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Re: Capitalism and XML

• To: Matthew Gertner <matthew.gertner@s...>
• Subject: Re: Capitalism and XML
• From: Francis Norton <francis@r...>
• Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 11:40:00 +0000
• Cc: "'arg@u...'" <arg@u...>, xml-dev@l...
• References: <DC1124C4368AA9438D9DEC34ECB6F162013EB7CD@o...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020311

Matthew Gertner wrote:

>There's an interesting article in the Economist this week
>(http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1045223 -- like
>a good reactionary I read reactionary rags) that points out that purely
>selfish behavior based on this principle can lead to altruistic behavior on
>the macro level. Good news for everyone, I say.
>
Excellent article. Anyone interested in a sociobiological explanation 
for altruism that goes beyond kin-selection to explain the specific 
circumstances where group selection *does* lead to altruism could take a 
look at "Unto Others" by Elliott Sobers and David Sloan Wilson, 
particularly the first half. The criteria are surprisingly simple - you 
need group selection, obviously, to reward the altruism, but you also 
need regular reshuffling of the groups to reduce the opportunity for 
selfish units to squeeze altruistic units out of the group. They 
illustrated this by an example where farms were able to increase 
egg-laying capacity by selecting groups of chickens which chared cages, 
rather than just the individual best layers. Turned out that selecting 
only individuals was selecting those that laid the greatest stress on 
their colleagues - err... I mean cage-mates - so didn't scale up as 
desired...

Francis.

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