Evolution Will Kill Off Selfish People

[NearLifeExperience]

What a poor example in the first paragraph..

What makes you more entitled to the last donut than the person who took it? Ironically, very selfish

 

[crazygameguy4ever]

If anything it seems to me people have gotten more selfish over the decades not less. It looks like evolution really does favor selfishness after all.

 

[M920CAIN]

I was of the opinion that even the nicest person can have a "selfish" moment. What defines a selfish person? the need for more materialistic things? because based on that all Western civilization is selfish, while all Eastern civilization if full of nice people, which obviously is not the case. Whether selfish or unselfish, the world it is what it is because someone always takes charge, making him/her selfish from another's point of view? Does selfish collide with modesty? I can't see how events depicted in this article can be predicted.

 

[TheMatsjo]

Fun study, useful insight, but to take that and claim that selfishness will phase out through evolution is ridiculous, especially because it implies that 'selfishness' is a biologically determined trait (or primarily one).

 

[Abomination]

When I started being more selfish my life started improving... from this alone I believe this "study" to be bunk.

Selfish people will only be 'wiped out' if being selfish had an identifier that was easily recognized. I suppose if society was to start to crumble or something due to capitalism going bust there MIGHT be a Robin Hood style of revolution... but even then it'd be another case of 'winner takes more' and the more selfish will take more.

So we're back to square one.

So once again those who walk the line between being selfish enough to do well and not selfish enough to generate too much attention will do the best.

 

[Psychobabble]

Riddle me this then Batman. If what these these little game theory constructs say is true about human society, then how the fuck do they explain the continuous existence of a small group of social elite assholes who always got the best of everything, usually at the exploitation of a much larger group of disadvantaged peons who's sweat toil and struggle made these bags of dicks the social elite in the first place?

Anyway, cute theory guys, too bad the entire annals of human history prove it to be total and complete bullshit.

I think somebody needs to track these guys down and explain to them that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or the fable about the ant and the grasshopper, weren't documentaries.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

Maybe the Escapist should stop posting science-related news, 99% of the Escapist is as scientific literate as the average reader of the Daily Mail and I'm tired of reading the ignorance-inspired faux rage of the wikipedia-historians and 'so I read this book once that..." people on this forum.

"I DO NOT UNDERSTAND BIOLOGY NOR EVOLUTION, SO THIS ARTICLE ABOUT BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION IS BUNK. HURDHUR"

PS: "Survival of the fittest" does not mean what you think it means.

 

[Do4600]

This would only make sense if every single decision everybody had to make in life was the prisoner's dilemma, over and over and over and over and over again.

 

[Wargamer]

This is correct in nature, not in Humanity.

In nature, pack species survive because of the pack. A group of wolves or lions or whatever can take on and bring down larger prey. Moreover, a lone hunter that is injured is dead; a group might, in theory, look after the wounded member until it recovers.

But Humans don't work by natural selection, save for a few Darwin Award recipients who kindly chose not to have children first. Humans don't need to be strong, or smart, or in any way useful to society to breed. We have built out society around not only protecting the weak, stupid and useless, but permitting their traits to continue in our gene pool.

For this theory to apply to Humanity, we would essentially have to be in a zombie apocalypse. Let's face it, who is going to get saved in that situation? The team players. The group-minded people. The survivors who think "how do we rebuild society?" rather than "how do I survive?"

 

[WarpZone]

So, long story short. Selfish people win in the short term. But in the long term, you'll have the last laugh. After a few millenia have passed, that is.

Source:
Discovery [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2382017/Selfish-people-eventually-die-evolution-favours-cooperation.html]

Permalink

What?

- Okay, first of all, in terms of evolutionary timescales, we breed, live and die in exclusively the very short term, and evolution's effects are only visible in the very long term.

- The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't account for deleting all the individual prisoners and replacing them with brand-new ones each time the test is run. Which is what happens when the occasional selfish person dies before they can breed because they were just THAT selfish.

- The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't account for cultural factors that glorify and glamorize selfish behaviors. These factors are psychological and not at all rational. They do not follow rules of logic! The follow completely arbitrary rules and are not geared towards Winning. Modelling them would look something like "Each round, I have a 75% chance to automatically Cooperate with whichever player currently has the most points, regardless of whether I Forgive them or not." This would NOT result in a more competitive Prisoner. It would, however, more accurately model the effect of our current cultural attitudes and ingrained, instinctive behaviors on future generations of Players.

- Nor does it account for economic systems that greatly favor the selfish. Run an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in which the most successful Prisoner in the short term is allowed to selectively rewrite the rules for Scoring, and you'd see a very different dynamic emerge.

- Breeding among humans can occur or not based on factors other than success. Yes, an extremely rich person can probably have as much sex as they want to, but no, they will not intentionally seek More Pregnancies. The trend seems to be that the richer a society becomes, the higher the birthrate, until they reach a certain point and then it dips below 2 kids per couple and the population starts to shrink.

- A selfish person only needs to be 'successful' one time to knock up another Player. They do not need to be the Most Successful, they just need for any other Player to Forgive them at least once, and bam, they've effected Evolution at least as much as the average family in an industrialized nation.

- I'm a little fuzzy on whether "success" in real life means "breeding before death" or "having access to the resources needed to raise a child well," I.E. Money. The premise of this article seems to conflate these two definitions of "success."

TL; DR: I'm not Evolutionary Biologist who is also a Computer Programmer who is also a Sociologist, but this conclusion seems counter-intuitive given what I know about the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, Evolution, and human behavior.

 

[Malfy]

This same research could have been conducted by playing all the scenarios from Virtue's Last Reward and be done with it.