David McGavock's List: Cooperation

• employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter work in semiautonomous teams, usually made up of experts from each department: design, programming, marketing, etc.
• How are conflicts resolved?
• Zuckerberg engages in the conversation and offers his perspective.
• "Twitter's growing really quickly, and something that allowed us to do so much with so few people early on was this culture of trust, where you knew people around you were smart and had the best of intentions," Mark Trammell,
• "TeamTeam," a forum for employees to gather around common interests.
• Trammell spends roughly 10 percent of his time helping his colleagues build personal relationships around "things that people are passionate about."

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• Psychologists have long known that commonality is an underestimated force in social interactions.
• Banter about similarities, however superficial or unrelated to business, dramatically increases trust and the likelihood of successful negotiation.
• The key, he says, is "the people."
• iTune's top podcaster, comedian Adam Carolla, hosts his competitors' radio shows for free - much to the chagrin of his corporate affiliates.

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• In a hard-knuckled, free-market economy built on competition, the most successful Internet companies put a high stake in another value: cooperation.
• Friendly competition is the explanation often given for the unique success of Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Google, Twitter and Facebook.
• Across the Internet industry, the most successful organizations compete by cooperating.
• Search giant Google dedicates a team of engineers to help users "move their data in and out of Google products," as the company puts it, free of charge and in a format that can be easily uploaded to competitors' Web sites.

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• Learning is social. Business is social. People are social. So why are so many of the forays into learning technology anti-social?
• Learning is a uniquely human experience. Most of our pitiful attempts to enhance learning with technology have been focused on the technology, not on the social or collaborative aspects that make it successful ultimately.
• personalized suggestions to users.
• personal goals and aspirations
• spaced reinforcement.
• collaborative filtering to suggest new areas of interest
• let’s use technology to help them collaborate.
• put you in touch with other people studying the same material online no matter where they were.
• Two kids per computer make for a more effective learning experience.
• meetings in Second Life.
• Most of the bad behavior on the open internet is perpetrated by anonymous spammers, trouble-makers, and outright crooks who cloak their identities.
• My gut tells me we are on the cusp of an amazingly great era.

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• 16 years ago, a UNESCO world commission came up with a blue-print of Education For the 21st Century. It was headed by J. Delors, a former prime minister of France and included 12 outstanding education leaders and experts from all over the world.
• (1) Learning to Know----(fomal/informal education) (2) Learning to do—(skills) (3) Learning to Live Together-----and Learning to Be-----(self-realization)

• The report also spoke about 7 over-arching tensions, these being:

  1.    The tension between the global and the local.

  2.    The tension between the universal and the individual.

  3.    The tension between tradition and modernity.

  4.    The tension between long term and short term considerations.

  5.    The tension between competition and concern for equality of opportunity.

  6.    The tension between expansion of knowledge and our capacity to assimilate it.

  7.    The tension between the spiritual and the material.
• in the present day and age, crucial that we addressed the need to learn about other people, their history and cultures and thus by “recognizing interdependence as well as the risks and challenges involved, we will be able to develop more effective solutions to manage and minimize conflicts
• proposed the promotion of citizenship values, respect for others’ cultures, appreciation of differences, creating awareness of commonalities leading to resolving conflicts through dialogues and working peace and development.
• He made a spirited plea for making concerted efforts to ensure that Learning To Live Together (LTLT) is universally accepted as an educational response to resolving of differences and conflicts.
• Pakistan today is a frightfully faction-and-conflict-ridden society. We have to reckon with a daily toll of a number of innocent lives all over the country.
• More than perhaps, any other country, Pakistan needs to take up without delay, besides other necessary measures, well-devised educational programmes aimed at imparting the art and strategies of Learning To Live Together

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• This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena -- the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational "loops" that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.
• Bacteria were here first and are with us still, comprising a major part of the biosphere.  They are unseen with the naked eye, they lack nuclei (for this reason, they are called prokaryotes -- "pro" = before,  "karyon" = nucleus). Their forms were legion and their metabolisms were (and continue to be) strange.
• What is known is that the spirochete didn't digest the thermoplasmid and the thermoplasmid did not digest the spirochete.  As Margulis was fond of saying, "1 + 1 = 1."  There was a union of the two, resulting in an entirely new being.  They were inseparable, literally.  The thermoplasmid had a rotor now, and the spirochete had a "head".
• Margulis, inspired by the work of little-known biologists, revealed and proved these mergers for us.  At first, her worked was rejected and scoffed at.  It did not fit the still-dominant neo-Darwinian paradigm that tells us all evolutionary novelty comes from natural selection acting on genes and the gradual accumulation of random genetic mutation.  But eventually these symbioses were accepted because they could not be ignored
• our physical selves are universes composed of the movemenst, biological agreements, and interactions of these beings.
• "Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves..." Margulis once stated, with her colleague Ricardo Guerrero.
• After she found James Lovelock, they worked on making those processes known.  Their collaboration resulted in Gaia Theory, which was a disciplinary symbiosis -- the theoretical expression of Margulis's interdisciplinary life.
• Gaia is the work of the relational loops of push and pull between bacteria, other organisms, and the environment
• But Lovelock came up with an understandable and accesible metaphor in the form of a computer program called Daisyworld.  Daisyworld is not the "proof" of Gaia: Lovelock and his colleague Andrew Watson devised the program to see if living and environmental factors could theoretically interact without intention. 
• "Gaia," Margulis's former student Greg Hinkle said, "is just symbiosis as seen from space."
• Gaia processes are real and observable (and sometimes referred to as "biogeochemistry", a term more acceptable to mainstream science).  Furthermore, the five kingdoms (bacteria, protoctists, fungi, plants, animals) of life are all touched by symbiosis
• Indeed, symbiogenesis has been observed in the lab.  An amoeba population, accidentally infected with bacteria was observed over long periods of time, and soon enough, the infecting bacteria could not be removed from the infected amoeba without killing the organism. 
• All animals have symbiotic partners in their guts.  Remove these symbionts and the animals die.
• Microcosmos show us a bacterial view of the world.  Bacteria exchange their genes laterally.  This means they don't pass their genomic information only when they reproduce (though this can happen), but also  through their simple existence.
• Along with the many detailed examples of bacterial mergers at varying levels of cellular complexity, the world revealed by Acquiring Genomes is also a world of mating between distinct phyla
• What is definite is that the merging of beings is key, and symbiogenesis offers a clearly observable alternative to the consistent but woefully incomplete neo-Darwinian paradigm.
• David Bohm, who said
• "Science is the search for truth...whether we like it or not."
• Many neo-Darwinist concerns circled nervously around words like "Gaia" and "cooperation" (which Margulis did not like to use).  They were, perhaps rightly, concerned that these terms were ripe for religious appropriation.  But Margulis herself was outspoken against such mishandling of her research. 

  • Cooperation - not God - meets Gaia
• it's much more complex than that -- there is something "in it" for every symbiont,
• "Gaia is not merely an organism."  The Earth is beyond stale conception.  It is more magnificent and active than we can imagine.  Gaia is object and process.
• If Gaia is conscious, it possesses a consciousness of a different magnitude, probably of a different order all together.
• this complexity is impossible to incorporate in a linear and reductive understanding.

  • This is a question that I often wonder - how different thinkers (using different modes of understanding) come to different conclusions. 
    
    What is it that separates the linear (reductive) thinker from the holistic (systemic) thinker?
• To encompass complex systems with our thinking, we must imagine a model that is less like "cause-effect" more like "being-manifestation."  That is, multiple layers and numerous agents of forces unconsciously conspire together, and their conspiring is so intermingled, that it is simultaneously cause and effect, and thus beyond both. 

  • This is true in my experience. Effects are not formulaic or easily quantified in an additive way. Like an idea or concept we formulate. It doesn't arise from reading x, y and z. In between there are unconscious musings, sleep, dreaming, discussions, contemplations. Out of this "soup" arise "the idea". This is being born out by neuroscience.
• Dawkins, who claims to be an atheist, relies on a host of selfish angels within us and the possibility for meme-salvation to justify his theory.  He substantiates his magical worldview on a meager past of scientific work.
• Perhaps as we -- in the newly and deeply connected world of the internet, social profiles, and globalization -- witness the dissolution of the cult of isolated individuality and embark on understanding a clearer and more nuanced view of individuality, so to will we ready ourselves for a clearer view of evolution and life.

  • This is a good question; how does this connected world reframe our conception of ourselves as individuals? Can we, at once, become humbled while we contribute? Can we imagine ourselves as less important while we excel in our pursuits?
• Now that Margulis has died, it remains our choice to catch up with what she and her life's work have set in motion.  To do so, we must bring together the many fields of knowledge she embodied.  Biologists must talk to physicists, virologists must talk to geologists, cosmologists must talk to microbiologists, and scientists musty talk to non-scientists.  This motion of meeting and exchanging ideas, if we act with it, will evolve our thinking.

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• To find a good strategy to use in such situations, I invited experts in

   

  game theory to submit programs for a computer Prisoner’s Dilemma

   

  tournament – much like a computer chess tournament.
• the winner was the simplest of all candidates sub-

   

  mitted. This was a strategy of simple reciprocity which cooperates on the

   

  first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous

   

  move. Using an American colloquial phrase, this strategy was named Tit

   

  for Tat.
• data from these tournaments reveals four properties

   

  which tend to make a strategy successful: avoidance of unnecessary con-

   

  flict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the
• face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding

   

  to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can

   

  recognize and adapt to your pattern of action.
• What made this mutual restraint possible was the static nature of trench

   

  warfare, where the same small units faced each other for extended periods

   

  of time. The soldiers of these opposing small units actually violated orders

   

  from their own high commands in order to achieve tacit cooperation with

   

  each other
• • These conditions are core.
• the individuals involved do not have to be rational: The evolutionary

   

  process allows successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not

   

  know why or how. Nor do they have to exchange messages or commit-

   

  ments: They do not need words, because their deeds speak for them.

   

  Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: The use of

   

  reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not

   

  needed: Successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist.

   

  Finally, no central authority is needed: Cooperation based on reciprocity

   

  can be self-policing
• An indefinite number of interactions, therefore, is a condition under

   

  which cooperation can emerge

  • This condition is especially important in the case of egoists. Relationship over time.
• So there must be some clustering of individuals who use

   

  strategies with two properties: The strategy cooperates on the first move,

   

  and discriminates between those who respond to the cooperation and those

   

  who do not

  • The check for reciprocation is a bit of evidence that the other side knows the value of the move of cooperation; that they won't be abandoned.
• The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the

   

  relationship.
• Whether the

   

  players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether

   

  the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with

   

  each other
• It turns out that if one waits to respond

   

  to uncalled-for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The

   

  longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that

   

  the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay.

  • Immediate feedback appears to be important in many domains.
• Waiting for probes to accumulate only risks the need for a

   

  response so large as to evoke yet more trouble.

  • I have found that testing limits is a factor in working with children and adults. We are alert to the boundaries.
• For

   

  this reason, the only arms control agreements which can be stable are those

   

  whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is

   

  that violations can be detected before they can accumulate
• Therefore, the advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve

   

  as good advice to national leaders as well: Don’t be envious, don’t be the

   

  first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don’t be too

   

  clever.
• We are used to thinking

   

  about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as

   

  football or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range of

   

  situations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual

   

  defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in

   

  eliciting their cooperation

  • Herein lies another key... that we have a cooperative (win-win) attitude and understanding of the "game". We see our survival as tied with not exclusive of the fate of the "other".

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• Symbiotic relationship[edit]

   

  Rhizobia are unique in that they are the only nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in a symbiotic relationship with legumes. Common crop and forage legumes are peas, beans, clover, and soy.
• The symbiotic relationship implies a signal exchange between both partners that leads to mutual recognition and development of symbiotic structures.
• The legume–rhizobium symbiosis is a classic example of mutualism—rhizobia supply ammonia or amino acids to the plant and in return receive organic acids (principally as the dicarboxylic acids malate and succinate) as a carbon and energy source—but its evolutionary persistence is actually somewhat surprising.
• There are two competing hypotheses for the mechanism that maintains legume-rhizobium symbiosis (though both may occur in nature). The sanctions hypothesis suggests the plants police cheating rhizobia. Sanctions could take the form of reduced nodule growth, early nodule death, decreased carbon supply to nodules, or reduced oxygen supply to nodules that fix less nitrogen.^[7] The partner choice hypothesis proposes that the plant uses prenodulation signals from the rhizobia to decide whether to allow nodulation, and chooses only noncheating rhizobia.

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• Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent and architecture of this network through the use of new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree’s roots from another. He has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees.
• He has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees.
• Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker, a recent undergraduate student in Forestry, found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees.

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• The worms require the mosquito as an intermediate stage to complete their life cycles.

• The period between the initial infection when the dog is bitten by a mosquito and the maturation of the worms into adults living in the heart takes six to seven months in dogs and is known as the "prepatent period".

   
• they migrate to the muscles of the chest and abdomen, and 45 to 60 days after infection, molt to the fifth stage (L₅, immature adult). Between 75 and 120 days after infection, these immature heartworms then enter the bloodstream and are carried through the heart to reside in the pulmonary artery.
• By seven months after infection, the adult worms have mated and the females begin giving birth to live young, called microfilariae.
• circulate in the bloodstream for as long as two years, waiting for the next stage in their life cycles in the gut of a bloodsucking mosquito. When ingested by a mosquito, the microfilariae undergo a series of molts to the infective third larval stage, and then migrate to the salivary glands of the mosquito, where they wait to infect another host.
• Dogs show no indication of heartworm infection during the six-month prepatent period prior to the worms' maturation, and current diagnostic tests for the presence of microfilariae or antigens cannot detect prepatent infections.
• Many dogs will show little or no sign of infection even after the worms become adults. These animals usually have only a light infection and live a fairly sedentary lifestyle. However, active dogs and those with heavier infections may show the classic signs of heartworm disease. Early signs include a cough, especially on exercise and early exhaustion upon exercise. In the most advanced cases where many adult worms have built up in the heart without treatment, signs progress to severe weight loss, fainting, coughing up blood and, finally, congestive heart failure.
• The currently approved drug in the US, melarsomine dihydrochloride, is marketed under the brand name Immiticide.^[15]
• After treatment, the dog must rest (restricted exercise) for several weeks so as to give its body sufficient time to absorb the dead worms without ill effect.
• Surgical removal of the adult heartworms as a treatment also may be indicated, especially in advanced cases with substantial heart involvement.^[16]
• Long-term monthly administration of ivermectin year-round at three times the dose normally used for heartworm prevention (see "Prevention") will eventually kill adult heartworms.

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• Symbiosis includes predation and parasitism as well as mutualism - partnerships that involve tough bargains and hard compromises in which the continuing survival of participating organisms is at stake.

  • My Dog Beau has heartworm. The parasite lives, grows and breeds inside him.
• cooperative symbiotic arrangements are not only essential, but appear to have been necessary for driving evolution at the pace it has unfolded on earth.
• The roots of many species of trees host fungi that in turn create hospitable environments for bacteria that are capable of fixing nitrogen in the soil in a form useful to the trees. The trees, fungi, and bacteria create environmental conditions, through their specialized capacities, that encourage one another's growth; instead of competing for a scarce resource, these different kinds of organisms work together to produce it in abundance.
• James Lovelock to propose the Gaia Hypothesis - that life on earth is a vast and complex, self-regulating, superorganism, in which the separate parts cooperate in order to maintain an environment supportive of their existence and evolution.

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• Synergy, "the combined or cooperative effects produced by the relationships among various forces, particles, elements, parts, or individuals in a given context – effects that are not otherwise possible,"
• survival advantages on the human groups that use them that social-cultural change happens far more quickly than it would through Darwinian evolution.
• the payoff for cooperation for a group is high enough to overcome the individual resistance and other barriers to bringing the elements together.
• William E. Hamilton's papers on "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior" in 1964 formalized the neo-Darwinian explanation of altruistic behavior as conferring benefits on close kin,
• Robert Trivers' 1964 "Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" decoupled kinship, cooperation, and altruism by offering evidence that the helping organism acts with the assumption that low-cost, low-risk assistance to another now will be repaid later – reciprocity.
• Corning objects to inclusive fitness theory, reciprocal altruism, tit-for-tat as adequate explanatory frameworks because they exclude interactions that provide synergistic combined effects and are self-policing because they are interdependent
• Corning claims "The intellectual fascination of the Prisoner's Dilemma game may have led us to overestimate its evolutionary importance."

  • Key objection to fascination with "Prisoner's Dilemma"
• Corning lists "five maybe six distinct paths to cooperation and complexity in evolution:" altruism, reciprocity, functional interdependence, mutualism, and parasitism.
• Corning agrees with Jared Diamond that the emergence of agricultural civilization, empires, and wars of conquest in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago was due to what Diamond himself called a "package" of ecological circumstances and cultural inventions that worked together synergistically:
• As a result, ten to one hundred times more people can be fed from one acre than from hunting-gathering, and a settled lifestyle permitted a reduction of the spacing of births from a four year separation among nomads to two years, leading to rapid population growth.
• The Igorot people of the remote mountains of Luzon, in the Philippines, use a vast, elaborate, intricately constructed combination of terraces, dams, canals, and ponds to grow rice sustainably and with remarkable efficiency
• In order to use and maintain this new, complex technological and ecological system the former slash-and-burn lowlanders had to invent a new social and political system involving the disciplined coordination of many family groups.
• Work by Gintis, Bowles, Fehr and Gächter indicate that strong reciprocity among humans is egoistic, not altruistic or cooperative, and depends on aggressive punishment of cheaters.

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• It's a question people have asked for as long as there have been people: are human beings inherently good? Are we born with a sense of morality or do we arrive blank slates, waiting for the world to teach us right from wrong? Or could it be worse: do we start out nasty, selfish devils, who need our parents, teachers, and religions to whip us into shape?
• The philosopher Rousseau considered babies "perfect idiots...Knowing nothing,"
• for most of its history, her field agreed.
• discovered seemingly simple ways to probe what's really going on in those adorable little heads.
• Babies, even at three months, looked towards the nice character and looked hardly at all, much, much, much shorter times, towards the unhelpful character.

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• Study after study after study, the results are always consistently babies feeling positively towards helpful individuals in the world. And disapproving, disliking, maybe condemning individuals who are antisocial towards others.
• first published their findings about baby morality in the journal "Nature" in 2007, and they've continued to publish follow-up studies in other peer-reviewed journals ever since
• babies seem to view the ball thief "as deserving punishment."
• do you think that babies, therefore, are born with an innate sense of justice?
• What seems to be an ignorant and unknowing baby is actually a creature with this alarming sophistication,
• What we're finding in the baby lab, is that there's more to it than that -- that there's a universal moral core that all humans share. The seeds of our understanding of justice, our understanding of right and wrong, are part of our biological nature.

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• From this Wynn concludes that infants prefer those "who harm... others" who are unlike them.
• We are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues, and that, to some extent, is the dark side of morality.

• Karen Wynn: I think, we are built to, you know, at the drop of a hat, create us and them.

    

    

• Lesley Stahl: Sounds to me like the experiment show they are little bigots.

    

    

  Paul Bloom: I think to some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias.

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