It will likely show that cooperation evolved in humans because those cultures that didn't cooperate, regardless of how large or how small they were, didn't survive.

~Lee Dye’s paraphrase of Kurzban’s hopes from All for One? Why Humans Cooperate  

As a graduate of psychology I tend to read anything I can get my hands on on the subject, especially those that are related to Evolutionary Psychology.  Lately I have read a few articles on motherhood and longevity and giving birth to daughters versus sons and found them to be lacking in a lot of information that I think is important to know when assessing the studies (for example neither article comments on whether or not the studies investigated available food supply to the mothers or other environmental factors.  I hesitate to accept their conclusions if all variable and explanations were not looked at first.  The latter article reports that

[In order] to explain how sons shorten their mothers' lives, the scientists propose that giving birth to heavier babies was more taxing for women in preindustrial times. Moreover, carrying a boy is associated with higher levels of testosterone (which can suppress the immune system) for mothers-to-be. Grown daughters were more likely to stay within the family to help their aging mothers with everyday tasks.

What bothers me about this report is that there is no mention of whether the study makes assumptions about food intake of the child.  I would like to know whether the investigators assumed for example that boys and girls would eat the same amount of food?  Or did they assume that one sex would consume more food than the other?  If they assumed the former then they would not take into consideration that a mother may receive less food and therefore nutrients if she gave birth to a son instead of a daughter which could seriously affect her lifespan … but I have completely gone off topic here because this blog was supposed to have something to do with the quote at the top of the page).

The article that I pulled the above quote from is about Human Cooperation (one of the topics of intense interest to evolutionary psychologist of late).  The article outlines an interesting experiment done by some psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania attempting to answer the “big question” of why we cooperate.  The quote at the top of this blog is (I imagine) a hypothesized answer to this question.  Such captions and thoughts irritate me to no end because they almost seem to underestimate the intelligence of the reader.  Granted this article was not published in a science journal (or pseudo-science by which I mean a magazine based loosely on scientific articles) and therefore cannot assume that its reader will have any background in the theory and principles behind evolutionary psychology but still it just seems that even someone who has no background can sit there and say to themselves “ok, so I have one society that cooperates with one another and one society where each individual does things only for themselves, in the long run who will end up surviving?  In the selfish society people will only be looking out for themselves and eventually you are going to have a situation where one person’s selfishness affects another person.  What happens then?  Do they fight, if so to what end?  Until the death?  If no fighting is involved does the society separate?  If societies continue to separate because their members are too selfish to live together then at some point we will end up with societies that cannot exist within close proximity to each other.  This will lead to interbreeding within societies and mass genetic duplication leading to retardation and the deterioration of genetic variability.  With enough deterioration of variability the species will not be able to survive and therefore the selfish individual, society and genes will disappear.  On the other hand we have a society that cooperates with one another.  Each individual, although they would like to have more than their neighbours helps out, some giving up a portion of their share for the greater good.  This cooperation strengthens the group, the group doesn’t disperse there continues to be much gene variability in the society and they survive.”

Now I have left out quite a few things in the above scenario and I have romanticized the cooperative society (leaving out free riders for example); however, those things do not negate the point that it is quite easy to see how a cooperative society would survive as opposed to a selfish society, or maybe I am just crazy.  That being said I support the research done and feel that many advancements could come from it if they make the appropriate conclusions and future research pursuits.  I do not believe that the "big answer" quoted above is the information they can gain from this study and wish that before making comments that are rather generalized and easy to predict researchers would put a little thought into their conclusions (or reporters would accurately report what they have been told, for all I know the researchers said something completely different and this is what ended up in print.)

Well, that is enough picking on people who cannot reply (at least until I come across the next evolutionary article that tickles my fancy.)