"But this raises the question: Is some nonhuman software organizing the teamwork of all those nonhuman semi-smart robots, aka bacteria? For this would be the truly radical argument: that bacteria — demonstrably integrated deeply and broadly into the entire planet, shaping its geochemistry, creating substrates and chemical processes that support the development of complex organic molecules, regulating the cycling of energy and nutrients both in “higher” organisms and their environments — constitute a kind of distributed awareness encompassing the whole planet. That not only are bacteria in a given local environment busy texting each other like mad, but the entire planet may consist of a giant Microbial World Wide Web."
Taking a cue from a Spanish hill town, the mayor of Richmond, Calif., is recognizing worker-owned co-ops as a possible path out of the poverty and unemployment that plague her city."
Want community? Resilience Circles are a new type of community support group where members learn, give mutual aid, and participate in local and social action.
"In the variant where participants had some choice over whom they interacted with, though, the amount of co-operation stayed stable as the rounds progressed. When Dr Christakis and his team looked at how the relationships between players were evolving in this third version, they found that connections between two co-operators were much more likely to be maintained than links that involved a defector. Over time, the co-operators accumulated more social connections than the defectors did.
Furthermore, as they were shunned, the defectors began to change their behaviour. A defector’s likelihood of switching to co-operation increased with the number of players who had broken links with him in the previous round. Unlike straightforward tit-for-tat, social retaliation was having a marked effect."
"Humans prefer to work together to solve problems, chimps don’t. From this, I conclude that cooperation and collaboration mark the leading edge of evolutionary progress.
Early in life, human children show that they prefer working cooperatively. Chimps, on the other hand, prefer to go it alone. Even though they share many of the cognitive abilities that enable collaboration, our simian cousins would rather pull themselves up by their own boot straps."
"http://www.ted.com Author Robert Wright explains "non-zero-sumness," a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the "game." Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress -- a move toward empathy -- is our only hope."
"Food co-ops are still the most collaborative of cooperative sectors that I have worked with, and a neat example of the one of the most useful concepts in the Ostrom cannon, that of polycentricity. Polycentricity - the pairing of local control with higher level shared governance and/or services both general and specialized - has only recently evolved in the food co-op sector, although it was contemplated decades earlier. Now with the establishment of the National Cooperative Grocers Association and its uniform supply contract, for example, member co-ops can purchase together as a "virtual chain" from the major national wholesaler providing significant savings. Such a shared purchasing agreement requires, however, that each member effectively guarantee the purchases of the others in order to access the savings. This has necessarily led to some formal standardization of expectations of financial performance of each member , but in keeping with the Ostrom model, these "rules" of performance did not come from some outside rating agency, but rather from the food cooperatives themselves (design principle 3)."
When it benefits them, chimpanzees willingly work together. Otherwise, they can't be bothered. For humans, collaboration is rewarding for its own sake, a behavioral split that may underlie key differences between human and chimpanzee societies.
BOOK: "Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume – linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others – adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous levels of social cooperation. Phonetic competence correspondingly reflects social pressures for vocal imitation, learning, and other forms of social transmission. Distinctively human social and cultural strategies gave rise to the complex syntactical structure of speech. This book, presenting language as a remarkable social adaptation, testifies to the growing influence of evolutionary thinking in contemporary linguistics. It will be welcomed by all those interested in human evolution, evolutionary psychology, linguistic anthropology, and general linguistics."
"The EACH project was founded at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling at Tufts University. Our goal is to explore complexity in evolution through multi-agent modeling (aka object-based parallel or agent-based modeling). Our focus is the Evolution of Altruistic and Cooperative Behavior."
"Social neuroscience is a rapidly growing discipline that examines the relationship between the brain and social behavior. The “social brain hypothesis” posits that, over evolutionary time, living in large, social groups favored the physical growth of brain regions important for social behavior. In non-human primates, some evidence indicates that the size of the amygdala is related to social behavior. Little is known, however, about this relationship in humans. A provocative new study finds that the volume of a key component of the social brain, the amygdala, is directly related to the size and complexity of social networks in adult humans."
"How can we ensure collaboration on the Internet, where populations are highly fluctuating, selfish, and unpredictable? We propose a new algorithmic technique for enabling collaboration in network security games. Our technique, Secure Multiparty Mediation (SMM), improves on past approaches such as tit-for-tat in the following ways: (1) it works even in single round games; (2) it works even when the actions of players are never revealed; (3) it works even in the presence of churn, i.e. players joining and leaving the game."
"Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically—is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it.
Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. In Together he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature."
"In the shadow of the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall St. movement, ordinary people are re-negotiating their terms with big business. They want to spend less, do more, and solve problems together. They are the foundation of the new "sharing economy.""
"Biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22nd. She stood out from her colleagues in that she would have extended evolutionary studies nearly four billion years back in time. Her major work was in cell evolution, in which the great event was the appearance of the eukaryotic, or nucleated, cell — the cell upon which all larger life-forms are based. Nearly forty-five years ago, she argued for its symbiotic origin: that it arose by associations of different kinds of bacteria. Her ideas were generally either ignored or ridiculed when she first proposed them; symbiosis in cell evolution is now considered one of the great scientific breakthroughs."
Nice guys can finish first -- a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that the dynamic nature of social networks, like those found in everyday life, encourages people to be friendlier and more...
"I think you can make a very strong case that the technologies we have created — and the media that we make out of some of those technologies — is, in fact, how humans have evolved. This is, of course, in the realm of theory, but it is not “blue sky” theory."
"But the proposed new interpretation of what causes ants and a few other species to become highly social, to the point of intricate specialization and even self-sacrifice, or altruism, is classic Wilson. “The causative agent,” the authors wrote, “is the advantage of a defensible nest.” Eusocial creatures are driven to cooperate not by their relatedness, in other words, but by the advantages that accrue to any group from the division of labor. As natural circumstance forced individuals to interact, certain cooperative traits became advantageous, and proliferated, in a handful of cases."
(BOOK): "Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been lauded, lambasted, and satirized. Despite unease over its implications for the character (and quality) of knowledge, Wikipedia has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the centuries-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a rich ethnographic portrayal of Wikipedia's historical roots, collaborative culture, and much debated legacy."
Issue of Grassroots Economic Organizing newsletter devoted to Elinor Ostrom and collective action research, practice, and theory: "Overview of the Issue
Most of GEO's readers are practitioners of economic collective action. They may be wondering why GEO is dedicating an entire issue not only to the practice of, but the theory and research of collective action as well.
Well, an important shift is underway in academia and it seems to be building momentum. It is a spreading inter-disciplinary interest in empathy, cooperation, and group-level behavior that seems to be converging in networks both within and outside of university structures. Practitioners of collective action should take heed of these developments. We work mostly in the margins of our political and economic life, and maybe this sea change can become a very empowering resource for making cooperation work more deeply and more broadly than we can even imagine."
"Philosophers of biology often have a very dim view of evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary-psychology bashing has been a successful cottage industry. I have been unimpressed by many of these criticisms, in part because of the feeling that the critics of evolutionary psychology were very poorly informed about what evolutionary psychology was. Imo, many of them simply have no serious acquaintance with the field they are criticizing. But, so far, my reaction was just that: an opinion, a feeling. Not anymore.
In a forthcoming article, Kara Cohen and I have provided support for this impression. using a new tool: quantitative citation analysis. We show that the usual, very negative characterization of evolutionary psychology is largely mistaken, and that philosophers of biology have been fighting a strawman. It is also noteworthy that quantitative citation analysis could be particularly useful for philosophers of science who want to add quantitative tools to their toolbox."
Executives, like most other people, have long believed that human beings are interested only in advancing their material interests.
However, recent research in evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, political science, and experimental economics suggests that people behave far less selfishly than most assume. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have even found neural and, possibly, genetic evidence of a human predisposition to cooperate.
These findings suggest that instead of using controls or carrots and sticks to motivate people, companies should use systems that rely on engagement and a sense of common purpose.
Several levers can help executives build cooperative systems: encouraging communication, ensuring authentic framing, fostering empathy and solidarity, guaranteeing fairness and morality, using rewards and punishments that appeal to intrinsic motivations, relying on reputation and reciprocity, and ensuring flexibility."
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