--- Robin Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "Let me propose a signaling story...."
Perhaps it is an evolutionary artifact: dominance hierarchies are established when young, and children are just doing what evolution has hard wired in their brains. So rather than asking why children don't cooperate as well as adults, we should be asking why do adults cooperate as well as they do? Possible answers: It takes that long to overcome evolutionary hard wiring (consider how violently adults of other species compete), or any of the economic models for cooperation that one favors, or something else clever that I can't think of. Considering that if you look a dominant macaque in the eyes he'll jump on your head and rip your face off, perhaps child social behavior better represents the null hypothesis (so to speak) and adult cooperation represents the break from "nature" that needs to be explained. Best regards, jsh ===== "...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong." -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
