Post by cjm on May 10, 2015 7:54:41 GMT
While interesting, the article seems based in parts on rather thin evidence and wishful thinking.
And the following probably is a good reason for private ownership in farming.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-help/?page=1
Why We Help [Preview]
People tend to think of evolution as a strictly dog-eat-dog struggle for survival. In fact, cooperation has been a driving force in evolution.
There are five mechanisms by which cooperation may arise in organisms ranging from bacteria to human beings.
Humans are especially helpful because of the mechanism of indirect reciprocity, which is based on reputation and leads us to help those who help others.
...
For decades biologists have fretted over cooperation, scrambling to make sense of it in light of the dominant view of evolution as “red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred, Lord Tennyson so vividly described it. Charles Darwin, in making his case for evolution by natural selection—wherein individuals with desirable traits reproduce more often than their peers and thus contribute more to the next generation—called this competition the “struggle for life most severe.” Taken to its logical extreme, the argument quickly leads to the conclusion that one should never ever help a rival and that an individual might in fact do well to lie and cheat to get ahead. Winning the game of life—by hook or by crook—is all that matters.
Why, then, is selfless behavior such a pervasive phenomenon? Over the past two decades I have been using the tools of game theory to study this apparent paradox. My work indicates that instead of opposing competition, cooperation has operated alongside it from the get-go to shape the evolution of life on earth, from the first cells to Homo sapiens. Life is therefore not just a struggle for survival—it is also, one might say, a snuggle for survival. And in no case has the evolutionary influence of cooperation been more profoundly felt than in humans. My findings hint at why this should be the case and underscore that just as helping one another was the key to our success in the past, so, too, is it poised to be vital to our future.
...
Why We Help [Preview]
People tend to think of evolution as a strictly dog-eat-dog struggle for survival. In fact, cooperation has been a driving force in evolution.
There are five mechanisms by which cooperation may arise in organisms ranging from bacteria to human beings.
Humans are especially helpful because of the mechanism of indirect reciprocity, which is based on reputation and leads us to help those who help others.
...
For decades biologists have fretted over cooperation, scrambling to make sense of it in light of the dominant view of evolution as “red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred, Lord Tennyson so vividly described it. Charles Darwin, in making his case for evolution by natural selection—wherein individuals with desirable traits reproduce more often than their peers and thus contribute more to the next generation—called this competition the “struggle for life most severe.” Taken to its logical extreme, the argument quickly leads to the conclusion that one should never ever help a rival and that an individual might in fact do well to lie and cheat to get ahead. Winning the game of life—by hook or by crook—is all that matters.
Why, then, is selfless behavior such a pervasive phenomenon? Over the past two decades I have been using the tools of game theory to study this apparent paradox. My work indicates that instead of opposing competition, cooperation has operated alongside it from the get-go to shape the evolution of life on earth, from the first cells to Homo sapiens. Life is therefore not just a struggle for survival—it is also, one might say, a snuggle for survival. And in no case has the evolutionary influence of cooperation been more profoundly felt than in humans. My findings hint at why this should be the case and underscore that just as helping one another was the key to our success in the past, so, too, is it poised to be vital to our future.
...
And the following probably is a good reason for private ownership in farming.
In the classic public goods scenario known as the Tragedy of the Commons, described in 1968 by the late ecologist Garrett Hardin, a group of livestock farmers who share grazing land allow their animals to overgraze on the communal turf, despite knowing that they are ultimately destroying everyone's resource, including their own. The analogies to real-world concerns about natural resources—from oil to clean drinking water—are obvious. If cooperators tend to defect when it comes to custodianship of communal assets, how can we ever hope to preserve the planet's ecological capital for future generations?