Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Mutual aid ...

... Martin Nowak: a helping hand for evolution.

"The two pillars of evolution are mutation and natural selection: mutation generates diversity, and natural selection chooses the winner. What I want to argue in this book is that, in order to get complexity, there is a third principle, co-operation. It's not just a small phenomenon, it is something that is really needed to explain the world as we see it." Without it, [Nowak] says, we would have a world without multi-cellular creatures – or even without cells, just monomolecular replicators in an organic soup.

This was also Kropotkin's point, I believe.

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