Why don’t other animals make better use of punishment?
Posted 14 May 2012 / 0Trends in Ecology & Evolution “Punishment and cooperation in nature“
A Minor Post, Articles, Cooperation, PunishmentIs the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?
Posted 07 Jan 2012 / 0Contrails 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 of international talks have provided little progress at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Most famously, the Read More
Altruism, Articles, Climate Change, Cooperation, Economics, Environmental Justice, Ethics, Pollution, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Sustainability, WebMartin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
Posted 03 Nov 2011 / 0Martin 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 questions like “why do we get cancer?” and “how did language evolve?”. Nowak likes to Read More
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, SustainabilityHoward Rheingold TED talk urges a global movement to study cooperation
Posted 21 Oct 2011 / 1A 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 university (although he does call what he does — modestly — “Rheingold U”), and there Read More
Altruism, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Game Theory, Group Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Talks & Seminars, WebHow the right wing co-opts research into the evolution of cooperation
Posted 20 Aug 2011 / 2One of the ways that I keep up with my field these days (inasmuch as that is even possible given the pace of innovation and activity) is by using Google Alerts. For those of you who are not familiar with the service, it allows you to receive updates via e-mail every time that a new Read More
Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Human Evolution, Memetic Fitness, Political Science, Punishment, Reciprocity, Sociology, WebRand and Nowak paper on antisocial punishment in public goods games
Posted 19 Aug 2011 / 2Researchers 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 hypotheses. And looking at the societies that we live in, it is easy to see Read More
Altruism, Articles, Cooperation, Game Theory, PunishmentBarash and Lipton on Bin Laden (and Us)
Posted 10 May 2011 / 0David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton are unafraid of explaining modern social behavior from an evolutionary perspective. As famous communicators of evolutionary psychology, they see in an understanding of biology the promise of explaining humanity. In their latest column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Why We Needed Bin Laden Dead“, Barash and Lipton Read More
Articles, Cooperation, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Nature, Multilevel Selection, Psychological Adaptation, Psychology, Punishment, SociologyFirefighting and the Tragedy of the Commons
Posted 09 Oct 2010 / 0A recent incident in Obion County, Tennessee has gotten national media attention from the likes of MSNBC, NPR, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. A resident of this rural county called 911 when a fire broke out in his yard, but was told that he would not receive a response from the local Read More
Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Film, Television, & Video, MSCI-463, The Evolution of Cooperation, Multilevel Selection, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Web