Survival of the kindest

[japple]

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/12/08_survival_of_kindest.shtml

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

Contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

They call it "survival of the kindest."

[OneGrassRoot]

1. Ooooh, I LOVE that!

Thank you so very, very much for sharing that, japple.

Survival of the kindest.

Indeed.

:hug:

:grouphug:

[bigmonkey]

2. Mean behavior is news because we expect kind behavior.

On the whole, people treat each other well, an overwhelming amount of the time.

[OneGrassRoot]

3. You know what's funny?

Maybe my perspective is warped, but I think both kind and mean behavior is newsworthy these days.

Lack of interaction...isolation...seems to be the norm. So both kindness and mean behavior seems to make the news; of course, mean behavior is louder and harsh and seems to command more attention but more and more sites are devoted to "good news."

:hi:

[bigmonkey]

4. You're right, but I've always thought that kind behavior is underreported.

:-) I've always thought that the MSM uses that kind of reporting in response to folks criticizing them for not reporting the "good news".

Maybe you're right, though, that increased isolation is making people more interested in stories about positive interactions.

[Fire Walk With Me]

5. The MSM have to promote fear and outrage in order to "sell" their product.

Others are noticing what you have noticed and what this thread is saying, and it will happily increase. People who help others will gain more airtime, as will projects with similar aims. Feel-good news will gradually increase, watch for a trend.

[Ricochet21]

6. Awesome nt

[villager]

7. So rightwingers hate evolution -- because evolution selects against them!?

n/t

[Manifestor_of_Light]

8. i make a point of making the clerks laugh at Walmart.

Before you get on my case for shopping there, I live in a town with no grocery store and I have to drive 20 miles to get to Walmart or a Kroger. There are no other choices.

I always say to the checker "Don't work too hard! It's a wild night in the big city!"
The 'big city' has 20,000 people.

I think 'survival of the fittest' is simplistic. Back in the 1970s I was earning a biology degree and the hot topic was sociobiology. Even then I think biologists realized that because of diversity of effort and tasks among people, cooperation was necessary to survive.

[get the red out]

9. We wouldn't be alive if we didn't work together

I believe it took patriarchal religion to put people in the frame of mind to consider power over another and one against the other as superior to cooperation. War became an industry where the guys at the top sent other people out to die stealing from hard working communities declared the "enemy". Now the weapons are bigger but the concepts haven't changed one bit. I don't think this is "natural", an abberation because we got big enough brains for someone to make this scheme up? Maybe. A result of the intervention of "gods" with a small "g" from the sky? Maybe again.

Perhaps actual "salvation" is getting back to our natural values and sticking to them?

[Mist]

10. I think there's a definate asymmetrical thing with the human race. I think SOME people are

very much the "survival of the fittest--dog eat dog" type (Darth Cheney, for example). The rest of us are more co-operative and sharing. I think the "dog-eat-dog" types are actually in the minority.