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Human preferences toward things in nature, while refined through experience and culture, are hypothetically the product of biological evolution. For example, adult mammals (especially humans) are generally attracted to baby mammal faces with their large eyes and rounded features and find them appealing across species. Similarly, the hypothesis ...
The lessons described above apply in environments that support cooperation, but whether cooperation is supported at all, depends crucially on the probability (called ω [omega]) that the players will meet again, [15] also called the discount parameter or, figuratively, the shadow of the future.
Suzanne Batra introduced the term "eusocial" [1] after studying nesting in Halictid bees including Halictus latisignatus, [2] pictured.. The term "eusocial" was introduced in 1966 by Suzanne Batra, who used it to describe nesting behavior in Halictid bees, on a scale of subsocial/solitary, colonial/communal, semisocial, and eusocial, where a colony is started by a single individual.
Inclusive fitness in humans is the application of inclusive fitness theory to human social behaviour, relationships and cooperation. Inclusive fitness theory (and the related kin selection theory) are general theories in evolutionary biology that propose a method to understand the evolution of social behaviours in organisms.
Cooperative breeding requires "repression" of helpers' reproduction, by pheromones emitted by a breeder, by coercion, or by self-restraint. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy believes that cooperative breeding is an ancestral trait in humans, a controversial proposition.
A cooperative act is, by definition, similarly costly (e.g. helping raise the young at the nest of an unrelated pair of birds versus producing and raising one's own offspring). It would therefore also signal fitness, and is probably as attractive to females as a physical handicap.
These latter definitions for positive and negative cooperativity easily encompass all processes which we call "cooperative", including conformational transitions in large molecules (such as proteins) and even psychological phenomena of large numbers of people (which can act independently of each other, or in a co-operative fashion).
According to Dr. de Waal, human morality has two extra levels of sophistication that are not found in other primate societies. Humans enforce their society's moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. People also apply a degree of judgment and reason not seen in the animal kingdom. [citation needed]