some money for a down payment
An important thesis, though not a totally new one: Robert Wright's "Nonzero" and Matt Riddley's "Origins of Virtue" make related cases. Fantastic books for those interested in the origins and nature of co-operation.
like the people in fly over country who talk about being independent but suck up more federal funding than everyone else?
Hoarding of goods used to mean cooperation. But add to that interchange of hoarded goods and make it virtual so it can be infinitely accumulated and give it its own meaning instead of "goods, just a lot of them", and selfishness becomes an emergent behaviour, specially if that meaning is shared by the other members of your species. We as civilizaiton acquired a few very destructive memes and will be hard to get rid of them.
Unfortunately, the competative jerks are the ones with all the guns.
Damn them for out-thinking the collective.
A species with cooperative tendencies may evolve where it benefits survival but evolution doesn't care. Not sure it applies to people though. Humans are intelligent enough to game the system and cooperate when it benefits them or be selfish when they can get away with it.
Yes, exactly. We should exterminate them. I'm sure you in your new skinny jeans and cashmere pullover can figure out how to operate the food-gathering tractor.
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.
Fortunately, they also oppose sex, so they should die out before too long.
Gee, and as a republican, here I thought that my view was thinking that helping others should be done by ones own volition and not state mandated. I also didn't realize I rejected evolution, as it's a main stream belief and not the very vocal minority of whack jobs like I thought it was.
Thanks for telling me what I believe about myself.
One wonders if this doesn't help to explain both the perennial popularity of libertarianism and the ongoing lack of a viable libertarian state.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
So, essentially, they changed the rules for the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the results turned out differently.
And then they use this to draw broad conclusions about society?
Color me speechless...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
no biggie. just buy food from other countries like we do in the winter time
most of the food grown in the US is not fit for human consumption. its to send off to some factory to make a food product out of it
Does the paper give consideration it is not always the loser that qualifies as selfish? Take army ants for example. Nor is cooperation always voluntary or extremely evolutionarily programmed in. I probably should have RTFA, but am too busy lauging at the premise that cooperation is non-selfish mob while the less socially successful/needy is selfish. Territorialism in some species is a form of cooperative survival. Infinite diversity etc..
If only the authors had been Slashdot readers, they could have written this same paper 10 years ago.
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.
Come on, this is no news! This has been common knowledge for decades and it is in Wikipedia as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation).
--
A good summary is an excellent excuse to avoid reading the article. The same with a bad one.
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.
Eskimo says - I loan out my knife....it comes back dull. I loan out my dog...he comes back tired and hungry. I loan out my canoe, it comes back broken. I loan out my wife...she comes back happy.
It seems they have forgotten that evolution doesn't favor anything instead specific traits are favored in environments in which they are useful. In human behavior selfishness is partially a byproduct of the survival instinct. In times of plenty it's easy for most of us to push aside our survival instincts and work together to form larger more cooperative communities. It is to our benefit that such communities prosper so that we may live in greater security within the buffer they provide. The more scarce resources become the more pressing our survival instincts are and the more large communities begin to crumble. When you get to the family unit the biological drive to procreate and insure the offspring's survival will moderate the survival instincts allowing parents and other close relatives to sacrifice there own survival. No one, know matter how selfless is going to watch their loved ones starve so everyone can have an equal share of the communities resources. Which brings me back to my primary point. All human behavior is at is base inherently, though not always consciously selfish.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
So, this will give me hope the bazaar (ie open source hardware|software|operating systems) will triumph, in the long run : )
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
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.
I thought Nash's theory had to do with the optimal way of picking up women at campus bars.
This is true for any social animal (which humans most clearly are). Consider two sub-species of ants, one with members who work together, and one with members who hoard food to themselves. Which one will survive and increase its population the most in the long run? Take a guess. It's the simplest explanation for why humans have altruistic tendencies (despite the long-accepted explanation of "because God!").
There seems to be a large public misconception that evolution is a process which works on individuals, when really it works on ENTIRE ECOSYSTEMS. This isn't Pokemon.
Another "proof" is in the book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts. In a sales situation, because introverts are NOT pushy (selfish) they will often lose that first sale. However, over time -- especially with a consultative sales model, introverts will outperform extroverts. Sales is a cooperative venture where you try to determine if your product will meet the customer's need. Introverts will listen -- a basis of cooperation, and then respond appropriately, because they heard what you had to say. Too introverts are more attuned to non-verbal cues (even over the phone). They will hear the pauses and hesitation and respond.
As such, introverts naturally follow a cooperative path. They prosper by helping others. Sounds like a winning strategy to me.
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.
Though certainly a lot of both, evolution is more the story of cooperation than competition. Complexity requires a cooperation of sorts from quantum particles to DNA and beyond . Molecules ‘work together’ to make DNA, cells themselves are made of more primitive biological structures that banded together, organs are made of cells working together, and so on to organisms, species, ecosystems and, in a roundabout way, even the solar system itself.
Sure, we aren’t talking about cognitive choices, but there is a distinct pattern of epiphenomenal sums arising from cooperative parts. Self-similarity is a theme in evolution (i.e. the pattern of cooperation is self-similar across various scales of scope), and cooperative patterns are easy to spot in human history and culture. These patterns are key and forge a trajectory of slow progress despite (and also due to in no small part) self-interest.
Now some like to argue that cooperation is just enlightened self-interest, and that might be true from the perspective of the individual. On larger scales, though, enlightened self-interest is simply a mechanism that pragmatically engenders cooperation.
Actually, he's doing a false generalization from one of the Republican President Candidate wannabes (Rick Santorum) to the rest of the republicans. Rick did, in fact, campaign on the idea that sex should be limited to only procreative purposes even inside marriage. To help enforce his puritanical ideas on everyone else, he wants to make all contraception illegal. In fact he supports allowing the government to rifle through the bedrooms of the people to make sure that they are only have sex for the reasons he believes are moral according to his interpretation of his religion*.
So a more accurate statement would be "Most of those EVIL PEOPLE who disagree with your political opinions do not oppose sex between married partners."
* There are, of course, rumours that Rick is a closeted homesexual who is actually incapable of taking pleasure in sex with his wife, which might explains his antipathy to having sex more often than strictly required to create children.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Did you totally lack any sort of comprehension that you are criticizing a homosexual? WTF? Where did you go to school that taught that homosexuals are OK to disagree with due to their sexual orientation?
Oh, and good job linking to Salon.com regarding a dissident. I might as well go to stormfront.com to get relevant opinions regarding Marxists. It's the same thing.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I didn't pay much attention to the various mugs the Republicans barfed up as candidates, so I wasn't aware of that particular bit of 9th century lunacy.
And I have to say... seriously? Really? He was a contender? Ever? In what world did anybody think it was a good idea to give him so much funding that he was, for a short time, a frontrunner in the primaries? I know the Republican party and their mouthpieces are past masters of the moving-the-bar technique of public debating where they pretend to seriously propose insanity in order to make some reactionary policy look conservative, but... seriously?
But I forget, there are still people in the world who think professional wrestling is real.
Does it also hold for capitalism?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
even among scientists in the field, is that personal survival and evolution have something to do with each other. They don't. Evolution is about the propgation of the genetic line, and in the long run, when personal survival conflicts with it, evolution steamrollers it every time.
The selfish individual may increase his personal chances of survival to a ripe old age, but his selfishness may well reduce his chances of passing his genetic line on to another generation.
Dawkins pretty much said the same thing a very long time ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48EWLj3gIJ8
He wore sweater vests like Mr. Rodgers, and people got confused.
Why is Snark Required?
Personal selfishness makes sense for personal risks/threats.
Extra-group risks/threats necessitate interpersonal cooperation while rationalizing own-group selfishness.
Extra-tribal risks/threats necessitate inter-group cooperation while rationalizing own-tribe selfishness.
Extra-regional risks/threats necessitate inter-tribal cooperation while rationalizing own-region selfishness.
Extra-global/extra-terrestrial risks/threats necessitate international cooperation while rationalizing own-planet selfishness.
and so on and so forth...
None of that really pits the concept of selfishness against cooperation, since all we do is exchange a lower level of selfishness for a higher level one, and cooperate one level below the level of selfishness required to mitigate the risk or to meet the threat. Selfishness and cooperation therefor go hand in hand as we attempt to surmount broader risks and threats.
I don't know why submitter brought up politics (maybe to softly troll), it could just as well be that the differences between political stances lie not so much in whether one rejects selfishness in favor of cooperation or vice versa, but more so in the way different mindsets prioritize various risks/threats into different levels.
(maybe this is all off-topic since IDRTFA)
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
ALL of Ayn Rand's philosophy did NOT considered people's memories.
Nor did it consider people's characters. I mean really, she was a slut and adulterer.. She had a husband who put up with it. Is her philosophy for those who can't stick up for themselves? Was her husband REALLY OK with that?
It's easy to pontificate your narrow beliefs, but to actually live up to them on a large scale?
I wonder what HER sainthood would have said about Alan Greenspan's policies?
If you read her writing (I don't recommend it) you can see she had a thing for powerful men. She idolized them. So it's no surprise that her "philosophy" lionized them.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Evolution really comes down to no survival of the non fit so -> the optimal solution for any species is to have both selfish and cooperative behaviors (they give different advantages to a species in different environmental situations and for a species to have a strong preference for one or the other decreases the chance that both will remain in the population).
Game theory approaches that model the optimal behavior for an individual are cute and may apply perfectly well to an individual in a specific environment but really has nothing to do with the survival of a species over time.
You say ...
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.
I think prestige is an incentive for pure cooperation.
Prestige can be viewed as selfish since it may lead to increased breeding or other benefits for the individual. So, I don't really know what you mean by "pure" cooperation. If I am seeking prestige, is my cooperation pure? What if I am not seeking prestige, but people bestow it upon me anyway?
Surely there is an evolutionary incentive here, even if it is not and internal one.
Are you truly suggesting the cooperating leads to mediocrity? A good team acting in true cooperation can accomplish quite a bit more than a lone person in many cases. Just being forced to defend your stance against suggestions from others will help you to refine and solidify the best parts while discarding the worst. CEOs might take home the big money, but they don't work in a vacuum and they could not succeed as they do if everyone else walked away and left them to their own devices.
It's not a false generalization. The GOP is opposed to birth control and is opposed to abortion and is opposed to sex education that would include information about STI prevention other than abstinence.
Sure, folks within the party might not agree, but the party wouldn't be able to support those things if people didn't vote for it.
What's next, getting on people for false generalization because Catholics agree with the Pope?
Maybe Jesus was right?
Mod it down, crybabies.
Right. Kropotkin is my wing-man.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Delicious ad hominem.
Did it ever occur to you that the fact that you would exterminate all those who disagree with you is the reason those others have guns?
Better for whom?
Yes, cooperation wins. Well, as long as no one cheats and manages to "free ride" on the backs of cooperators. Once that happens, cooperation collapses back to selfishness. This ground has been plowed many times. One of the greatest mysteries of Biology continues to be the existence of human altruism. That is, how can a gene that encodes for "die for your country" behavior, survive that organism's... death for its country. The better such behavior works, the more likely the cooperator dies and leaves no children. And yet, we all know that altruism works, we just don't know how yet.
Human societies are about cooperating. And if they exist, that means humans cooperating in a society succeeded more than individual competing at each others. And they do exist.
That sounds odd when said, but cooperation is more competitive than competition.
You mean the needs of the many really do outweigh the needs of the few, or the one? You don't fucking say...
people really don't know what's good for them. And worse they hate being told that. There's too much information out there, and it's too complex. Take traffic jams. In most cities they exists solely because of people speeding to red lights. Experts and Elite have a place. The Renaissance Man's days are over and done. Maybe the trouble is we've lost the ability to tell the difference between a pompous aristocrat and a man of science?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The very fact that we are multicellular organisms with specialized body tissues supports this. For if evolution favored selfishness most of all, primordial life would not have banded together.
# It's the circle of li-i-i-i-i-i-i-ife ...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Did you learn biology at Bob Jones University? It's not in a person's interest to pass the genes on.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Weasel words.
See also:
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Rubbish. It simply means working together.
You might be helping that smelly twat from accounts because your boss will have you fired otherwise. You might be one of a platoon of conscripts building a bridge because the officer will have you fired at otherwise.
Still cooperation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you knew shit about evolution, you'd know that "species" is both singular and plural. "Specie" is a word, but it means coinage.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
AC, you're overthinking this. They'll simply starve to death and the problem will take care of itself
- elgo
Working together with others, as a team, is a skill that must be learned.
Those that never learned, and don't want to learn, are more successful as individuals.
But those who work together can beat them.
Thats why criminals end up losing.
But a criminal who can take control of the team can cause great damage, so be careful who you follow...
Mostly in America do we think that competition is better than cooperation. This is epitomized in the TV show "Survivor" where greedy Americans compete for resources in a survival situation where more sensible people would support each other against the elements and natural hazards. Americans are so free enterprise and anti-communist that, even to save their lives, they cannot embrace:" from each according to his ability; to each according to his need". Isn't it obvious which group would have the better chance of surviving and propagating. Compare the way Australians and Americans acted and survived in Japanese hell hole prison camps.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
I'd expect someone with experience in a field to be able to write the common words of that field correctly. Does your accountant - sorry, your mom's accountant - write "debbit"?
Can't make me.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't think that was an ad hominem. Ad hominem is an attack on the characteristics or the authority of a person _without addressing the substance of the argument_. What was the substance of the argument? Ayn Rand's philosophical views, which - as AC and kilfarsnar argued - were influenced by the traits of her personality.
"most of the food grown in the US is not fit for human consumption. its to send off to some factory to make a food product out of it"
Source?