On 22 January 2015 at 17:11, jore <commun...@thoughtmaybe.com> wrote:
> Most built on cooperation and mutual aid. It's what makes life possible. > It is certainly what allows some the "advanced" life of humans and possibly some other mammals to occur but it by no means underlies nature. We are exceptions. Call it what you like but the cleaning fish exploits the hippo for food, the hippo exploits the cleaning fish for parasite removal, the parasites themselves exploit the hippo, and something else eats the cleaning fish. There certainly are symbiotic inter-species relationships in nature but they are rare exceptions. Exceptions are lauded by humans (and by humans alone). Bees pollinate flowering plants in exchange for food, but a million other insect species just want to eat the plants, and would do if the plants didn't devote a large chunk of their physiological resources to filling themselves up with toxins. Cooperation itself didn't evolve for altruistic reasons or to make an ecosystem work or something teleological, it arose because it is more adaptive, ie, a better way for the individual organism to exploit its environment. It is an investment driven by returns. For example, a male fox will bring food to his mate at the lair while she is feeding their offspring. Once she stops lactating, the deal is off. Humans are the supercooperators of the living world but it is still pretty difficult for us: take a look around. Cooperation is a kind of conundrum: it is incredibly powerful (allowing us for example to create the global warming problem) yet it is unstable, inherently at risk of gaming by defectors. A bit of self evaluation reveals it is conditional for all of except a few Buddhist saints. Despite the fact that we have a number of radical adaptations that facilitate cooperation, maintaining cooperation in human societies requires the relentless application of sanctions, threats, rules, culture and training. It is a higher brain function and falls apart quite easily during stress when we tend to revert to lower brain functions. Cooperation is a new and weird evolutionary development. We humans are, relatively, full of biologically weird emotions like love and compassion. Bacteria and reptiles don't have a sense of fairness or an urge to help out. Exploitation wasn't invented by late 20thy century capitalists or wingnut libertarians (admittedly, they may have developed it in the religious direction a little) but it has been the norm of biology for billions of years. Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link