[ExI] Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?

[William Flynn Wallace]

I'd say cooperate until it is evident that it isn't working, just as you
would assume that a stranger is not an enemy (you stay on guard whether
it's friend or possible foe).  bill w

On Tue, Apr 9, 2024 at 7:12 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> BOOK REVIEW      08 April 2024
>
> Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?
> How humans, animals and even single-celled organisms cooperate to
> survive suggests there’s more to life than just competition, argues a
> cheering study of evolutionary biology.
> By: Jonathan R. Goodman
>
> <
> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00999-5?error=cookies_not_supported&code=e792dce6-4d14-4420-9537-c4788ac608d0
> >
>
> Quotes:
> Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life Jonathan
> Silvertown Oxford Univ. Press (2024)
>
> The fact that all life evolved thanks to natural selection can have
> depressing connotations. If ‘survival of the fittest’ is the key to
> evolution, are humans hardwired for conflict with one another? Not at
> all, says evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in his latest
> book, Selfish Genes to Social Beings. On the contrary, he argues, many
> phenomena in the natural world, from certain types of predation to
> parasitism, rely on cooperation. Thus “we need no longer fret that
> human nature is sinful or fear that the milk of human kindness will
> run dry”.
> The author argues against the idea that cooperation is fundamentally
> at odds with competition — a view that emerged as a consequence of the
> sociobiology movement of the 1970s, in which some biologists argued
> that all human behaviour is reducible to a Darwinian need to be the
> ‘fittest’. The reality, as Silvertown shows, is not black and white.
>
> Fundamentally, Silvertown proposes, cooperation in each of these
> situations stems from selfishness. Animals did not evolve to act for
> the benefit of their species, but to spread their own genes.
> Cooperation happens because mutual benefits are better, biologically
> speaking, than working alone, as the case of lichens effectively
> demonstrates.
> --------------------
>
> Does this research indicate that even hard-core libertarians would be
> better off co-operating with others?
>
> BillK
>
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