Over at TerraDaily News there's an interesting discussion of a British study about cooperation. According to the study they describe, cooperation (as opposed to selfishness) is a successful evolutionary strategy in small groups. While being selfish is advantageous for a specific individuals, groups with more cooperators do better. So you wind up with successful groups of cooperators and unsuccessful groups of backstabbers.
This has two interesting implications.
First, it touches on one of the major difficulties that some people have with the idea of evolution by natural selection: without a Divine creator the world appears to be without any moral order. To them, evolution seems to encourage selfishness and amorality. But this study points up something which they should find reassuring: our common ideas of morality are the result of our evolutionary history.
It also has a less reassuring implication. Evolution favors cooperation within small groups -- the size of a troop of early hominids, say. In large societies, we need other mechanisms to prevent bad behavior. Hence the invention of laws, police, judges, and so forth. Humans seem to have trouble relating to large societies. You can see this in popular culture: the yearning for a bar "where everyone knows your name" or the romanticizing of small town life by people who would hate to live in a small town. We want to be part of a small group because you can trust the others in a small group. We've evolved that way. Unfortunately, we can't live in little close-knit groups any more.
A tip of the hat to Transterrestrial Musings for spotting this interesting article.
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