Bioregioning 🌍

• 1 Pager & Summary

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
—Edward O. Wilson

What it takes to grab the biggest slice of the pie is different than what it takes to make the biggest pie. This is, quite literally, the fundamental problem of human social life, and it is just as true for an individual in a team as it is for a nation-state arguing that it should be allowed to release more carbon than other nations.

We need to construct conditions in which altruism can thrive.

What's in it for me → What's in it for us? Eco-system!

The three Cs of human distinctiveness:

1. Cooperation. First, we easily cooperate with others who are genetically unrelated to us and are by far the most cooperative primate.

2. Cognition. Second, our cognition is different, especially our capacity for symbolic thought and relational learning.

3. Culture. And, third, we culturally transmit more learned behavioral information across generations than other species.