'Fittest' means 'friendliest,' not 'most aggressive

[Angry Floof]

Cooperation and compassion are our survival skills, not aggression and competition.

‘Friendliest,’ not fittest, is key to evolutionary survival, scientists argue in book

For humans to continue to evolve successfully, he says, “friendliness is the winning strategy. Social problems require social solutions. The secret to our species’ success is the same as it is with dogs and bonobos. We are the friendliest human species that ever evolved, which has allowed us to outcompete other human species that are now extinct. When that mechanism is turned off, we can become unbelievably cruel. When it is turned on, it allows us to win. We win by cooperation and teamwork. Our uniquely human skills for cooperative communication can be used to solve the hardest social problems.”

 

[Worldtraveller]

Good article. One of the big problems we're facing is decades of negative propaganda vis a vis the Theory of Evolution (due mostly to religious zealotry, in and of itself a major problem) that survival of the fittest = nature is red in tooth and claw.

The irony is that the xians (in the US) who made that claim constantly touted it as a bad thing, while wholeheartedly embracing it.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Cooperation and compassion are our survival skills, not aggression and competition.

‘Friendliest,’ not fittest, is key to evolutionary survival, scientists argue in book

For humans to continue to evolve successfully, he says, “friendliness is the winning strategy. Social problems require social solutions. The secret to our species’ success is the same as it is with dogs and bonobos. We are the friendliest human species that ever evolved, which has allowed us to outcompete other human species that are now extinct. When that mechanism is turned off, we can become unbelievably cruel. When it is turned on, it allows us to win. We win by cooperation and teamwork. Our uniquely human skills for cooperative communication can be used to solve the hardest social problems.”

I call bullshit. The end goal is still domination. The point of Darwinian cooperation is that the sum is greater than it's parts. With specialisation we can utilise more of our gathered energy in beating the competition. Bullies on a school yard are friendly to each other, but their victim might disagree. When France shifted from their soldiers being motivated by selfish greed (ie money and loot for them personally) to love and patriotism for their nation their army swelled and Napoleon set all of Europe on fire. That's Darwinian cooperation in action. But hardly friendliness. The fallout from this "friendliness" was absolute carnage in Europe for more than a decade.

The "it's all about love" and "our true nature is peace" is an unhelpful and self destructive hippie trope. Fitness IS all about beating your enemies. It's just smarter to do it in a group than going at it alone. You'll need to divert less of your resources to building muscles.

 

[southernhybrid]

The article makes sense. Unless we cooperate with each other, we lose. I love the example of dogs. Dogs learned to cooperate with us because it was in their best interest to be friendly. In return for their love and protection, we feed and house them. But, unfortunately, there are too many humans who treat dogs as objects instead of the intelligent, loving creatures that they are. But, I digress.

But, I do agree that in order to survive, it's better to cooperate. Division and war often destroy a society, while cooperation, social programs and such help keep a society together. I think a good example is what happens after a natural disaster. Most of the time, the humans cooperate, share and help each other to survive. This is even true of strangers. One might live in the same neighborhood for years and never get to know many neighbors, but then a natural disaster happens and suddenly everyone is helping each other. I'm not saying that everything is about love and peace, but humans do need to cooperate if survival is the goal.

 

[James Brown]

It's said that Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Perhaps evolution is the same? Two wolves can come together in mutual harmony and brotherhood to vote on what's for dinner. They probably would welcome more wolves into their voting bloc with open paws.

Of course, after dinner, the wolves have nothing left for tomorrow's dinner, but that's a problem for tomorrow. It takes foresight to understand that excessive competition can lead to resource starvation and extinction, but foresight is harder when your stomach is growling.

 

[Angry Floof]

Cooperation and compassion are our survival skills, not aggression and competition.

‘Friendliest,’ not fittest, is key to evolutionary survival, scientists argue in book

For humans to continue to evolve successfully, he says, “friendliness is the winning strategy. Social problems require social solutions. The secret to our species’ success is the same as it is with dogs and bonobos. We are the friendliest human species that ever evolved, which has allowed us to outcompete other human species that are now extinct. When that mechanism is turned off, we can become unbelievably cruel. When it is turned on, it allows us to win. We win by cooperation and teamwork. Our uniquely human skills for cooperative communication can be used to solve the hardest social problems.”

I call bullshit. The end goal is still domination. The point of Darwinian cooperation is that the sum is greater than it's parts. With specialisation we can utilise more of our gathered energy in beating the competition. Bullies on a school yard are friendly to each other, but their victim might disagree. When France shifted from their soldiers being motivated by selfish greed (ie money and loot for them personally) to love and patriotism for their nation their army swelled and Napoleon set all of Europe on fire. That's Darwinian cooperation in action. But hardly friendliness. The fallout from this "friendliness" was absolute carnage in Europe for more than a decade.

The "it's all about love" and "our true nature is peace" is an unhelpful and self destructive hippie trope. Fitness IS all about beating your enemies. It's just smarter to do it in a group than going at it alone. You'll need to divert less of your resources to building muscles.

It's like you don't believe humans can be more mature than posturing baboons, and/or you don't believe that all human beings are one species.

Also, cooperation is a specialization.

 

[Angry Floof]

It's said that Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Perhaps evolution is the same? Two wolves can come together in mutual harmony and brotherhood to vote on what's for dinner. They probably would welcome more wolves into their voting bloc with open paws.

Of course, after dinner, the wolves have nothing left for tomorrow's dinner, but that's a problem for tomorrow. It takes foresight to understand that excessive competition can lead to resource starvation and extinction, but foresight is harder when your stomach is growling.

We are nothing if not plastic. Adaptability is actually our strongest survival trait. Cooperation and the ability to recognize all humans as your own tribe are the traits that are most needed now in this connected, technological information age, an environment that we did not evolve in. But we got here through adaptability, and compassion and cooperation are the means to adapting now.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. We may kill off our entire species and maybe even kill the entire Earth before we go, but life always seems to find a way in nature, and cooperation - taking care of your whole tribe - always seems to find a way in human nature.

 

[Angry Floof]

I think our biggest challenge in the modern world is adapting to a tribe of seven billion after having evolved in small groups over eons. Our brains are highly plastic, but eons of animal brain is a strong influence, especially considering that our ideological world evolved out of those animal impulses and some ideologies specifically hijack the more aggressive, fear based, reactive primal impulses.

 

[Angry Floof]

It's said that Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Perhaps evolution is the same? Two wolves can come together in mutual harmony and brotherhood to vote on what's for dinner. They probably would welcome more wolves into their voting bloc with open paws.

Of course, after dinner, the wolves have nothing left for tomorrow's dinner, but that's a problem for tomorrow. It takes foresight to understand that excessive competition can lead to resource starvation and extinction, but foresight is harder when your stomach is growling.

Foresight, or what some might call maturity, utilizing executive functions over animal brain fear aggression.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I call bullshit. The end goal is still domination. The point of Darwinian cooperation is that the sum is greater than it's parts. With specialisation we can utilise more of our gathered energy in beating the competition. Bullies on a school yard are friendly to each other, but their victim might disagree. When France shifted from their soldiers being motivated by selfish greed (ie money and loot for them personally) to love and patriotism for their nation their army swelled and Napoleon set all of Europe on fire. That's Darwinian cooperation in action. But hardly friendliness. The fallout from this "friendliness" was absolute carnage in Europe for more than a decade.

The "it's all about love" and "our true nature is peace" is an unhelpful and self destructive hippie trope. Fitness IS all about beating your enemies. It's just smarter to do it in a group than going at it alone. You'll need to divert less of your resources to building muscles.

It's like you don't believe humans can be more mature than posturing baboons, and/or you don't believe that all human beings are one species.

The number one enemy for any individual (in all of nature) is members of the same species. Because they're competing for resources in the same niche. Yes, I believe humans are one species. Which is why we keep murdering each other. Essentially we're still the same posturing baboons. We're just more sophisticated about how we do it than other primates. But we're still doing the same thing.

I recommend Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now. He argues that Rousseau got it backwards. The natural state of humans is to be a savage brute, and civilisation and enlightenment is all about preventing us from being our true nature. Which benefits us all. He also argues that modern society is feminised, we've cut the balls off the patriarchy, and that is also to the benefit of the world at large. Which is a fun theory. I think he makes a very compelling case.

In his book, Better Angels or our Nature he writes about the history of violence. Which clearly demonstrates the correlation. Both books are great.

Also, cooperation is a specialization.

Yes, with the end goal of dominating our rivals.

 

[Angry Floof]

The number one enemy for any individual (in all of nature) is members of the same species. Because they're competing for resources in the same niche. Yes, I believe humans are one species. Which is why we keep murdering each other. Essentially we're still the same posturing baboons. We're just more sophisticated about how we do it than other primates. But we're still doing the same thing.

I recommend Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now. He argues that Rousseau got it backwards. The natural state of humans is to be a savage brute, and civilisation and enlightenment is all about preventing us from being our true nature. Which benefits us all. He also argues that modern society is feminised, we've cut the balls off the patriarchy, and that is also to the benefit of the world at large. Which is a fun theory. I think he makes a very compelling case.

In his book, Better Angels or our Nature he writes about the history of violence. Which clearly demonstrates the correlation. Both books are great.

Also, cooperation is a specialization.

Yes, with the end goal of dominating our rivals.

We are nothing if not plastic and adaptable. We are not baboons. We have a brain that can recognize when we are actually in danger and need to be reflexively aggressive and when we are not. We are capable of learning. Negativity bias is another vestigial survival trait that has served us well but doesn't any longer, and also explains why some people only see the negative, the savage brute, and not the peaceful bonobo, not the highly intelligent, complex, adaptable, aware social animals that we are.

The only evidence I see that our primal animal aggression is more significant than our intelligence and sensitivity is negativity bias.

And I just want to note that we are so adaptable in so many constant and subtle ways that right now, if you've read this, your brain has changed in some way. You might choose defensiveness or to assert your intellectual dominance (fueled by the subconscious animal brain urge to dominate that you mention) or your understanding might change in some small way, even if that change occurs later, like a seed that's been planted.

We all operate this way. There is no reason to think that the savage brute in us dominates in any conditions other than real threat. Negativity bias in this overwhelming information age may well excite our animal brain fear aggression and regress all of humanity into violent monkeys, but I doubt that would happen when the vast majority of us are not scared or feeling threatened, coupled with the fact that we are as capable of recognizing when we are actually under threat or just hearing a scary story or seeing scary images, meaning recognizing when our animal brain fear aggression does not need to be activated.

We're capable of fully utilizing our frontal lobes and disengaging animal brain reactions. At some point in our history, we all shit wherever and threw the bones of our dinner wherever. Like every other animal, we develop differently when we don't have other humans to cultivate our behavior, but most of the time we do, and there are seven billion of us cultivating each other's behavior constantly. So there is no reason to believe that that cultivation will take a nose dive into primal fear mentality and remain there. There's no reason to believe that aggression is the stronger influence on our evolution just because it's physical. Peace and pleasure are just as influential if not more so.

I fully acknowledge the possibility that humanity could take a nose dive and devolve into a species of savage brutes, especially given the possibility of global disaster reducing humankind back to a few small groups without the stability and industry of civilization, but barring all that, I see no reason to discount the possibility of continuing to progress toward more peace, less war, more cooperation, less aggression, and brains evolved to handle a tribe of seven billion without engaging animal brain fear reactions, or to think that that is not even more possible given the superior benefits of our friendly nature.

Fear aggression and animal brain urge to dominate are powerful drivers, absolutely. And in our ideological world, they can clearly be hijacked on a national and global scale because of technology. But this state is not sustainable. Survival itself, not so much reason and conscious deliberation or desire for peace, but survival pushes people to abandon fear reactions when reality hits that prejudice will not pay the bills or feed the kids.

 

[skepticalbip]

^ ^ ^

I have to wonder if you really believe this or if you only think you believe it.

Do you, your family, and friends ever lock the doors of your homes?

How many of the homeless have you invited to move into and share your home and food? You have so much and they have nothing.

Do you think nothing of walking alone through the "bad parts" of a city at 1 A.M.?

 

[ruby sparks]

Some co-operation, especially in social species, and especially as regards their own kind and kin, is useful (and in the end, self-serving). Imo competition is still the main requirement for survival in most species. In ours, I wouldn't want to make a call about the proportions, I'd just say it's some of both. And if things ever go pear-shaped, I think the competitive urge will have the upper hand. I think Pinker is right.

It's sad really. It's the way life on earth is and the way we are in response. Even compared to most other apes we are very aggressive (especially the males).

But personally, I try to be the best I can, and I value co-operation, and would encourage and applaud it where possible. And I do believe that things can always be done better and more co-operatively and that people can change and improve, even if to some extent it goes against the grain.

 

[DrZoidberg]

We are nothing if not plastic and adaptable. We are not baboons. We have a brain that can recognize when we are actually in danger and need to be reflexively aggressive and when we are not. We are capable of learning. Negativity bias is another vestigial survival trait that has served us well but doesn't any longer, and also explains why some people only see the negative, the savage brute, and not the peaceful bonobo, not the highly intelligent, complex, adaptable, aware social animals that we are.

Our emotional brains aren't capable of learning other than in a very limited sense. But we can use our rational faculties and create a world that avoids triggering our (stupid) emotional brains and making them do unproductive things. Which is what civilisation is.

Brains being plastic doesn't mean that you can insert the wishful thinking of your choice and make the perfect peaceful human. The USSR was essentially just one massive real life experiment in creating a human like it. It didn't work. Brains being plastic means stuff like that the brain can regain lost functions after a stroke even though the previously dead regions stay dead.

Bonobos aren't any more peaceful than any other primate. That's just old hippie clap trap. It comes from flawed experiments with bonobos in captivity. All it proves is that bonobos are smart enough to know when being violent is a counter productive strategy. But guess how they behave when they can be violent and get away with it? Yes, that's right, they are violent.

The only evidence I see that our primal animal aggression is more significant than our intelligence and sensitivity is negativity bias.

I think you need to explain that. I think your logical chain has parts missing. I can't follow your logic.

And I just want to note that we are so adaptable in so many constant and subtle ways that right now, if you've read this, your brain has changed in some way. You might choose defensiveness or to assert your intellectual dominance (fueled by the subconscious animal brain urge to dominate that you mention) or your understanding might change in some small way, even if that change occurs later, like a seed that's been planted.

We all operate this way. There is no reason to think that the savage brute in us dominates in any conditions other than real threat. Negativity bias in this overwhelming information age may well excite our animal brain fear aggression and regress all of humanity into violent monkeys, but I doubt that would happen when the vast majority of us are not scared or feeling threatened, coupled with the fact that we are as capable of recognizing when we are actually under threat or just hearing a scary story or seeing scary images, meaning recognizing when our animal brain fear aggression does not need to be activated.

We're capable of fully utilizing our frontal lobes and disengaging animal brain reactions. At some point in our history, we all shit wherever and threw the bones of our dinner wherever. Like every other animal, we develop differently when we don't have other humans to cultivate our behavior, but most of the time we do, and there are seven billion of us cultivating each other's behavior constantly. So there is no reason to believe that that cultivation will take a nose dive into primal fear mentality and remain there. There's no reason to believe that aggression is the stronger influence on our evolution just because it's physical. Peace and pleasure are just as influential if not more so.

I fully acknowledge the possibility that humanity could take a nose dive and devolve into a species of savage brutes, especially given the possibility of global disaster reducing humankind back to a few small groups without the stability and industry of civilization, but barring all that, I see no reason to discount the possibility of continuing to progress toward more peace, less war, more cooperation, less aggression, and brains evolved to handle a tribe of seven billion without engaging animal brain fear reactions, or to think that that is not even more possible given the superior benefits of our friendly nature.

Fear aggression and animal brain urge to dominate are powerful drivers, absolutely. And in our ideological world, they can clearly be hijacked on a national and global scale because of technology. But this state is not sustainable. Survival itself, not so much reason and conscious deliberation or desire for peace, but survival pushes people to abandon fear reactions when reality hits that prejudice will not pay the bills or feed the kids.

That cultivated civilised behaviour does take a nosedive whenever the social fabric disentegrates. In war for instance. It goes very quickly. In sociology it's called "anomie". It's been commented on many times by thinkers that civilisation is a fragile thin layer of varnish covering our savage nature. It's interesting how most of us living in a safe part of the world find murder horrifying, yet in wartime it's easy to turn an entire nation into a nation of "murderers" on a dime.

Right now we live in weird times. There's plenty of food to go around. For the first time ever in human history nobody has to go hungry. Some do anyway. Due to war and such. But mostly we're all wrapped up in a blanket of material and mental safety. That's a very weird world. Just a hundred years ago, in most countries, people had very little empathy for the poor and struggling. Life was cheap and not particularly highly valued. That tape can be reversed to the dawn of time and it was always like that. Just the last 30 years homicide rates have plummeted all over the developed world.

Don't make the mistake of seeing our current times as any kind of normality. It's not. So the conclusions you can draw from just looking at how people behave today won't teach you much about how desperate people behave.

 

[ruby sparks]

How many of the homeless have you invited to move into and share your home and food? You have so much and they have nothing.

Human apes don't generally do this. It's quite a big hint as to what the priorities actually are for most of them (us), even when there is enough.

 

[Angry Floof]

OK, show of hands. Who here actually read the article? Or better yet, the book?

 

[skepticalbip]

OK, show of hands. Who here actually read the article?

I read the article and the writer was as mistaken about what Darwin said as those who believe Darwin was talking about the most vicious and strong were the 'fittest'.

The "fittest" are those best adapted to insure their genes are passed on. What determines best adapted varies dependent on many factors. There is no one strategy that insures survivability. Earthworms have found a good survival strategy - they are damned fit.

His example of dogs surviving because they are 'friendly' is a rather blinkered view. The dogs were 'friendly' to their pack which included the specific human group they joined. A major reason for the dogs survival is they teamed with a successful predator species. This predator species found them useful in their hunts and as vicious protectors to ward off 'enemies' whether other humans or other predators. It is like the writer has no clue that people's dogs are damn 'unfriendly' to a strange human who tries to enter the property uninvited.

ETA:
Just thought that the most successful (so 'fittest' in the Darwinian sense) avian species is the chicken. They are spread worldwide. The reason for their success is that humans find them tasty.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I call bullshit. The end goal is still domination. The point of Darwinian cooperation is that the sum is greater than it's parts. With specialisation we can utilise more of our gathered energy in beating the competition. Bullies on a school yard are friendly to each other, but their victim might disagree. When France shifted from their soldiers being motivated by selfish greed (ie money and loot for them personally) to love and patriotism for their nation their army swelled and Napoleon set all of Europe on fire. That's Darwinian cooperation in action. But hardly friendliness. The fallout from this "friendliness" was absolute carnage in Europe for more than a decade.

The "it's all about love" and "our true nature is peace" is an unhelpful and self destructive hippie trope. Fitness IS all about beating your enemies. It's just smarter to do it in a group than going at it alone. You'll need to divert less of your resources to building muscles.

It's like you don't believe humans can be more mature than posturing baboons, and/or you don't believe that all human beings are one species.

Also, cooperation is a specialization.

To be fair, he's not wrong about a sizeable portion of the world population.

 

[Worldtraveller]

^ ^ ^

I have to wonder if you really believe this or if you only think you believe it.

Do you, your family, and friends ever lock the doors of your homes?

How many of the homeless have you invited to move into and share your home and food? You have so much and they have nothing.

Do you think nothing of walking alone through the "bad parts" of a city at 1 A.M.?

What is this fallacy? Straw man? Poisoning the well? Several rolled into a such a short post?

 

[Angry Floof]

OK, show of hands. Who here actually read the article?

I read the article and the writer was as mistaken about what Darwin said as those who believe Darwin was talking about the most vicious and strong were the 'fittest'.

The "fittest" are those best adapted to insure their genes are passed on. What determines best adapted varies dependent on many factors. There is no one strategy that insures survivability.

That is what the article and the book actually say, that many factors contribute to adaptability and that different traits or strategies offer maximum adaptability in different environments. In the human environment, cooperation is the best survival strategy for a tribe of seven billion, not the only and not all by itself without relation to myriad other strategies.

His example of dogs surviving because they are 'friendly' is a rather blinkered view. The dogs were 'friendly' to their pack which included the specific human group they joined. A major reason for the dogs survival is they teamed with a predator species. This predator species found them useful in their hunts and as vicious protectors to ward off 'enemies' whether other humans or other predators.

And thus was formed a friendly, non-threatening, cooperative, largely peaceful relationship, whether it began out of selfish need or not. And the benefit to the survival of both was increased.

The fact is that when everyone does well, everyone does well. Even the most obscenely rich prosper when everyone prospers, or at the very least, virtually everyone's needs are met and so virtually no one is stressed about basic survival.

But negativity bias might be a factor in why people tend to believe aggression and conquest make for the most successful survival strategy even though there doesn't seem to be any more evidence for that than for friendliness being the most successful strategy, maybe even less. Violence and dominance tend to impinge deeply on the nervous system, and that gets the attention of all the brain's defense mechanisms. Now, for the modern human who uses abstract thinking and language in this modern ideological and information environment with a brain that evolved over eons in small groups with no information other than what the senses provided, simply talking about violence can ignite those primal, visceral responses, which hijacks blood flow from the frontal lobes to the older more reactive brain.

No offense, but the responses that deny cooperation as a successful strategy (and possibly the most viable at this particular moment in human history) sound like not much more than, "BUT LOOK AT ALL THE VIOLENCE WE DO AND HOW SELFISH WE ARE. THAT IS THE PROOF." To that I would say the same thing I've been saying for years on all manner of topics: recognize negativity bias and make the conscious effort to seek out the positive. Your animal brain is not going to do that for you, and the world around you is not going to stop bombarding you with negative messages and imagery on all fronts, so you have to do the work of diminishing the effects of negativity bias yourself.