Monday, June 13, 2011

Proven : Co-operation is key to evolution, not survival of fittest

News: It has been scientifically proven that survival of the most co-operative, rather than of the fittest, is the key to evolution.



http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/supercooperators-the-mathematics-of-evolution,-altruism-and-human-behaviour

Please check out the link - there's a podcast as well as a video you can watch there which gives all the details. Here's the gist:

RSA Keynote

Everyone is familiar with Darwin's revolutionary idea about the survival of the fittest, and most people agree that it works - but Darwin's famous theory has one major chink. If life is about survival of the fittest, then why would we risk our own life to jump into a river to save a stranger?

Some people argue that issues such as charity, fairness, forgiveness and cooperation are evolutionary loose ends, side issues that are of little consequence. But as Harvard's celebrated evolutionary biologist Professor Martin Nowak explains - cooperation is central to the four-billion-year-old puzzle of life.

Cooperation is fundamental to how molecules in the primordial soup crossed the watershed that separates dead chemistry from biochemistry.

Cooperation is the key to understanding why language evolved, an event that is as significant as the evolution of the first primitive organism.

And it goes without saying that cooperation is the reason that people live in towns, villages and cities. Cooperation can even help to explain the spread of cancer cells and the role of punishment in society.

Join Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield at the RSA as they explore the five basic laws of cooperation - Kin Selection, Direct Reciprocity, Indirect Reciprocity, Network Reciprocity and Group Selection - in order to explain some of the most fundamental mechanics beneath everyday life.



If you can connect the dots together fast enough, this development will blow you away. Everything we had accepted so far, will have to be questioned - the major institutions that rule the world today are suddenly exposed to be completely unnecessary to society.

This mathematically (and by now practically too) proven theory gives credible backing to the argument that existing systems of Capitalism, Game Theory, Communism, Big Government - are all flawed, as they assumed "survival of the fittest" was the most basic evolutionary rule, which inevitably led to selfishness.

Even Communism and now the Big Government systems that run major countries of the world today, assume that people aren't capable of co-operating on their own and so need a big-brother government to keep them from destroying themselves. They fool us into thinking that normal won't take care of the underprivileged, so they tax us and then leech it off for their own ends. Did you know that the Indian government

According to them, the concept of people voluntarily co-oerating with each other, loving and caring for one another, shouldn't exist. If their arguments were to be believed (as they unfortunately have so far), then there is just no explanation for the rise and rise of so many movements all across the world today that want to spread good without any selfish motive other than the practical realization that the only way their children will have a happy life is if everybody's children inherit a better world.

"Economists" (rather waste-onomists!) try to justify, and downplay, the existence of all the benevolent voluntary movements across the world as PR tactics, without even addressing the loophole that if their most basic logic (market economics > selfish motive as prime driver of all human activity) was really true, there would not be any Public around to sell the PR to!

Because of this chasm in logic, this conflict between reality and accepted theories, religious institutions had barged in and claimed that all the good stuff in the world arises from religiosity. There was already enough evidence of organized religious institutions and leaders abusing authority for their own ends in the name of religion, of stifling growth, of dividing people, but because of the claims that everything that is good in this world also comes from them, they were able to justify their existence as necessary and essential to civilization.

The scientific proof of co-operation being inherent in all living organisms exposes those claims and so defeats the monetary, the religious and the government institutions in one blow! If good for all is inherent in us all, if we know that any selfish society will self-destruct by natural inevitability and we have the scientific proof to back it, there is no need for having any competitive system, or any external incentives for good behavior or any big brother to watch over.

Rather, if we probe deep enough, it's evident that bad behavior exists today only because of external incentives that reward it - from genocidal governments to reckless traders to repressive religions to terrorists. To prevent terror, they make more terror, to prevent bankruptcy they create more debt, to prevent vice they end up committing more vice and the vicious cirlce widens. If we got rid of our assumptions and accepted co-operation as our natural state, we won't need the institutions that are causing the mess while fooling us all this time that they were protecting us - we don't need their protection as we don't have any enemies in a world where co-operation is key to evolution!

For the nice religious people, I did not target you; it turns out you were on the right path all along! Using this we can once and for all get rid of the extremist elements in your establishments by exposing their double standards. You won't need to follow made-up stories, rather the most basic principles of empathy, love, caring, are enough as they can be proven by simple logic and don't need elaborate setups like heaven and hell and God and Satan. This co-operation theory represents a path for unification of scientific thought and niceness - we will realize that one is the other and we can have both!

No comments:

Gift Economy

Would you like to show your appreciation for this work through a small contribution?
Contribute

(PS: there's no ads or revenue sources of any kind on this blog)

Related Posts with Thumbnails