[sakoht]

Reads like a Disney lens on nature. Whether or not wolves have a single alpha in a pack, nature is built around selfishness and violence with certainty, cooperation selectively. Animals watch each other suffer and die without a flinch all the time. And nearly everything dies from being eaten. Any lens on nature that sugar-coats this is projecting human values.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Reads like a Disney lens on nature

The author isn't saying nature isn't cruel. They're saying wolf packs don't work the way we imagine them to in popular culture.

You don't have males duking it out to be the alpha. (That's closer to gorillas and chimpanzees, though even among them it's rare.) You have a breeding pair and their pups. Wolf packs aren't monarchies, they're emergent clusters of wolves around a breeding pair that goes away when the breeding pair perishes. A younger wolf "challenging" an older wolf for dominance isn't the natural state; it's the space-constrained state that emerges in captivity. (Even that might be giving it too much credit.)

[snickerer]

Nature is not 'build around selfishness and violence'. Any lens on nature that says this is projecting human values.

Nature is build around what works best for the survival of the individual's genetics in the current environment. That is called evolution.

You can't even project the human concept of selfishness on this. A worker ant supports its genetical survival best by sacrificing its life for the community.

To understand evolutionary developed strategies a wonderful tool is the calculation of probability. Science knows something about how to choose good strategies, and that may help us to understand 'why' evolution optimized for this and that.

In the case of groups of hunters (or many other groups), we know that cooperation is often superior to constant internal fighting. And choosing the best strategic thinker as the leader instead of the biggest bully is obviously a good idea in many scenarios. It is very reasonable that the wolves' leader selection process has optimised itself in such a direction.

[eleveriven]

Elephants live in complex, matriarchal family groups and demonstrate extraordinary empathy

[froh]

and animals support and comfort each other without hesitation all the time too.

and "nearly everything dies from being eaten", yes, because nearly everything is in the human meat eating food chain, I kid you not.

no. the lens that depicts the world at constant war is projecting a mix of maybe personal experience and certainly group think onto an otherwise surprisingly cooperative and supportive nature.

https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=coope...

[otabdeveloper4]

> selfishness and violence

Are human emotions, please don't anthropomorphise.

[lIl-IIIl]

Neither of those are emotions.

Selfishness is the default setting, and is easy to explain in evolutionary terms. Unselfishness is what usually surprises us when we see it in animals.

[culi]

Surprises you perhaps. Over 90% of plants rely on cooperation with mycorrhizal fungal networks. The evolution of lichen, a partnership between fungi and lichen, has happened independently tens of thousands of times. Our very cells rely on a once-alien cell with its own DNA that is now called the "mitochondria" for our very survival. Even still, the majority of cells in the human body are usually non-human. We literally couldn't eat a single thing without the complex multi-species microbes we rely on.

Cooperation is at the basis of all of nature. The difference between "competition" and "cooperation" is usually a matter of perspective and human bias. They are two sides of the same coin. We fit details about nature into one of those two frameworks to uphold a specific worldview we find useful for organizing information. Historically we've favored the competition framework, but take a look at the Annual Reviews journals for a field like Ecology, Mycology, Biology, etc and I think you'll see this is quickly changing