Author: Robert Axelrod Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0786734884 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
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.
Author: Lee Alan Dugatkin Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195358805 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
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.
Author: Nichola Raihani Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 125026281X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 183
Book Description
"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.
Author: Walter D. Koenig Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521530996 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Cooperative breeders are species in which more than a pair of individuals assist in the production of young. Cooperative breeding is found in only a few hundred bird species world-wide, and understanding this often strikingly altruistic behaviour has remained an important challenge in behavioural ecology for over 30 years. This book highlights the theoretical, empirical and technical advances that have taken place in the field of cooperative breeding research since the publication of the seminal work Cooperative Breeding in Birds: Long-term Studies of Behavior and Ecology (1990, HB ISBN 0521 372984, PB ISBN 0521 378907). Organized conceptually, special attention is given to ways in which cooperative breeders have proved fertile subjects for testing modern advances to classic evolutionary problems including those of sexual selection, sex-ratio manipulation, life-history evolution, partitioning of reproduction and incest avoidance. It will be of interest to both students and researchers interested in behaviour and ecology.
Author: Martin Nowak Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451626630 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
Looks at the importance of cooperation in human beings and in nature, arguing that this social tool is as important an aspect of evolution as mutation and natural selection.
Author: Douglas Rushkoff Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393651703 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 151
Book Description
Porchlight’s Management and Workplace Culture Book of The Year “[A] thoroughly fascinating exploration of the long interplay between power and the technologies of communication.” —Adam Frank, NPR Team Human is a manifesto—a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together—not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups. Team Human delivers a call to arms. If we are to resist and survive these destructive forces, we must recognize that being human is a team sport. In Rushkoff’s own words: “Being social may be the whole point.” Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff shows that when we work together we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can find the others who understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity—together—we can make the world a better place to be human.
Author: Brian Hare Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0399590676 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness “Brilliant, eye-opening, and absolutely inspiring—and a riveting read. Hare and Woods have written the perfect book for our time.”—Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens and co-author of Nudge For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about “evolutionary fitness,” the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. Advancing what they call the “self-domestication theory,” Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and award-winning journalist, shed light on the mysterious leap in human cognition that allowed Homo sapiens to thrive. But this gift for friendliness came at a cost. Just as a mother bear is most dangerous around her cubs, we are at our most dangerous when someone we love is threatened by an “outsider.” The threatening outsider is demoted to sub-human, fair game for our worst instincts. Hare’s groundbreaking research, developed in close coordination with Richard Wrangham and Michael Tomasello, giants in the field of cognitive evolution, reveals that the same traits that make us the most tolerant species on the planet also make us the cruelest. Survival of the Friendliest offers us a new way to look at our cultural as well as cognitive evolution and sends a clear message: In order to survive and even to flourish, we need to expand our definition of who belongs.
Author: Kim Sterelny Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262552787 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 587
Book Description
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. Bradford Books imprint
Author: Christopher Bryant Publisher: ANU Press ISBN: 1760464295 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
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
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Author: Walter D. Koenig
Author: Robert Axelrod
Author: Lee Alan Dugatkin
Author: Nichola Raihani
Author: Walter D. Koenig
Author: Martin Nowak
Author: Douglas Rushkoff
Author: Brian Hare
Author: Kim Sterelny
Author: Christopher Bryant