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OUR ANIMAL NATURE IS CHARACTERISED AS MUCH BY CO-OPERATION AS IT IS BY CARNAGE
OUR ANIMAL NATURE IS CHARACTERISED AS MUCH BY CO-OPERATION AS IT IS BY CARNAGE
From the September 10 post:
: Someone said, "Life did not take over the globe by
: combat, but by networking" (by cooperation).
New Scientist 15 September 2009
The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal Review by Marc Bekoff
MANY people have argued that humans are naturally cooperative. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama, Russian zoologist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, neurobiologist James Rilling and psychologist Dacher Keltner, among many others including myself, have all made the case that our animal nature is characterised as much by kindness and collaboration as it is by competition and carnage. Now, the prolific primatologist Frans de Waal joins the fray to convince people that we are not such nasty creatures after all.
mpathy, de Waal explains, is the social glue that holds communities together, and if humans are empathetic animals it is because we have "the backing of a long evolutionary history". "Bonding... is what makes us happiest," he writes, and rapidly accumulating evidence from the behavioural and neural sciences supports the claim.
De Waal, drawing from his own research, focuses on non-human primates. He could have made a more compelling case, however, by discussing the broad spectrum of species in which empathy has been observed. For example, scientists are learning a lot about the evolution of human social behaviour from the social carnivores whose behaviour and social organisation closely resemble that of early hominids and who show high levels of cooperation and empathy. Monkeys, cetaceans, elephants and rodents (rats and mice, at the very least) all exhibit empathy and what we might call moral intelligence.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327256.600-review-the-age-of-empathy-by-frans-de-waal.html
: Lamarck was at the spearpoint of this 'counter-conquest'
: thinking.
The Lamarckian theory centred on the mechanism of inheritance, with the basic premise being that environment influences an organ’s development and characteristics acquired during a lifetime could be passed on to the next generation. It sounds like a sound enough theory but, as seen in Lamarck’s Evolution, both vociferous acclaim and acrimony were to dog the scientist during his life and for the two centuries thereafter.
In his erudite yet highly readable account, Ross Honeywill charts the work of one of the pioneers of modern science as well as the subsequent findings of his successors and detractors. It begins in 18th-century France with Lamarck working against a background of revolutionary fervour, and ends at the beginning of the 21st century, with the validation of his hitherto discredited work. One wouldn’t expect that the claims and repudiations of white-coated boffins would make for spellbinding reading but Lamarck’s travails are a story full of arch enemies, Machiavellian conspiracies and passionate debate. -Thuy On,The Age Book Reviews
: Endosymbiosis allows or explains hyperdimensional
: materialization of forms in substance right out of the
: Quantum Realm in Zero Time Reference (ZTR). This thinking
: is alien to the Darwin we came to know. Giving rise to
: denial of any relevance or linkage to ZTR, Darwinism
: required or guaranteed 'all-or-none' methods including
: administrative violence in quest of the summit of
: dominance. Dominator society has ever sought to extinguish
: the core 'belief' that each being holds the spark of
: ZTR/God.
In 1809, Lamarck had published Philosophie Zoologique, a work in which he anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution. What struck Steele about Lamarck’s theory was that he posited that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime could be genetically passed on to its progeny. At the time, Lamarck’s theories gained many enemies and he died 20 years later: penniless and largely unacknowledged. Fifty years after Philosophie Zoologique, Darwin published On the Origin of Species. While Darwin did acknowledge Lamarck’s contribution, he disagreed with his idea that acquired characteristics could be passed on to the next generation. The ascendancy of Darwinian theory meant that few scientists pursued Lamarck’s ideas with much vigour... However, 200 years after his work was first published, Lamarck’s theories are finding their place. -Mark Rubbo, Readings e-news
Was the origin of the eukaryotic cell an example of quantum evolution?
Biology: An old perspective By Maximo Sandín
Excerpt: The orthodox interpretation of this extraordinary process is that it is a case of phagocytosis (i.e., one "bacteria industry" or "bacteria bank" devouring or assimilating another) conferring a selective advantage , or a case of parasitism (by which one benefits at the other's expense).
From a different perspective, i.e., from outside the paradigm of competition as the driving force of evolution, it can be described as the integration or co-operation of two or more systems, the result of which something more than the sum of its constituent parts: Bacteria are systems, totalities, what physicists call Holons and, although seemingly strange, this integrity ensures their sudden appearance, given that totalities, like quanta in physics, cannot appear gradually.
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