Paper: Evolution Favors Cooperation Over Selfishness 245
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."
Re:Duh? (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
How about "Journal of Slashdot" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Duh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [netflix.com]!
Re:Duh? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.