Aggregating transdisciplinary media for an increasingly interconnected world.

  1.   [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

    Scientific American: “Your Opinion of Climate Change Depends on Your Social Psychology”

    from the article:

    In a public lecture at the Baniff Centre for the Arts, science journalist Jay Ingram argues that climate change controversies have little to do with facts and findings.  Christie Nicholson reports

  2.  

    Our evolutionary success is partially due to our ability to cooperate

    Photographer: Tobias Wolter

    An article in Scientific American explains our evolutionary advantages that placed us on the top of the food chain, those being the C’s: cognition, culture, and cooperation.

    Here is part of the article discussing cooperation:

    Whether demonstrated by situations of hunting, foraging, child rearing or migrating, humans with culture, in pursuit of shared goals, had much to gain through cooperation. Cooperating humans would lead to greater survival, greater reproduction and colonization.

    After all, other primates cooperate, said anthropologist Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in reproductive strategies of old-world monkeys. Communal breeding, for example, reduces stress on bonnet macaques creating greater reproductive success.

    Our western culture is a competitive one with a history built on Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Carnegie, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan etc.  We exercise our competitive drive in the marketplace, in sports, in politics, and between nations.  However, our laissez faire ideals and “survival of the fittest” mentalities underestimate the power of cooperation which, according to the article, is one of the reasons we have had such evolutionary success.  This is important for our race to remember as we face challenges too big for any single nation to solve such as climate change, overpopulation, scarcity of resources, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and more.

    This is not to say that competition is bad but we have to realize it’s not a panacea.  We are after all members of the same species, and our continued evolutionary success will require our ability to recognize opportunities where cooperation is more beneficial for all parties.