Found a brilliantly researched article by Julia Whitty, written in 2006 for Mother Jones and titled "
The Thirteenth Tipping Point". Here are a few tasty paragraphs:
Cockroaches have been on earth about 300 million years and dolphins about 50 million years—what amounts to millions of rounds of play (a reference to an earlier explanation of game theory). During those eons they have evolved what ethologists call "obligate cooperation": an evolutionarily stable strategy that reflects the individual's inescapable dependence on the group.
Somewhere along the way, these two very different life-forms found the tipping point and slipped from selfishness toward altruism, transforming what we perceive as the Tragedy of the Commons into something more like a triumph.
And...
No matter how badly it manifests for us, nature evolves toward efficiency, balancing the spinning plates at the point of minimum effort, rearranging them with ruthless dexterity.
And...
Already, manta rays with six-foot wingspans are sailing into view, mouths open, filtering the eggs from the water. At the outer range of our strobes, reef sharks are circling, preparing to gorge on those that have come to feast. From the cold and perpetually dark reaches of the deep known as the mesopelagic, fish that glow in the dark, and live a mile or more below the tidal, lunar, and seasonal influences that trigger the mass spawning, are rising toward it now, preparing to devour the bonanza they have perceived in ways we can't.
... Somehow, spineless, brainless, eyeless, earless, immotile marine animals that meet all our criteria for zero intelligence manage to synchronize their activities to ensure survival. Otherwise, all their gametes—a year's investment in energy—would launch off into open water without ever finding suitable partners.
Good stuff, huh? Check out the whole article
here.
