maybe mary tyler moore was here?
I'm still not a fan of the midwest, but i gotta say i love some of its urban areas. I'm in minneapolis right now at a conference with my mom and the city is totally not what i expected-and i've seen every single episode of the mary tyler moore show.
I just read this really neat article called "The Arithmetics of Mutual Help" about how cooperation is the new evolution. It's ridiculously amazing, but lengthy, so hopefully i'll do it justice with my summary: So natural selection endorses individual advancements for the success of a species, individuals are sort of in competition with each other. The mechanism of cooperation is seemingly at odds with individual success because it benefits others at the expense of one's own progeny. But scientists have been investigating cooperative behavior in humans and in other animals (all the way down to microbes, and even cooler--single molecules!!) and found that cooperation happens at every level of life, and has been since its inception!!
The question is: why would anyone share a common good rather than cheat others? Social experiments have proven (when they study resources in prison--it's a famous experiment) that one takes more when they cheat others, but does so at a higher risk. The probability of walking away with the benefits is smaller (kinda like stealing).
Animals often appear to cooperate despite the lack of advantage to the donating species. Squirrels give warning to other neighboring squirrels in the presence of a predator, Scrub jays help strangers build nests, and sterile honey bees working at the nest are just a few examples. In many cases, biologists just attributed it to close kinship structures-the animals must have been related, even if distantly. After all, in a family a good deed is just a good deed, while outside a family, a good deed has to be returned to be paid off.
Scientists found that when we humans do good deeds we think about it long term. We are more altruistic with people in our own community, with people we recognize, meet repeatedly, and with those who we remember our last encounters with. In many smaller organisms, the lifespan is short or unpredictable and there is little evolutionary pressure to make the long term investment of a good deed.
The people who wrote this article believe that cooperative behavior is just imbedded in all species' DNA and they more or less imply that it arises from behavior on the molecular level-which is pretty fucking sweet.
"Prebiotic evolution, many researchers believe, may have taken place on surfaces rather than in well-stirred solutions. Catalyzing the replication of a molecule constitutes a form of mutual help; hence, a chain of catalysts, with each link feeding back on itself, would be the earliest instance of mutual aid.
Cooperative chemical reactions would have been vulnerable to ‘cheating’ molecular mutants that took more catalytic aid than they gave. Such difficulties were thought to undercut many ideas about prebiotic evolution based on cooperative chains. But researchers recently demonstrated with computer simulations that self-generated spatial structures akin to those we devised can hamper the spread of destructive parasitic molecules."
I just read this really neat article called "The Arithmetics of Mutual Help" about how cooperation is the new evolution. It's ridiculously amazing, but lengthy, so hopefully i'll do it justice with my summary: So natural selection endorses individual advancements for the success of a species, individuals are sort of in competition with each other. The mechanism of cooperation is seemingly at odds with individual success because it benefits others at the expense of one's own progeny. But scientists have been investigating cooperative behavior in humans and in other animals (all the way down to microbes, and even cooler--single molecules!!) and found that cooperation happens at every level of life, and has been since its inception!!
The question is: why would anyone share a common good rather than cheat others? Social experiments have proven (when they study resources in prison--it's a famous experiment) that one takes more when they cheat others, but does so at a higher risk. The probability of walking away with the benefits is smaller (kinda like stealing).
Animals often appear to cooperate despite the lack of advantage to the donating species. Squirrels give warning to other neighboring squirrels in the presence of a predator, Scrub jays help strangers build nests, and sterile honey bees working at the nest are just a few examples. In many cases, biologists just attributed it to close kinship structures-the animals must have been related, even if distantly. After all, in a family a good deed is just a good deed, while outside a family, a good deed has to be returned to be paid off.
Scientists found that when we humans do good deeds we think about it long term. We are more altruistic with people in our own community, with people we recognize, meet repeatedly, and with those who we remember our last encounters with. In many smaller organisms, the lifespan is short or unpredictable and there is little evolutionary pressure to make the long term investment of a good deed.
The people who wrote this article believe that cooperative behavior is just imbedded in all species' DNA and they more or less imply that it arises from behavior on the molecular level-which is pretty fucking sweet.
"Prebiotic evolution, many researchers believe, may have taken place on surfaces rather than in well-stirred solutions. Catalyzing the replication of a molecule constitutes a form of mutual help; hence, a chain of catalysts, with each link feeding back on itself, would be the earliest instance of mutual aid.
Cooperative chemical reactions would have been vulnerable to ‘cheating’ molecular mutants that took more catalytic aid than they gave. Such difficulties were thought to undercut many ideas about prebiotic evolution based on cooperative chains. But researchers recently demonstrated with computer simulations that self-generated spatial structures akin to those we devised can hamper the spread of destructive parasitic molecules."