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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 ...
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.
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.
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.
Ok, Apparently TFA implies it is quantifiable... Who would have thought?
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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.
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Selfishness in general will help to advance the species.
Selfishness in pairs or small teams is just more effective than selfishness alone.
So yeah ... "Duh?"
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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....
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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"
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.
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.
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.
Interesting...
Is it selfishness as a species or as a group of individuals that leads to an ecosystem collapse? As a species, doesn't selfishness mean survival at any cost? Even the extreme cost of preserving the ecosystem? Perhaps the error is that we are selfish on the wrong level - as individuals rather than as a species. I am admittedly drunk, but it sounds like a rather profound question, so, what the heck, I'm asking.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
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.
No, millions dead for a greedy, selfish dictator. Seems to validate this article quite well.
Dawkins pretty much said the same thing a very long time ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48EWLj3gIJ8
Not selfishness but rather self-interest. Cooperation is often in one's self-interest. There's a reason that "power in numbers" is a truism.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
What? Ayn Rand could be wrong? The shock and horror of it!
Um, didn't Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon cooperate to build the John Galt Line?
Rand's protagonists cooperated all the the time, and of course also provided value to their voluntary customers - what they tried not to do is let their property be controlled or taken involuntarily by government.
Ask yourself, what is the difference between cooperation and theft? Isn't it whether you volunteer to participate?
Go watch the movie!
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.
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."
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.
It is rather depressing here on slashdot lately. I week or so ago I used exactly those three names when a discussion came up about social equality. Someone claimed that social equality is the same as oppression. I made the point that conflating those dictators' policies with equality showed a profound lack of education, and left it at that. I expected to get yelled at for going too far by including pol pot, as no realistic thinking person with even the most basic knowledge of history could realistically argue that pol pot had anything to do with social equality. But no, I got yelled at because I made a point without backing it up with arguments. As though common sense and a basic primary school knowledge of history could be taught by a slashdot comment. Well this time I am going to try to explain it. Pol Pot is the easiest. Pol Pot's government was not communist, it was a despotism. Despotism is where a group or individual takes over all the resources and uses the control of those resources to gain power. It was a semi-feudal despotism. Feudalism means that there is a top class of people who are given power, and an underclass of peasants or serfs who work very hard and get nothing. Stalin and Mao created similar systems, but slightly less brutal. Despotism is a form of government that has been popular throughout history, and characterises Europe in the dark ages.
High social equality on the other hand, can be characterised by (to take a completely random example) the USA in the 1950's and 60's. Tax rates were higher and income equality was higher. It is harder to get nice graphs on government oppression during this period in the US, but I am sure we can all agree that less people were executed than under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Other countries that have had a high rate of social equality in the last century are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand. This is not an exhaustive list.
For more information on the statistical correlation between social equality and general wellbeing please see the following statistics lecture.