I would like to point out that Margaret Thatcher's full quote was:
"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a tenure of work and duty and we look beyond that to a much wider range."
She wasn't denying the existence of community, but rather attacking the depersonalisation of responsibility.
Her target was the idea that "Society" is a nebulous entity that owes you something, without you owing anything in return.
Agency: By saying "there is no such thing," she was asserting that "Society" doesn't pay taxes or provide services—people do. She was attempting to re-establish the link between the individual's effort and the collective's well-being.
This is exactly how the examples you give from the gene level to society work. It is cooperation where every component has a role to play in the success of the whole.
Now what humans can do which every prior evolved cooperative structure doesn't do is help those who cannot contribute. In other words go beyond cooperation to charity and benevolence. And that is what Huxley was encouraging and what Thatcher urged in her frequent references to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The political debate is about the right balance between state and individual, compulsory or voluntary support. And the content of that debate while framed in moral terms is at root practical. Does pure voluntary do enough or leave a resentful suffering underclass, does pure state so limit individual responsibility that it becomes unaffordable.
Nice rationalisation of what was quite clearly said to make a point for political advantage and stir up opposition to the 'communist threat'. There was no problem with welfare being the depersonalising of responsibility in Australia, when our socially democratic government positively worked toward creating social security rather than helping rich people get richer as they did when Thatcher and her facile rhetoric influenced governments to neoliberalise so it would trickle down. But it doesn't and now we want our society back but the billionaires own it.
She also lied about her understanding of the 'greenhouse' effect. "The Iron Lady's complete and dramatic U-turn meant that her free market admirers could reclaim her legacy and erase from history her arguments that economic growth must be environmentally sustainable while the public seemed to have mostly forgotten that one of the earliest champions of legally binding international agreements was, in fact, a staunch Conservative and economic Liberal."
What do you see in your mirror? I'm happy with my reflection and comments like yours are evidence for my hypotheses about fuckwits and how many are named David.
I was just going to say the same thing. Evolution values cooperation not for its own sake, but to provide a competitive advantage among the cooperators. The level of cooperation will be constrained by the extent to which it provides a competitive advantage.
Competition is the essential flip side. It provides the motivation for the cooperators.
One social implication for humans might be that unmotivated cooperation might be evolutionarily unattainable. Adversity—whether from other human groups, other species or even a harsh natural environment—is the glue that binds cooperators. It disappears and the cooperators become competitors.
I think people often have the wrong picture of 'evolution' as purely selfish, largely because of the misleading 'selfish gene' idea. We shouldn't view genes as the only true replicators. Instead, ‘multi-level selection’ suggests that cells, organisms, and groups of organisms also count as replicators - all nested within each other like Russian Dolls.
Inside a single Russian doll, the inner units usually cooperate because they rely on each other (intra-cooperation), but conflict arises if a single unit starts reproducing selfishly at the expense of the whole (intra-conflict). Between two separate Russian dolls, they might work together for mutual benefit (inter-cooperation), or fight over limited resources (inter-conflict).
Admittedly, when I picture evolution, I usually only think of that last dynamic, the classic 'dog-eat-dog' struggle, completely forgetting the other three. I only realized this thanks to the great book 'Evolution and the Levels of Selection' by Samir Okasha.
I like the recap of cooperation types across time and at different scales, it provides a good overview to situate the usually human-centered studies of the evolved psychology of cooperation.
Fantastic! I am glad you referenced this in your newest post, because somehow I missed it.
Another avenue that I will be taking, while referencing this and your post on prospect theory's S-shaped sensitizations, is that "human nature" is better understood according to the implicit placement of an S-shaped curve centered on the cooperative side of coordination. I say implicit because we detect defection as a deviation from this baseline (the loss aversion side), and we detect conspicuous over-cooperation (we discount conspicuous lack of incentive as potential for hidden motives/incentives). Otherwise, we effortlessly coordinate and largely take it for granted.
This also forms the backbone of what I am calling "deferential survivorship bias." The coordination baseline is mostly backgrounded and insalient, with deviations composing available anecdotal evidence, especially whenever we are in diagnostic or troubleshooting mode. This creates a systematically skewed sample consistent with the "differential" version of survivorship bias.
Raihani's book is wonderful.
I would like to point out that Margaret Thatcher's full quote was:
"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a tenure of work and duty and we look beyond that to a much wider range."
She wasn't denying the existence of community, but rather attacking the depersonalisation of responsibility.
Her target was the idea that "Society" is a nebulous entity that owes you something, without you owing anything in return.
Agency: By saying "there is no such thing," she was asserting that "Society" doesn't pay taxes or provide services—people do. She was attempting to re-establish the link between the individual's effort and the collective's well-being.
This is exactly how the examples you give from the gene level to society work. It is cooperation where every component has a role to play in the success of the whole.
Now what humans can do which every prior evolved cooperative structure doesn't do is help those who cannot contribute. In other words go beyond cooperation to charity and benevolence. And that is what Huxley was encouraging and what Thatcher urged in her frequent references to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The political debate is about the right balance between state and individual, compulsory or voluntary support. And the content of that debate while framed in moral terms is at root practical. Does pure voluntary do enough or leave a resentful suffering underclass, does pure state so limit individual responsibility that it becomes unaffordable.
Very good point, I may have been uncharitable with the interpretation of her sentence.
Nice rationalisation of what was quite clearly said to make a point for political advantage and stir up opposition to the 'communist threat'. There was no problem with welfare being the depersonalising of responsibility in Australia, when our socially democratic government positively worked toward creating social security rather than helping rich people get richer as they did when Thatcher and her facile rhetoric influenced governments to neoliberalise so it would trickle down. But it doesn't and now we want our society back but the billionaires own it.
She also lied about her understanding of the 'greenhouse' effect. "The Iron Lady's complete and dramatic U-turn meant that her free market admirers could reclaim her legacy and erase from history her arguments that economic growth must be environmentally sustainable while the public seemed to have mostly forgotten that one of the earliest champions of legally binding international agreements was, in fact, a staunch Conservative and economic Liberal."
https://theecologist.org/2018/oct/17/who-drove-thatchers-climate-change-u-turn
Speaking of making a point for political advantage...
All commenters should own a mirror, just in case.
What do you see in your mirror? I'm happy with my reflection and comments like yours are evidence for my hypotheses about fuckwits and how many are named David.
Humans cooperate in order to compete and compete in order to cooperate. https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-cooperative-competitor
I was just going to say the same thing. Evolution values cooperation not for its own sake, but to provide a competitive advantage among the cooperators. The level of cooperation will be constrained by the extent to which it provides a competitive advantage.
Competition is the essential flip side. It provides the motivation for the cooperators.
One social implication for humans might be that unmotivated cooperation might be evolutionarily unattainable. Adversity—whether from other human groups, other species or even a harsh natural environment—is the glue that binds cooperators. It disappears and the cooperators become competitors.
Just thinking aloud here.
Some great uncommon examples!
I think people often have the wrong picture of 'evolution' as purely selfish, largely because of the misleading 'selfish gene' idea. We shouldn't view genes as the only true replicators. Instead, ‘multi-level selection’ suggests that cells, organisms, and groups of organisms also count as replicators - all nested within each other like Russian Dolls.
Inside a single Russian doll, the inner units usually cooperate because they rely on each other (intra-cooperation), but conflict arises if a single unit starts reproducing selfishly at the expense of the whole (intra-conflict). Between two separate Russian dolls, they might work together for mutual benefit (inter-cooperation), or fight over limited resources (inter-conflict).
Admittedly, when I picture evolution, I usually only think of that last dynamic, the classic 'dog-eat-dog' struggle, completely forgetting the other three. I only realized this thanks to the great book 'Evolution and the Levels of Selection' by Samir Okasha.
Here I ramble more about 'multi-level selection' but in regards to actual examples like cancer, culture, kin selection... if you are interested: https://paleoposition.substack.com/p/critiquing-veritasiums-video-on-evolution
Thanks, I will have a look at your piece! Okasha is a very good reference indeed.
I like the recap of cooperation types across time and at different scales, it provides a good overview to situate the usually human-centered studies of the evolved psychology of cooperation.
Fantastic! I am glad you referenced this in your newest post, because somehow I missed it.
Another avenue that I will be taking, while referencing this and your post on prospect theory's S-shaped sensitizations, is that "human nature" is better understood according to the implicit placement of an S-shaped curve centered on the cooperative side of coordination. I say implicit because we detect defection as a deviation from this baseline (the loss aversion side), and we detect conspicuous over-cooperation (we discount conspicuous lack of incentive as potential for hidden motives/incentives). Otherwise, we effortlessly coordinate and largely take it for granted.
This also forms the backbone of what I am calling "deferential survivorship bias." The coordination baseline is mostly backgrounded and insalient, with deviations composing available anecdotal evidence, especially whenever we are in diagnostic or troubleshooting mode. This creates a systematically skewed sample consistent with the "differential" version of survivorship bias.
Much more to say of course. Keep 'em comin'!