The importance of kindness in scientific work
Nature has a “Career Feature” by Kendall Powell recounting a recent scientific meeting in New Zealand meant to promote the idea of kindness in scientific wor...
All posts tagged with cooperation
Bonobo preferences: dominance over cooperation
An article in Current Biology by Christopher Krupenye and Brian Hare suggests that bonobos may have a social preference for individuals who wear their domina...
Link: Getting students to act like givers instead of takers
Interesting approach to getting students to collaborate in a course, from Adam Grant:
Developing the sharing sense
Following on after yesterday’s post about hunter-gatherer population structure, I ended with the proposal that cooperation may be a “cognitive technology” in...
The chimpanzee males who adopt orphans
The value of long-term field studies: Christophe Boesch and colleagues report on adoption in the Taï Forest chimpanzee study population – where more than 30 ...
Robot genetics
Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller describe experiments that combine genetic algorithms and robots. It’s a review essay rather than a description of new resea...
Evolving swarm bots
Robot swarms programmed with genetic algorithms to “evolve” their behavior:
A Snowdrift game version of hunting
I want to run through some examples of how we can apply game theory to consider hunting decisions in human groups. First, I describe a simple Snowdrift model...
Snowdrift games, cooperation, and "tragedy of the commune"
It’s the second day of June, which means it’s a good time to consider snowdrifts. OK, maybe not – but at least we’re far enough from ...
Disease, pathogens, and collectivism
Sharon Begley in Newsweek reports on a hypothesis about "collectivism" and pathogens:
Cooperation, phenotypic vectors, energy
Burtsev and Turchin (2006) present the results of simulations of cooperative behavior in self-interested agents. This is a well-established subject, and the...