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Old 07-06-2017, 11:44 AM   #5838
troutman
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"Individualism is a much better ideal then collectivism, history has shown that".

That comment caused me to think about The Roots of Human Cooperation. Led me to this blog:

https://evolution-institute.org/focu...n-cooperation/

Members of groups that sustained cooperative strategies for provisioning, child-rearing, sanctioning non-cooperators, defending against hostile neighbors, and truthfully sharing information had significant advantages over members of non-cooperative groups.

In the course of our subsequent history we created novel social and physical environments exhibiting similar, or even greater, benefits of cooperation, among them the division of labor coordinated by market exchange and respect of rights of property, systems of production characterized by increasing returns to scale (irrigated agriculture, modern industry, information systems with network externalities), and warfare. The impressive scope of these modern forms of cooperation was facilitated by the emergence in the last seven millennia of governments capable of enforcing property rights and providing incentives for the self-interested to contribute to common projects.

In the pages that follow we will advance three reasons why these altruistic social preferences supporting cooperation outcompeted unmitigated and amoral self-interest . . .
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