28 November 2011

Life co-op

It's important to note this kind of thing; not all evolution is about competition: some is about co-operation. See here.
Life began with a planetary mega-organism - life - 25 November 2011 - New Scientist:
LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism
.
This is important because there is a tendency for some to use the competitive view as justification for a eugenic ideology or cut-throat capitalism. This kind of discovery/hypothesis tends to undercut that piece of lazy political ethics.

No comments:

Review: It happened in Hell

 It seemed to me that this book set out to do two main things. One was to demonstrate that so many of our notions of what goes under the lab...