Cooperation
edyong | May 24, 2008The prisoner was plucked from a free-living existence and plunged, without trial, into a cell from which it will never leave. It will be provided with food but will have to cater to the needs of its jailer, bereft of its own independence. And yet, this apparent injustice will go unchallenged. No liberal hackles will be raised and no bags of angry letters from Amnesty International will flood the oppressor's mailbox.
For this event did not occur in the world of autocrats and tyrants, but in that of a microscope slide. The captor measures less than a thirtieth of a millimetre across and its…
edyong | May 22, 2008Our bodies are rife with genes and the majority of them aren't even ours. We all have a strong sense of our own individuality, but the truth is that our bodies are hotels for a diverse array of microbes including bacteria and fungi. The numbers are simultaneously creepy and humbling. Tot up all the cells in our bodies and the microbial ones would outnumber our own by a factor of ten. The five feet of our large intestine houses the majority of these microorganisms and contain up to 100 trillion of them.
These single-celled tenants are known as the microbiota and they carry their own sets of…
edyong | May 17, 2008As far as humans are concerned, sexually-transmitted infections are things to avoid. But imagine if these infections didn't cause death and disease, but gave you superpowers instead. It may sound like a bizarre fantasy, but it's just part of life for aphids.
Aphids mostly reproduce without sex, giving rise to many all-female generations that are exact copies (clones) of their parents. They only have sex once in autumn, the only time when mothers give birth to males. Asexual reproduction makes sense for aphid mothers since they pass on all of their genes to their daughters. If they…
edyong | May 10, 2008Imagine that you're walking along a quiet street and you see a wallet lying on the pavement. Would you take it? Now imagine a slightly different situation - the wallet has a red circle drawn around it. While many people would be tempted in the first scenario, almost no one would touch the wallet in the second. The key difference is that the lone wallet was most likely dropped accidentally by a passer-by buy the encircled wallet was clearly placed and marked by someone, who may well still be watching. And there is nothing that keeps people more honest than the presence of a watchman.
Social…
edyong | March 19, 2008Two weeks ago, I wrote about a Science paper which looked at the effects of punishment in different societies across the world. Through a series of fascinating psychological experiments, the paper showed that the ability to punish freeloaders stabilises cooperative behaviour, bringing out the selfless side in people by making things more difficult for cheaters. The paper also showed that 'antisocial punishment', where the punished seek revenge on the punishers, derails the high levels of cooperation that other fairer forms of punishment help to entrench.
Now a new study published in that…
edyong | March 6, 2008
Humans have an extraordinary capacity for selflessness. We often help complete strangers who are unrelated to us, who we may never meet again and who are unlikely to be able to return the favour. More and more, we are being asked to behave in selfless ways to further the common good, not least in the race to tackle climate change.
Given these challenges, it's more important than ever to understand the roots of cooperative behaviour. From an evolutionary point of view, it can be a bit puzzling because any utopic society finds itself vulnerable to slackers, who can prosper at the expense of…