Evolution Will Kill Off Selfish People

[KDR_11k]

I don't think the prisoner's dilemma is the best thing to study here. Yes, cooperation is better than no cooperation if that's just a binary thing but as long as there's a mixture of cooperation and selfishness there is room for parasites (as the plethora of parasitic species on Earth shows).

Among humans even the selfish ones aren't selfish 100% of the time, when a task cannot be done alone they will cooperate even if they will attempt to stab their partners in the back at the end of it if that increases their personal benefits (cf. Capitalism). There are simply many cases where cooperation is beneficial even to a total egoist because his personal gains are greater regardless of what anybody else gets.

A species capable of cooperation is far superior to one that's made up of loners though as evidenced by the success of herd animals like humans over loners like many carnivores. Loners don't need as much food as a society but a society may be able to procure or produce food at a much higher rate than their larger numbers increase their demand. Also a society can fight threats with more force, a lone human may be easy prey but no carnivore can deal with a whole human society.

 

[health-bar]

this claim seems wildly inaccurate but I like the little thought experiment.

if all unselfish people are elimanted, IE: they were all stepped on by the selfish ones, then all you have left eventually are selfish people, like what happens with bacteria and antibiotic immunity.

once the game has only selfish people playing, ratting out the other person actually becomes detrimental, as both would spend the maximum time in prison since they both talked. In light of this fact, the selfish people must adapt and attempt to construct loyalties and shoot for the 1 month plan.

but now we're back to square one as, once again, neither party knows if the other will actually talk.

while I can definitely see how in an increasingly cooperative world, notions of selfishness might prove to be detrimental since the best way to get ahead is if people and nations work together, but there will always be the opportunity to throw someone under the bus to achieve a goal quicker.

As far as i can tell, the only winning move is not to play.

 

[Nurb]

The selfish do the damage then change when it suits them, but are still ahead...

so it's like "trickle down" evolutionary theory. The coopratives are left with the mess to clean up.

 

[gridsleep]

Actually, you can't tell what "evolution" is going to do, nor can anyone else. "Evolution" as it's called, is random mutation of DNA in a constantly changing environment. Since no one can predict precisely how any environment will change (our most super supercomputer can't predict the events in a cubic centimeter of air with any degree of certainty) then neither you nor any team of intellectual dilettantes with a supercomputer can predict the environment in which any suitably large population of DNA driven creatures will need to survive. In a hundred or a thousand years selfishness (and I have read everything Rand wrote so don't get me started on your definition) may well be the ultimate survival trait. For the next five minutes after that. For 250 million years, the hardiest DNA belonged to dinosaurs. Then, in the blink of an eye, which is to say somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 years in the global scale, their DNA was suddenly next to worthless unless you were a turtle, a crocodile, an alligator, a toad or a skink. Mammals and birds are now in favor and have been for well less than half the dinosaurs' span. I, personally (and, really, what other choice do I have?), believe the next superiority in evolution will be raccoons. But, when mammals have lost their environmental advantage, it will probably be the cephalopods' world. Fish always seem to win out, global desert or ice age notwithstanding, since 90% of the worlds' species are located in the ocean anyway. Kind of gives you the idea that the original move to dry land was a bit of a lark and is still being laughed at by those who have been around for over 300 million years, like the shark and the amoeba.

 

[Something Amyss]

My carefully thought out rebuttal to this theory:

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

But seriously, if it was such a short-term strategy, shouldn't it be dead already? Like, this seems like a trait that would have been stamped out with time.

I thought the title said shellfish people...

Shellfish people will rise to power.

I, for one, welcome our new shellfish overlords.

 

[Something Amyss]

The selfish do the damage then change when it suits them, but are still ahead...

so it's like "trickle down" evolutionary theory. The coopratives are left with the mess to clean up.

Well, trickle down economics is a justification of selfish behaviour, so....

 

[gridsleep]

The study and its justification doesn't do much for me, but that picture...

Oh man, that picture. There is only one appropriate response:

[small](Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it)[/small]

agreed, i saw the picture and cringed, i wanted to get that table flip picture but yours is better, fuck i wanna flip that car off a bridge now, fuckin selfish wanker ****, pop their bloody tires, see if they get the picture as to why that happened.

OT: that study is...well, frankly is a bunch of bull, but GAH THAT DAMN PICTURE. GET IT OFF.

Really? Humans fighting for their right to be regimented. The rich controllers have already won because you already think the way they want you to think. "Oh, but we have to cooperate if we are going to get along." "A little revolution is good for the soul." --Thomas Jefferson. The only reason people hate the car parked diagonally in two spaces is because they don't have the balls to dare to do it themselves. It's a slap in the face of your cowardice.

 

[Strazdas]

Wait, everyone is going to die? because everyone is selfish. or have these "scientists" confused selfish with materialistic?

Then again i cued argue that those arent scientists to begin with because they neither use scientific method nor logical reasoning in this one. Then again this being Daily Mail source, they may just made up the story, wouldnt be the first time.

 

[Arawn]

This makes sense only in this particular situation. I mean will this effect people like the guy that parked the car? Doesn't seem like selfishness will fade that quickly. It's just that when it benefits them it's best not to be selfish. The problem is knowing when those moments exist. In the end the title doesn't seem too valid a statement.

 

[kingpocky]

Besides the obvious criticisms of this being a way oversimplified model, It takes to long for evolution to change things significantly. In the next couple centuries tops, society is either going to collapse or go through the singularity. There won't be significant genetic change in the paltry few generations we'll have before then.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

The study and its justification doesn't do much for me, but that picture...

Oh man, that picture. There is only one appropriate response:

[small](Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it)[/small]

agreed, i saw the picture and cringed, i wanted to get that table flip picture but yours is better, fuck i wanna flip that car off a bridge now, fuckin selfish wanker ****, pop their bloody tires, see if they get the picture as to why that happened.

OT: that study is...well, frankly is a bunch of bull, but GAH THAT DAMN PICTURE. GET IT OFF.

Really? Humans fighting for their right to be regimented. The rich controllers have already won because you already think the way they want you to think. "Oh, but we have to cooperate if we are going to get along." "A little revolution is good for the soul." --Thomas Jefferson. The only reason people hate the car parked diagonally in two spaces is because they don't have the balls to dare to do it themselves. It's a slap in the face of your cowardice.

LOL! Not everyone thinks like that silly. I for one get angry when I see a car double parked because I think of that elderly woman I saw struggling to walk further in the parking lot with a walker because some jerk decided to park in a handicap space that was not handicapped. When people are inconsiderate, it affects others. Disliking someone for being rude isn't because they wish to do it themselves, it was the lack of consideration for others than invokes the anger.

It is viewed as being malignant like a cancer to society. Harmful to others because it lacks compassion and understanding. That isn't lacking " balls", lacking balls is seeing the guy get into his double parked car and not telling him what you think of him, or not taking his pic and uploading it to the net for a meme on Jackasses. Maybe more people should do exactly that, and maybe the idiot would begin to grasp why everyone detests him. They sure as hell are not jealous of him. Maybe, just maybe the lightbulb will go off in his head when he realizes no one wants to be him, and they see him as a loser. LMAO!

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

So...This was an experiment to confirm which Richard Dawkins discovered and confirmed? Am I missing something here? The selfish gene theory pretty much covers this topic from top to bottom.

This, and also, I don't think this really works because human society does not kill off anyone.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Ugh.. it's the Daily Mail reporting on science, what did you expect.

But seriously, this is a fantastically outdated, Darwinistic way of thinking about genetics. The survival or breeding potential of individuals is actually kind of irrelevant when it comes to talking about evolution, what's actually important is genes, and since there is no single magic gene which only makes someone a jerk and does nothing else then deciding randomly that being a jerk is an evolutionary bad thing just makes absolutely no sense.

Virtually every genetic disorder exists because genes are not ipso facto "good" or "bad", sickle cell anaemia exists, for example, because the genes which produce it also grant better malaria resistance to a sizable proportion of the world's population.

Now, beyond the fact that I'm extremely skeptical that this kind of human social behaviour can even be theorized as the product of genetics, because it's far too complex and far too directly related to a person's upbringing, I'm not going to rule out the possibility of certain underlying tendencies towards particular ways of thinking. The thing is, if a gene exists in a wide segment of the population, that means it was selected for. It may relate to survival in an environment which no longer exists, but to simply say "oh, this gene is bad and will be deselected" actually makes zero sense. If it's bad, why does it exist?

The only reason any trait exists on any noticable scale in any animal is that the genes which control it are more likely to be passed on than other genes.

 

[Flatfrog]

Besides the obvious criticisms of this being a way oversimplified model, It takes to long for evolution to change things significantly. In the next couple centuries tops, society is either going to collapse or go through the singularity. There won't be significant genetic change in the paltry few generations we'll have before then.

So...This was an experiment to confirm which Richard Dawkins discovered and confirmed? Am I missing something here? The selfish gene theory pretty much covers this topic from top to bottom.

This, and also, I don't think this really works because human society does not kill off anyone.

Evolution works on a cultural level as well as (in human society much more than) a genetic level. Humans adopt survival strategies based on cultural norms and family patterns, as well as through individual rational and emotional decision-making. At all these levels it's quite easy for particular strategies to compete and evolve. Individual norms of selfishness, altruism, racism, tolerance etc translate at a social level to political philosophies such as libertarianism, socialism, free-market capitalism, utilitarianism, feudalism... This is how societies change. Actual genetic evolution lags a long way behind (although through the Baldwin Effect social norms can end up locked into the genome)

It's certainly true that society has undergone some pretty dramatic changes over the past couple of hundred years, in particular in its attitude towards violence, war and human rights. In one way or another that's the result of the differential success of memes for tolerance, law and peacefulness.

Captcha: 'Can't have nice things'. Well, I disagree.

 

[Odbarc]

The problem with this revelation is that 'short term' refers to a decades.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

Ugh.. it's the Daily Mail reporting on science, what did you expect.

But seriously, this is a fantastically outdated, Darwinistic way of thinking about genetics. The survival or breeding potential of individuals is actually kind of irrelevant when it comes to talking about evolution, what's actually important is genes, and since there is no single magic gene which only makes someone a jerk and does something else then deciding randomly that being a jerk is an evolutionary bad thing just makes absolutely no sense.

Virtually every genetic disorder exists because genes are not ipso facto "good" or "bad", sickle cell anaemia exists, for example, because the genes which produce it also grant better malaria resistance to a sizable proportion of the world's population.

Now, beyond the fact that I'm extremely skeptical that this kind of human social behaviour can even be theorized as the product of genetics, because it's far too complex and far too directly related to a person's upbringing, I'm not going to rule out the possibility of certain underlying tendencies towards particular ways of thinking. The thing is, if a gene exists in a wide segment of the population, that means it was selected for. It may relate to survival in an environment which no longer exists, but to simply say "oh, this gene is bad and will be deselected" actually makes zero sense. If it's so bad, why does it exist?

I concur. I don't think people realize that biodiversity is there for a reason. It is called SURVIVAL. The idea of " good genes and bad" is severely outdated. It also should be noted, that simply because that environmental factor those mutations are needed for does not exist currently, does not mean it could not return in the future.

 

[Baron von Blitztank]

Yay! I'm gonna sing The Daily Mail song now...

 

[Terminal Blue]

Evolution works on a cultural level as well as (in human society much more than) a genetic level. Humans adopt survival strategies based on cultural norms and family patterns, as well as through individual rational and emotional decision-making.

Proteins exist in a relatively simple and stable fashion. You can tell where one protein ends and another begins quite easily provided you can see or detect them. Social structures or cultural trends do not work like that, they are not dividable into "units", and they generally do not conform to an overarching narrative of survival.

So it isn't like "This society has selected cultural trait B from the list of options A to C, and family pattern E from the list of options A to F, therefore it's survival metric is 7.6. If it replaced its family pattern with option B then its score would rise to 9.7, therefore it will do so eventually."

"Survival" (at least individual survival) long since ceased to be the goal of human society. We aren't picking options to increase our survival, we're generally picking options according to systems of rationality to which we either conform or resist, and many of these are extremely arbitrary.

Evolution is a great way to explain the clear and defined world of hereditary proteins, but it's a poor way of explaining the extremely murky world of society.

It seems to be a bit of a popular thing at the moment to try and use evolutionary theory as a general model to explain society without having to rely on all those annoying anthropological and social science perspectives. Personally, I'm not a fan.

 

[Flatfrog]

The thing is, if a gene exists in a wide segment of the population, that means it was selected for

(Pedantry alert) Technically, it means it wasn't selected against. Don't forget neutral mutations.

But once again I do want to reiterate my point above - in the context of culture, survival strategies have other means than genetics to evolve. Just because a behaviour isn't genetically coded doesn't mean it can't be tested and selected.

 

[J Tyran]

Its right in a sense, grasses often suffer from sudden and unexplained deaths. You know like stab wounds or gunshots, most criminals would take six months on the chin rather than grass someone up so the whole premise is broken.