'Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows'

[Popular Front of Judea]

Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.
This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first.
Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of "the prisoner's dilemma", a scenario of game theory - the study of strategic decision-making.
Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.

Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows | BBC News
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23529849?print=true)

[Devrim]

I have just read this article and to me it didn't seem to say anything that was news. Richard Dawkins argues essentially the same position in the Selfish Gene (2nd edition) published in 1989.

Devrim

[Sotionov]

A study showed that some time ago:


http://images.betterworldbooks.com/048/Mutual-Aid-Kropotkin-Peter-9780486449135.jpg

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

So, basically Kropotkin was right?

EDIT: Sotionov beat me to it.



....I often forget how cool Kropotkin was. He was a true renaissance man.

[Comrade Jacob]

Us Communists have been arguing this for years.

[Brutus]

It was on "Horizon: what makes us human?".

[The real Fabians]

Humans are naturally co-operative, its make s more sense for that to be the case since the human brain grew to its size due to to the increasing complexity of our social groups etc...

[Zutroy]

And even if evolution favored selfish trends, it happens so incrementally over such a vast period of time---with a considerable reliance on other factors such as changes in climate and even sudden bursts in cosmic radiation---that it's imbecilic for someone to justify selfish behavior within their own lifetimes with evolutionary science, especially in an affluent capitalist society where their lives aren't even in peril.

[cyu]

More from http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2013/evolution-will-punish-you-if-youre-selfish-and-mean/

For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn’t evolutionarily sustainable.

In 2012, a scientific paper unveiled a newly discovered strategy – called zero-determinant – that gave selfish players a guaranteed way to beat cooperative players.

While ZD strategies offer advantages when they’re used against non-ZD opponents, they don’t work well against other ZD opponents.

ZD strategies only worked if players knew who their opponents were and adapted their strategies accordingly. A ZD player would play one way against another ZD player and a different way against a cooperative player.

The only way ZD strategists could survive would be if they could recognize their opponents. And even if ZD strategists kept winning so that only ZD strategists were left, in the long run they would have to evolve away from being ZD and become more cooperative. So they wouldn’t be ZD strategists anymore.