The Evolution of Cooperation, with Nichola Raihani
On Opinion
English - June 16, 2021 09:43 - 51 minutes - 70.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 9 ratingsSociety & Culture News Politics opinion civil discourse parlia polarization turi munthe debate psychology encyclopedia of opinion conversation democracy Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
S2 E23: The Evolution of Cooperation“Every multicellular being is a collective that operates as a whole - the individual is an ‘invention’ of evolution”
Cooperation is at work up everywhere - from our ‘selfish’ genes working together in the genome, through to the democratic societies that regulate our collaboration.
Cooperation is what distinguishes us most strikingly from our evolutionary cousin, the Chimpanzee. It is what allowed us safely to descend from the tree canopy into the savannah. It is what defended us from tyrants, helped us build agrarian societies, and forms the basis of our sense of justice and morality.
But cooperation has a dark side: we collaborate to better compete. How we regulate that dark force is key to our survival.
“Collaboration is the essential ingredient of and largest threat to our success”Listen to Nichola explain:
The biological evolution of cooperation in humansHow we compare with other great collaborators: bees, ants and birdsThe evolution of society: from egalitarian to feudal to democraticWhy loneliness is physiologically harmfulWhen cooperation becomes murderousWhy evolution gave us the Tragedy of the CommonsHow the invention of Institutions changes the rules of the evolutionary gameWorks cited include:
Christopher Boehm’s Reverse Dominance HierarchyPeter Turchin and his Z-CurveRichard Dawkins’ Selfish GeneRead the Full Transcript
Nichola Raihani is a professor in Evolution and Behaviour at UCL, where she leads the Social Evolution and Behaviour Lab. She is the author of The Social Instinct: how cooperation shaped the world
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