Metadata →
- Tags: cooperación estrategia evolución fav homo_sapiens
[!summary]“The Survival of the Friendliest?” discusses human evolution and cooperation, challenging the notion of survival of the fittest and emphasizing the importance of friendliness and prosocial behavior in human evolution. The book argues that cooperation and friendliness have been crucial for human survival and success as a species, leading to complex social networks and strategic cooperation strategies. It delves into the concept of human self-domestication and how changes in the social environment favored prosocial individuals over aggressive ones. Furthermore, the text explores various forms of cooperation such as interdependence, reciprocity, partner choice, and prestige competition, shedding light on the complex and strategic nature of human cooperation and conflict. [!note]
Este artículo sirve mucho para nutrir mi idea sobre las cuatro preguntas de Tinbergen y su relevancia para conceptualizar un caso clínico en psicoterapia.
Highlights
id686352335
the “human self-domestication hypothesis.” According to this hypothesis, changes in our ancestors’ material and social environment created new selection pressures in which aggressive individuals were outcompeted by friendly, prosocial ones - more specifically, by those who were friendly towards fellow “ingroup” members. This process had two important consequences. First, it allowed for immensely powerful forms of communication, coordination, and culture that constitute the secret of our species’ evolutionary success. Second, it produced a set of physical, psychological, and behavioural traits - a “domestication syndrome” - characteristic of domesticated species selected for social tolerance and low aggression.
id686353200
although evolution favours traits that maximise an organism’s fitness, organisms don’t make decisions by calculating the fitness consequences of behaviours. Instead, they act on adaptive drives, motives, emotions, and so on. In other words, the ultimateDarwinian causes of behaviours are different from their immediate (“proximate”) psychological causes.
Esto es una idea muy importante que no es completamente entendida por las personas que tienen una comprensión superficial o limitada de la teoría de la evolución. “Ultimate Darwinian causes are different than psychological ones”.
id686354374
Roughly, natural selection favours traits that maximise an organism’s inclusive fitness. This includes its own reproductive success, but also the reproductive success of kin (i.e., those who share the organism’s genes) as weighted by their degree of genetic relatedness. Inclusive fitness is relative, however. There’s no absolute fitness target, as if any organism that reaches that target will start spawning infinitely. Evolution favours organisms that are the most successful at hoovering up energy to propagate their genes
id686355495
there’s reciprocity (i.e., “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”). Humans trade favours, often in the context of relationships in which mutual trust and sympathy are built up over long periods. Such reciprocity depends on sophisticated cognitive capacities, including the ability to track individuals through time, remember their past behaviours, and delay gratification, which might explain why it’s rare in non-human animals.
id686356086
Consider interdependence. Although often depicted in heartwarming terms, it has a harsh logic. For example, people constantly (albeit often unconsciously) estimate the degree to which they have a stake in the interests of others, and emotions such as empathy closely track such estimations. For this reason, when you don’t depend on others or they threaten your interests, your empathy tends to disappear.
id709838426
Because humans evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation whilst minimising its costs, the social psychology we’ve evolved to navigate such complexity is highly strategic and selective. What might superficially look like indiscriminate friendliness is rooted in subtle psychological processes that track whom one depends on, the benefits of different relationships and alliances, and the degree to which traits and behaviours are socially rewarded
id709839020
Once you understand that natural selection is a competitive process and that organisms cooperate not because cooperation is inherently valuable but because it promotes their fitness-relevant goals, none of this should be surprising.
id709839459
Once you appreciate that human beings are Darwinian organisms and that cooperation is a complex set of strategies deployed to achieve more fundamental evolutionary goals, it becomes clear that this heartwarming story is a gross distortion of human social life