Everybody, One point of clarification. Altruistic (i.e. group fitness-enhancing behavior that diminishes the actor's fitness) does not have to be "nice" behavior. One of my favorite candidates for altruistic behavior in humans is road rage. A road rager risks his own safety to enforce a norm of driving behavior on somebody who has violated that norm. It doesn't feel like altruism when one is doing it, but it is.
Of course there are other potential explanations of this sort of behavior ... reputation enhancement, etc. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of ?glen? Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2016 8:59 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute But you're assuming that being a member of a team, prevents you from operating as an independent agent. That's just not true. Team membership doesn't redesign the individual from the genes up. It simply changes the context in which the individual behaves. And most team contexts are not as zero-sum constraining as you assume. In fact, most team contexts are enabling, not restrictive. For example, because my team has done things like pave 1000 mile long roads, built airplanes, deliver mail, etc, my individually driven agency is way more powerful than it would have otherwise been. Or, to go back to the article, a forward can be, individually, a much better overall soccer player _because_ of the full backs, not in spite of them. On 10/27/2016 07:46 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > And there are even more occult paths to success without the team, if a larger > solution space is considered to be better, and the same set of people follow > their noses as independent agents. Looking around in a solution space isn't > free. Each experiment takes some time and energy. -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
