[ExI] Corruption (was congress-lawyers)

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 19 17:12:28 UTC 2018


Great.  I am imagining a hierarchy here:  first, selfish needs and actions;
second, actions related to supporting the tribe; third, actions relating to
protecting food resources, such as game and cultivated crops; fourth actions
defending all humans; fifth, ??

I am not a biologist, but this order seems right to me.  Cheating, then, is
the favoring of the first set of actions rather than the second set.  In
other words, perfectly normal.

bill w

On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 11:05 PM, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

> BillW wrote:
>
> > Lots of physicians too.  Note the big story about a big time doctor who
> > failed to reveal millions of income from Big Pharm.
> > Is corruption an instinct?
>
> It's called cheating. It's something even more primal than instinct. It's
> a survival strategy displayed in group settings by everything from
> bacteria and slime-molds to human and eusocial insect societies. It can
> happen within species or between species. It can even happen inside a
> single organism.
>
> Multicellular organisms must deal with cheating by their cells in the
> guise of cancer. In economics it is called "the Free Rider Problem".  You
> can call it the curse of being social or the tragedy of the commons or
> networked prisoner's dilemma. It's all the same phenomenon playing out at
> different scales.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_(biology)
>
> The only known strategy against it is to find it and punish it or
> otherwise eliminate it whenever possible. To this end do honeybees eat any
> eggs they find that were laid by workers and white blood cells roam your
> body looking for tumor antigens. Rhesus monkeys scream en masse at
> high-ranking cheaters and physically attack lower-ranking cheaters.
>
> The ancient Greek penalty for cheating or bribery in the Olympic Games was
> monetary fines, flogging, and banning from further competition.
>
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
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