[jaybill]

I am not sure you can make the claim that cooperation and mutual aid are "principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial", nor would you find a large body of either biologists or anthropologists rushing in to support said claim.

Life on earth has gone roughly four billion years relying largely on predation, competition and survival of the fittest. I think you will find symbiosis and mutualism to be in the vast minority when quantitatively evaluating "things that work in nature".

I'm not saying that means cooperation and mutual aid are "bad". I just find it interesting when people impose their personal morals on nature.

[elemenohpee]

I probably overreached in that comment. Competition and cooperation are both important, I just think that we've come to irrationally overvalue selfish tendencies, while forgetting the cooperative basis of social behaviors that have made our species so successful.

[mindcrime]

There is, as I understand it, strong support for the ideas of "Reciprocal altruism" and "kin altruism," from the evolutionary psychologists / evolutionary biologists. Game theory research[1] by Robert Axelrod[2][4] has shed some light on the nature of altruism, cooperation and competition, as has the work of Robert Trivers[3].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Axelrod

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cooperation