[PEN-L:28403] Re: Humans wired to cooperate

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 23/07/02 09:14 -0400, Diane Monaco :
> NY Times
>
> July 23, 2002
>
> Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate
>
>    By NATALIE ANGIER



>    Scientists have no trouble explaining the evolution of competitive
>    behavior. But the depth and breadth of human altruism, the willingness
>    to forgo immediate personal gain for the long-term common good, far
>    exceeds behaviors seen even in other large-brained highly social
>    species like chimpanzees and dolphins, and it has as such been
>    difficult to understand.



>    Assuming that the urge to cooperate is to some extent innate among
>    humans and reinforced by the brain's feel-good circuitry, the question
>    of why it arose remains unclear. Anthropologists have speculated that
>    it took teamwork for humanity's ancestors to hunt large game or gather
>    difficult plant foods or rear difficult children. So the capacity to
>    cooperate conferred a survival advantage on our forebears.
>
>    Yet as with any other trait, the willingness to abide by the golden
>    rule and to be a good citizen and not cheat and steal from one's
>    neighbors is not uniformly distributed.
>
>    "If we put some C.E.O.'s in here, I'd like to see how they respond,"
>    Dr. Kilts said. "Maybe they wouldn't find a positive social
>    interaction rewarding at all."



The longer "evolutionary psychology" remains in fashion, the less arbitrary
is the overall effect. These subtler experiments use the model to give
attention to features that are not prominent in the linear model of human
ascent favoured at the height of rising capitalist.

The need for cooperation is not at all surprising when you consider, as in
other recent articles, that human beings were probably just as much likely
to be hunted as hunters as the forests retreated in Africa. The great
majority of  humanoid lines in fact died out.

In economic terms one of the most important features of the means of
production is often the role it gives to greater human cooperation. That is
quite consistent with marxism.

That is why there is a contradiction between individualistic CEO's and the
complex cooperative social activity of modern economic enterprises.

That is why even capitalism will have to find ways of controlling their
unpredictable and destabilising behaviour. It is costing billions of
dollars at this moment of time.

Chris Burford

Lodnon