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Carrion Luggage #1088062 added April 26, 2025 at 10:54am
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Competition in Other Places
The article that popped up today is from aeon, and fairly long. But the headline irked me, and I might have a couple of comments on the text, too.
The commitment to collaborate 
Though natural selection favours self-interest, humans are extraordinarily good at cooperating with one another. Why?
"Why?" Well, because "natural selection" doesn't favor "self-interest." That's a pernicious falsehood perpetrated by social Darwinists and Libertarians, in support of an individualist agenda.
No, the driving force in humans and many other species isn't competition, but cooperation. I know I've said this before. Even some things that look like competition still involve cooperation, like a chess match or a sportsball game: at the very least, you agree to follow the same set of rules, and if you don't, you get called out for cheating.
Competition is also a factor, of course, but cooperation builds societies, which offer mutual protection.
Anyway, the article, or at least some selected excerpts from it.
The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves?
Like I said, questionable premise, but still a reasonable question worthy of study.
If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so?
I don't think that's such a profound conundrum. Lots of people do employ deception to reap benefits. Hell, some nonhuman animals do, too (my cats, for example). If they're caught, though, those benefits tend to disappear.
The article proceeds to get into an evolutionary muddle, which, well, I don't even know where to start picking it apart. Maybe I'll just note that at least part of the discussion rests on the old "men hunt / women forage" trope, which has been at least partially debunked.
There's a lot more to it, and I fear a large part of it is pure speculation.
I have spelled out a coevolutionary link between human cooperation and commitment.
No, you haven't. You have made a hypothesis, and supported it to some extent.
But the author does acknowledge a thing I've been saying about evolutionary hypothesizing:
But how can we tell if my account is true or not? One might think that this kind of explanation is rather speculative and unconstrained – it is storytelling. An evolutionary explanation of this sort generally begins with a description of the ancestral state and a purported end state that we want to explain. Here, the end state is modern human cooperation. The explanation given takes a narrative form – the aim is to provide a synthesised description of an evolutionary process by appealing to incremental changes we could have made in response to social or ecological pressures in our environment.
All these "we do x today because our ancestors needed to learn to do it to survive" narratives strike me as just-so stories. Unless there's evidence, we can narrate all we want, and it'll just be a story. To back it up, we need more than just guesswork. Just asserting things like "men hunt / women forage" is an attempt to justify current social roles with an evolutionary narrative, but many of these guesses fall apart on examination.
My hypothesis is that this relationship between expanding cooperation and new forms of commitments is a uniquely human phenomenon and helps to explain the evolution of distinctively human prosociality.
And I'll give credit to the author here: the "hypothesis" aspect is acknowledged. I just didn't want people walking away thinking this was the One Truth about human cooperation. What we know is that cooperation and collaboration is what got us into space, for example—though there was certainly a bit of competition involved, too. |
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