Download or read book Cooperation and Its Evolution written by Kim Sterelny and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-02-22 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays from a range of disciplinary perspectives show the central role that cooperation plays in structuring our world. This collection reports on the latest research on an increasingly pivotal issue for evolutionary biology: cooperation. The chapters are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and utilize research tools that range from empirical survey to conceptual modeling, reflecting the rich diversity of work in the field. They explore a wide taxonomic range, concentrating on bacteria, social insects, and, especially, humans. Part I ("Agents and Environments") investigates the connections of social cooperation in social organizations to the conditions that make cooperation profitable and stable, focusing on the interactions of agent, population, and environment. Part II ("Agents and Mechanisms") focuses on how proximate mechanisms emerge and operate in the evolutionary process and how they shape evolutionary trajectories. Throughout the book, certain themes emerge that demonstrate the ubiquity of questions regarding cooperation in evolutionary biology: the generation and division of the profits of cooperation; transitions in individuality; levels of selection, from gene to organism; and the "human cooperation explosion" that makes our own social behavior particularly puzzling from an evolutionary perspective.
Download or read book The Evolution of Cooperation written by Robert Axelrod and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A famed political scientist's classic argument for a more cooperative world We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival. A vital book for leaders and decision makers, The Evolution of Cooperation reveals how cooperative principles help us think better about everything from military strategy, to political elections, to family dynamics.
Download or read book Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation written by Peter Hammerstein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Evolution Games and God written by Martin A. Nowak and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism’s reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics. Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms “cooperation” and “altruism.” Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning. The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.
Download or read book A Cooperative Species written by Samuel Bowles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin. In A Cooperative Species, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis--pioneers in the new experimental and evolutionary science of human behavior--show that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers. The authors describe how, for thousands of generations, cooperation with fellow group members has been essential to survival. Groups that created institutions to protect the civic-minded from exploitation by the selfish flourished and prevailed in conflicts with less cooperative groups. Key to this process was the evolution of social emotions such as shame and guilt, and our capacity to internalize social norms so that acting ethically became a personal goal rather than simply a prudent way to avoid punishment. Using experimental, archaeological, genetic, and ethnographic data to calibrate models of the coevolution of genes and culture as well as prehistoric warfare and other forms of group competition, A Cooperative Species provides a compelling and novel account of how humans came to be moral and cooperative.
Download or read book Why Humans Cooperate written by Joseph Henrich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. Natalie and Joseph Henrich examine this phenomena with a unique fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation, ethnographic descriptions of social behavior, and a range of other experimental results. Their experimental and ethnographic data come from a small, insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians called Chaldeans, living in metro Detroit, whom the Henrichs use as an example to show how kinship relations, ethnicity, and culturally transmitted traditions provide the key to explaining the evolution of cooperation over multiple generations.
Download or read book The Evolution of Human Co operation written by Charles Stanish and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do people living in small groups without money, markets, police and rigid social classes develop norms of economic and social cooperation that are sustainable over time? This book addresses this fundamental question and explains the origin, structure and spread of stateless societies. Using insights from game theory, ethnography and archaeology, Stanish shows how ritual - broadly defined - is the key. Ritual practices encode elaborate rules of behavior and are ingenious mechanisms of organizing society in the absence of coercive states. As well as asking why and how people choose to co-operate, Stanish also provides the theoretical framework to understand this collective action problem. He goes on to highlight the evolution of cooperation with ethnographic and archaeological data from around of the world. Merging evolutionary game theory concepts with cultural evolutionary theory, this book will appeal to those seeking a transdisciplinary approach to one of the greatest problems in human evolution.
Download or read book Cooperation in Primates and Humans written by Peter M. Kappeler and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-10-19 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooperative behaviour has been one of the enigmas of evolutionary theory. This book examines the many facets of cooperative behaviour in primates and humans. It bridges the gap between parallel research in primatology and studies of humans, and highlights both common principles and aspects of human uniqueness, with respect to cooperative behaviour.
Download or read book Meeting at Grand Central written by Lee Cronk and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Meeting at Grand Central brings together insights from evolutionary biology, political science, economics, anthropology, and other fields to explain how the interactions between our evolved selves and the institutional structures we have created make cooperation possible. The book begins with a look at the ideas of Mancur Olson and George Williams, who shifted the question of why cooperation happens from an emphasis on group benefits to individual costs. It then explores how these ideas have influenced our thinking about cooperation, coordination, and collective action. The book persuasively argues that cooperation and its failures are best explained by evolutionary and social theories working together. Selection sometimes favors cooperative tendencies, while institutions, norms, and incentives encourage and make possible actual cooperation."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book The Social Instinct written by Nichola Raihani and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Enriching" —Publisher's Weekly "Excellent and illuminating"—Wall Street Journal In the tradition of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, Nichola Raihani's The Social Instinct is a profound and engaging look at the hidden relationships underpinning human evolution, and why cooperation is key to our future survival. Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how life progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material to nation states. But given what we know about evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin, when on a Darwinian level, all the genes in the body care about is being passed on to the next generation? Why do meerkats care for one another’s offspring? Why do babbler birds in the Kalahari form colonies in which only a single pair breeds? And how come some reef-dwelling fish punish each other for harming fish from another species? A biologist by training, Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behaviour most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that makes us so distinctive–and so successful.
Download or read book For Whose Benefit written by Patrik Lindenfors and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes the reader on a journey, navigating the enigmatic aspects of cooperation; a journey that starts inside the body and continues via our thoughts to the human super-organism. Cooperation is one of life’s fundamental principles. We are all made of parts – genes, cells, organs, neurons, but also of ideas, or ‘memes’. Our societies too are made of parts – us humans. Is all this cooperation fundamentally the same process? From the smallest component parts of our bodies and minds to our complicated societies, everywhere cooperation is the organizing principle. Often this cooperation has emerged because the constituting parts have benefited from the interactions, but not seldom the cooperating units appear to lose on the interaction. How then to explain cooperation? How can we understand our intricate societies where we regularly provide small and large favors for people we are unrelated to, know, or even never expect to meet again? Where does the idea come from that it is right to risk one’s life for country, religion or freedom? The answers seem to reside in the two processes that have shaped humanity: biological and cultural evolution.
Download or read book Cooperative Evolution written by Christopher Bryant and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooperative Evolution offers a fresh account of evolution consistent with Charles Darwin’s own account of a cooperative, inter-connected, buzzing and ever-changing world. Told in accessible language, treating evolutionary change as a cooperative enterprise brings some surprising shifts from the traditional emphasis on the dominance of competition. The book covers many evolutionary changes reconsidered as cooperation. These include the cooperative origins of life, evolution as a spiral rather than a ladder or tree, humans as a part of natural systems rather than the purpose, relationships between natural and social change, and the role of the individual in adaptive radiation onto new ground. The story concludes with a projection of human evolution from the past into the future. ‘Environmental studies courses have needed a book like Cooperative Evolution for a long time. It is a boon for those teaching the complexity of the evolutionary story.’ — Dr John A. Harris, BSc(Hons) MSc PhD, School of Environmental Science, University of Canberra ‘As a regenerative, holistic-thinking farmer I daily witness the results of cooperative evolution as the seasons unfold. A pleasure to read, Cooperative Evolution gives entry to recent thinking on evolutionary processes.’ — David Marsh, MSA, ‘Allendale’, Boorowa, New South Wales, 2018 National Individual Landcarer Award recipient ‘This book is an engaging new look at ideas about evolution as we know it today. In the hands of two eminent biologists, it presents an approachable yet challenging argument. I heartily recommend it.’ — Emeritus Professor Sue Stocklmayer AO, BSc MSc PhD, Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, The Australian National University
Download or read book Cooperation among Animals written by Lee Alan Dugatkin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-02-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the depiction of nature "red in tooth and claw," cooperation is actually widespread in the animal kingdom. Various types of cooperative behaviors have been documented in everything from insects to primates, and in every imaginable ecological scenario. Yet why animals cooperate is still a hotly contested question in literature on evolution and animal behavior. This book examines the history surrounding the study of cooperation, and proceeds to examine the conceptual, theoretical and empirical work on this fascinating subject. Early on, it outlines the four different categories of cooperation -- reciprocal altruism, kinship, group-selected cooperation and byproduct mutualism -- and ties these categories together in a single framework called the Cooperator's Dilemma. Hundreds of studies on cooperation in insects, fish, birds and mammals are reviewed. Cooperation in this wide array of taxa includes, but is not limited to, cooperative hunting, anti-predator behavior, foraging, sexual coalitions, grooming, helpers-at-the nest, territoriality, 'policing' behavior and group thermoregulation. Each example outlined is tied back to the theoretical framework developed early on, whenever the data allows. Future experiments designed to further elucidate a particular type of cooperation are provided throughout the book.
Download or read book Origins of Altruism and Cooperation written by Robert W. Sussman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the evolution and nature of cooperation and altruism in social-living animals, focusing especially on non-human primates and on humans. Although cooperation and altruism are often thought of as ways to attenuate competition and aggression within groups, or are related to the action of “selfish genes”, there is increasing evidence that these behaviors are the result of biological mechanisms that have developed through natural selection in group-living species. This evidence leads to the conclusion that cooperative and altruistic behavior are not just by-products of competition but are rather the glue that underlies the ability for primates and humans to live in groups. The anthropological, primatological, paleontological, behavioral, neurobiological, and psychological evidence provided in this book gives a more optimistic view of human nature than the more popular, conventional view of humans being naturally and basically aggressive and warlike. Although competition and aggression are recognized as an important part of the non-human primate and human behavioral repertoire, the evidence from these fields indicates that cooperation and altruism may represent the more typical, “normal”, and healthy behavioral pattern. The book is intended both for the general reader and also for students at a variety of levels (graduate and undergraduate): it aims to provide a compact, accessible, and up-to-date account of the current scholarly advances and debates in this field of study, and it is designed to be used in teaching and in discussion groups. The book derived from a conference sponsored by N.S.F., the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Washington University Committee for Ethics and Human Values, and the Anthropedia Foundation for the study of well-being.
Download or read book Evolution written by Carl T. Bergstrom and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolution presents foundational concepts through a contemporary framework of population genetics and phylogenetics that is enriched by current research and stunning art. In every chapter, new critical thinking questions and expanded end-of-chapter problems emphasizing data interpretation reinforce the Second Edition’s focus on helping students think like evolutionary biologists.
Download or read book Cooperation and Collective Action written by David M. Carballo and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Cooperation research] is one of the busiest and most exciting areas of transdisciplinary science right now, linking evolution, ecology and social science. . . this is the first major work or collection to address linkages between archaeology and cooperation research."—Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University Past archaeological literature on cooperation theory has emphasized competition's role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation have been under theorized in favor of models stressing top-down leadership, while evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans to effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. Cooperation and Collective Action is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand cooperation and collective action. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. The breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. In Cooperation and Collective Action, diverse case studies address the evolution of the emergence of norms, institutions, and symbols of complex societies through the last 10,000 years. This book is an important contribution to the literature on cooperation in human societies that will appeal to archaeologists and other scholars interested in cooperation research.
Download or read book The Fractal Self written by John L. Culliney and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our universe, science reveals, began in utter simplicity, then evolved into burgeoning complexity. Starting with subatomic particles, dissimilar entities formed associations—binding, bonding, growing, branching, catalyzing, cooperating—as “self” joined “other” following universal laws with names such as gravity, chemical attraction, and natural selection. Ultimately life arose in a world of dynamic organic chemistry, and complexity exploded with wondrous new potential. Fast forward to human evolution, and a tension that had existed for billions of years now played out in an unprecedented arena of conscious calculation and cultural diversity. Cooperation interleaving with competition; intimacy oscillating with integrity—we dwell in a world where yin meets yang in human affairs on many levels. In The Fractal Self, John Culliney and David Jones uncover surprising intersections between science and philosophy. Connecting evidence from evolutionary science with early insights of Daoist and Buddhist thinkers, among others, they maintain that sagely behavior, envisioned in these ancient traditions, represents a pinnacle of human achievement emerging out of our evolutionary heritage. They identify an archetype, “the fractal self,” a person in any walk of life who cultivates a cooperative spirit. A fractal self is a sage in training, who joins others in common cause, leads from within, and achieves personal satisfaction in coordinating smooth performance of the group, team, or institution in which he or she is embedded. Fractal selves commonly operate with dedication and compassionate practice in the service of human society or in conserving our planet. But the competitive side of human nature is susceptible to greed and aggression. Self-aggrandizement, dictatorial power, and ego-driven enforcement of will are the goals of those following a self-serving path—individuals the authors identify as antisages. Terrorist leaders are an especially murderous breed, but aggrandizers can be found throughout business, religion, educational institutions, and governments. Humanity has reached an existential tipping point: will the horizon already in view expand with cooperative progress toward godlike emergent opportunities or contract in the thrall of corrupt oligarchs and tribal animosities? We have brought ourselves to a chaotic edge between immense promise and existential danger and are even now making our greatest choice.
