28 March 2006

Survival of the Fittest v Altruism

Evolution

The story of man

Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Modern Darwinism paints a more flattering portrait of humanity than traditionalists might suppose

...

Modern Darwinism's big breakthrough was the identification of the central role of trust in human evolution. People who are related collaborate on the basis of nepotism. It takes outrageous profit or provocation for someone to do down a relative with whom they share a lot of genes. Trust, though, allows the unrelated to collaborate, by keeping score of who does what when, and punishing cheats.

Very few animals can manage this. Indeed, outside the primates, only vampire bats have been shown to trust non-relatives routinely...

http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5327621

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