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Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
Recent Minor Posts
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
- Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
- Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Altruism
Brief NYT article on empathy in children
The New York Times “Understanding How Children Develop Empathy“
Posted in A Minor Post, Altruism, Articles, Empathy
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Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
In a recent short opinion piece (Scientific American “Creation, Evolution and Indisputable Facts“), Jacob Tanenbaum argues that selectively rejecting evolutionary biology is dangerous to the scientific culture of America. He rightly points out that our populace does not reject science … Continue reading
Lee Alan Dugatkin blesses Slate with a piece on Kropotkin
Slate “The Russian Anarchist Prince Who Challenged Evolution” I really appreciate the fact that Dugatkin uses Kropotkin to bring to light that Darwinian evolution has been — even in the time and work of Darwin — a process that was … Continue reading
On becoming a psychopath
The Chronicle of Higher Education “Psychopathy’s Double Edge” There are so many fascinating elements to this article and what it says about human behavior. First, there is the fact that most people walk around with a very potent regulatory of … Continue reading
Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
This is from the events calendar of Howard University, where Freeman Dyson gave a talk on October 12, 2012. Just in case this disappears from the web, here is the abstract of his talk: “The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Is it a … Continue reading
What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
CreationRevolution “If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?” It is striking how this reaction lacks any self-consciousness. Research like that referred to in this post is a potential means of understanding how religions and their particular constructed righteousness (in other words … Continue reading
Posted in A Minor Post, Altruism, Cooperation, Creationism, Cultural Evolution, Game Theory, Punishment, Web
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Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
Public Library of Science ONE “Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World” In the race to build the next over-simplified model of cooperative dynamics, it will be interesting to see how the media runs with this one. Is this a “scientists … Continue reading
Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
The Chronicle of Higher Education “To the Trickster Go the Spoils” I really appreciate that Freeman Dyson acknowledges so clearly in this article that the fact that he has found a deceitful solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma does not … Continue reading
Bacterial societies defy selfish gene predictions
MITnews “Weapon-wielding marine microbes may protect populations from foes“
“School of Life” acknowledges the values in religion worth preserving
On Being “Alain de Botton on a School of Life for Atheists” Religion for Atheists What I find very interesting about this philosopher’s approach are his implicit memetic assumptions: that religions have nested within their complex cultural structure extractable “ways of … Continue reading
ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
What was the ‘big news’ at this year’s Ecological Society of America meeting? Given that this meeting is composed of so many different meetings running concurrently, this just might be an impossible question to answer fairly. But for me, this … Continue reading
Posted in A Major Post, Altruism, Biodiversity Loss, Conservation Biology, Cooperation, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Society of America, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Group Selection, Marine Ecosystems, Multilevel Selection, Public Policy, Punishment, Resource Consumption, Social Capital, Sustainability, System Stability, Talks & Seminars, Teaching, Teaching Tools, The Evolution of Sustainable Use
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If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
Last summer I discussed a paper by Rand and Nowak that explored the dynamics of antisocial punishment in groups composed of cooperators, defectors, and loners playing a public goods game. In a conventional public goods game, at least some players … Continue reading
Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
Contrails captured by NASA scientist Louis Ngyyen Global carbon emissions continue to increase, threatening future generations with catastrophic climate change. And while most of the world agrees that something needs to be done to curb our carbon emissions, several decades … Continue reading
Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
Martin Nowak has accomplished a lot for a mid-career scientist. His theoretical work exploring how cooperation evolves has illuminated the importance of a great number of evolutionary mechanisms. He has also been unafraid to tackle real-life problems of cooperation, including … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Kin Selection, Language Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Religion, Superorganisms, Sustainability
Tagged David Sloan Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, Garrett Hardin, JBS Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Martin A. Nowak, Roger Highfield, Supercooperators, William D. Hamilton
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Howard Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
A few weeks ago I posted an aside about Howard Rheingold’s 6-week online course on cooperation theory. One of my questions about the course regarded how to assess Rheingold’s credentials to teach the course: he is not sanctioned by any … Continue reading
Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
This month’s issue of PLoS Computational Biology contained an interesting article entitled “Signalling and the Evolution of Cooperative Foraging in Dynamic Environments“. Authored by Colin J. Torney, Andrew Berdahl, Iain D. Couzin (all of Princeton University), the article seeks to … Continue reading
Rand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
Researchers who study cooperation cannot agree on the role that punishment plays in maintaining the widespread social cooperation observed in nature and human societies. As is true in any scientific discipline, the social experiences of scientists studying cooperation influence their … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Articles, Cooperation, Game Theory, Punishment
Tagged Antisocial Punishment, David G. Rand, Martin A. Nowak, Nature Communications
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Martin Nowak lecture on The Evolution of Cooperation at MIT
I just checked out a lecture given by Martin Nowak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was recently posted on the MIT videos site. The video was recently posted on the MIT site, but it is not entirely clear … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Kin Selection, Mathematics, Multilevel Selection, Psychological Adaptation, Radio & Podcasts, Reciprocity, Talks & Seminars, Web
Tagged Corina Tarnita, Martin A. Nowak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Supercooperators
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“A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a book about recent human history. But for those interested in human evolution, this history is essential reading. The primary idea of the … Continue reading
“The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
I just finished reading Robert Axelrod’s seminal book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation. Although I had read a lot about Axelrod’s work and am quite familiar with the body of literature that it inspired, I had never actually read his … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Behavioral Ecology, Books, Coevolution, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Human Evolution, Individual-based Models, Interdisciplinarity, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Political Science, Public Policy, Reciprocity, Sociology, Spatially Explicit Modeling
Tagged Prisoner's Dilemma, Richard Dawkins, Robert Axelrod
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