dragonrider wrote:In 1980, the political scientist robert axelrod organised a tournament where computers played against eachother with different strategies for the iterated prisonners dilemma. People where free to submit different strategies.
The outcome was that coöperative strategies where significantly more succesfull than defective ones, and one of the simplest ones, "tit for tat" was the most succesfull of them all.
The experiment was repeated with refined strategies based on analyses of the first tournament but tit for tat remained the most succesfull strategy.
Since then these results have been used by biologists and economists to explain the how complex forms of coöperation can evolve.
This is relevant because the underlying principle applies to intelligent lifeforms like humans, wolves, bonobo's or dolphins, but to plants, fungi or bacteria as well.
The underlying principle is that the most succesfull approach in strategic interactions is to be friendly (coöperative), but to retaliate when friendliness is being answered with unfriendliness.
This is true individually, but more importantly, it is also true on a grouplevel.
So in other words, kindness serves society/mankind. But only when unkindness is being avenged as well.
This reminds me a lot of Peter Kropotkin and his idea about mutual aid in the different reigns of live - he defended a sort of mutual Lamarckism/ biological founded anarchism against the "survival of the fittest" ideology of these days.
I remember playing the boardgame "Carcassonne" one day with some friends. With one of them, we decided to work together instead of everybody for himself. The rules seemed to don't formerly forbid that.
Needless to say that we won with an enormous difference.
"In the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations."
Pyotr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Arthur Dee was one of the greatest alchemists of all time, not likely to his dad, I forgot his name, this small James Bond sorcerer working for the queen of a... Hail Arthur!