Quotes About Cooperation

Hazel, watching, lent help here and there and encouraged the others.

I think we ought to do all we can to make these creatures friendly. It might turn out to be well worth the trouble.

A little common sense, goodwill, and a tiny dose of unselfishness, could make this goodly earth an earthly paradise. – Richard Aldington

Seeking first to understand isn't about who's right or wrong; it is a philosophy of effective communication.

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.

I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.

Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.

An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.

Fig trees and fig wasps share an intimate cooperative relationship. The fig that you eat is not really a fruit. There is a tiny hole at the end, and if you go into this hole (you'd have to be as small as a fig wasp to do so, and they are minute: thankfully too small to notice when you eat a fig), you find hundreds of tiny flowers lining the walls. The fig is a dark indoor hothouse for flowers, an indoor pollination chamber. And the only agents that can do the pollinating are fig wasps.

Often altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups. This is a basis of trade unionism.

This is a subtle, complicated idea. It is complicated because the 'environment' of a gene consists largely of other genes, each of which is itself being selected for its ability to cooperate with its environment of other genes.

An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.

Unless otherwise stated, 'altruistic behaviour' and 'selfish behaviour' will mean behaviour directed by one animal body toward another.

Politicians who invent external threats from foreign powers, in order to scare up economic or voter support for themselves, might find that a potentially colliding meteor answers their ignoble purpose just as well as an Evil Empire, an Axis of Evil, or the more nebulous abstraction 'Terror', with the added benefit of encouraging international co-operation rather than divisiveness

a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of 'group selection'

Kamikaze behaviour and other forms of altruism and cooperation by workers are not astonishing once we accept the fact that they are sterile. The body of a normal animal is manipulated to ensure the survival of its genes both through bearing offspring and through caring for other individuals containing the same genes.

The second point of this present chapter is that the genes that bear upon any given extended phenotypic trait may be in conflict rather than in concert with one another.

The other idea is that wherever there are 'shared' genetic influences on an extended phenotype, the shared influences may be in conflict with each other rather than cooperative

In a population of retaliators, no other strategy would invade, since there is no other strategy that does better than retaliator itself.

delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species that are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals

even with selfish genes at the helm, nice guys can finish first.

Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.

Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rahter than anarchy within the comunal body.