Survival of the Friendliest
nautil.us
nautil.us
He mentions that it isn't new, though. I thought it was a neat observation since it was new to me.
Or "law of the jungle". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_jungle
In the wild, the only creatures that can hunt alone are apex predators, of which there are only a handful in any given ecosystem. Every single other species has to band together to eat and protect themselves.
That we ever thought anything different is just silly.
Despite having the hindsight of history, people still try to apply Darwinian theory to the social realm at almost every chance...the rat race, climbing the social ladder, or pointy-haired managers invoking quotes from _The Art of War_ or some other general even though they haven't been in any real type of physical altercation or conflict
Social insects, pollinating plants, slime molds, pack hunters, etc. It seems to me that the history of life is the history of cooperation as the default state punctuated by selective pressures shocks usually due to a loss of some type of vital resource. Even our smallest functional unit, the cell, is most likely an example of cooperation between the eukaryote and mitochondria. All of our cells cooperating with our microbiome to make us who we are
I've come to the conclusion that humanity's greatest asset over other species is our unparalleled ability to cooperate in large scales societies using collective fictions like religion, justice/virtue, and the corporation to give us the motivation and structure for organization. The cognitive revolution kick started this and led to the agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution Yuval Noah Harari's A Brief History of Humankind is a fantastic read exploring this topic. He also did a MOOC on the same subject, but I don't know if it's still available.
All too often, we are taught in school the great man, big event view of history, like Alexander was some superhuman solely responsible for the creation of his empire (No one ever brings up the biggest, the Mongol Empire).
I don't know why you condemn the Great Man theory while talking about Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan -- two of the clearest-cut examples of how the Great Man theory isn't entirely wrong.
I'm not going to discount Alexander's successes. From all sources, he was very talented, if impulsive, cavalry calendar
Greece's climate and proximity to the coast made it one of the wealthiest areas in the world at the time due to exports of olive oil and wine. This allowed the free citizenry to be outfitted with the finest armor available at the time. That the Hoplites were free citizens, and not slaves, endowed them with a greater amount of morale than a number of other militaries at the time. Also, I believe his father was the one who created the phalanx formation. Put simply, he inherited the greatest fighting force at the time while being extremely well-funded.
The Great Man theory isn't entirely wrong, Napoleon springs to mind as another person who had an outsized influence on history. It's just that much of the history taught in US schools is about singular individuals and dates. They don't really go into the overall conditions of the times and that history is also the result of the decisions of everyday people like you and I
In the wild, the only creatures that
can hunt alone are apex predators
Being incidentally killed in a fight with another animal doesn't make you prey, btw. Prey means you are hunted as part of the diet of another species.
This is a complete perversion of the intent Darwin expressed with the term "survival of the fittest". Here it is conflated with "survival of the strongest", but that is not what Darwin meant. His point was that any species more able to adapt to change, and thus maintain their level of "fitness" to an ecological niche would be dominant.
>For those most invested in the old-school Darwinian view of the survival of the fittest and violence as virtue, then, the message is clear: Just relax.
Reminds me of the Oppenheimer quote:
>It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so
You can't have laws without violence.
Laws can be useful just as a Schelling point, even without any enforcement.
"Billions of years ago, another ancient cyanobacteria was engulfed and “domesticated” by an ancestor of plants. It shed most of the genes it needed for an independent existence and became what we now know as the chloroplast. In return for a safe environment, these chloroplasts performed photosynthesis for their hosts, fueling a new form of life that eventually spread over much of the Earth."
This seems to be talking about the same hypothesis, but I'm not enough of a biologist to be sure.
Let's look at house pets for example - many dogs still exist because of their friendliness towards humans (we feed and shelter them). Same with certain breeds of cats.
I wonder what would happen to this ecosystem if say, humans went extinct someday? It's pretty easy to imagine we'll be the cause of our own demise so any of these animals relying on us to survive would probably go with that, but if we disappeared tomorrow I'd be curious to see how they would survive.
There seems to be evolutionary (fitness?) pressure, helping shape the Communities, software, their norms, etc.
* In areas without proprietary competitors, new proprietary entrants seem to be rare.
* In many areas previously dominated by proprietary software, the Open Source alternatives are now often credible if not preferred.
This evolution of increasing fitness seems to be continuing.
If Open Source Software represents the "mammals" :D of the software ecosystem, what do the walled gardens (app stores, etc) represent?
Which resources are then indirectly consumed by OSS (at least its "free as in beer" variant), acting as a parasite in your analogy :) The money has to ultimately come from somewhere, you know, or the music stops.
What would software devs do if all the oh-so-evil proprietary software disappeared? Exchange FOSS PRs with each other, until they die of hunger?
Not sure. On one hand, the walled garden approach does seem to have some benefits when done well, of drawing in further resources/development.
> Indirectly consumed by OSS
Yeah, that could definitely be the case sometimes too. When OSS Communities use offerings present in these walled gardens (eg Affinity Designer, a good vector graphics app for OSX) to further what they're doing.
Not sure if parasite is correct :), but it seems reasonable there's some interplay between the produce of the walled garden(s) and the external ecosystem.
From the OSS Communities perspective, I'd kind of expect (but am not really sure) that many of the resources used in the walled garden apps come from OSS. eg things like gzip, various other libraries, perhaps graphics (etc).
And as a note, I don't personally believe all proprietary software is oh-so-evil. ;) The companies which develop software choose to act however they do, evil or not. The "evil" is in the actions of the companies, regardless of the OSS-or-not nature. That's just my understanding of things thus far anyway. :D
I think you missed the part where a vital piece of the ecosystem, namely proprietary/non-free software, no longer exists.
> Our evolution has been profoundly influenced by our selection-buffering behaviors. For instance, the appearance of some modern human features appears to be correlated with a rise in energy consumption, linked to the introduction of meat in our diet.
Does buffering ourselves from selection by hunting and eating animals not subject them to more selection?
It is more commonly referred to as the prisoner's dilemma.
This is a strange article, and I'm curious who the author wrote it for. It's certainly not written for biologists familiar with the research she refers to.