Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Cooperation and competition
Gender differences
Google has sent me the following link The Male-Warrior Hypothesis with extremely interesting observation on gender based differences in behavior. Scientists have found that males do cooperate more within their own group if there is another group competing with them. Scientists try to explain this by the fact that males were warriors. There is other link to the scientific work "Gender differences in cooperation and competition" .
This seems extremely plausible. Actually, we watch this daily, in soccer, ice hockey and other games, football, basketball, cricket. In any kind of team games or sports, we see the cooperation.
Women also do practice these team sports but not so much. I have tried to find out what might make females different. I believe it is the sexual selection. Females usually do not get involved in wars, unless forced by males, one reason could be that they do not care, because they will be “raped” anyway, and actually, from the point of sexual selection in evolution from the female point of view, the winner is good enough to mate with, no matter who the winner is. The signal for females is the winning: a male or groups of males winning over another group of males are more attractive to females.
So females do not have to get involved in such cooperation, they only “harvest” the results of male competition. And because males know that, they try to make coalitions, teams, groups, to have chances to win against other groups and so have the chance to pass their genes on.
Females then take care of their children, and they do not need any cooperation, they need help with the work load they have to accomplish, mostly females prefer help from grandparents, males on the other hand prefer going out and get into groups of other males to accomplish their collective tasks.
Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. If it were not, there would be no evolution. Always something must happen for the first time and then the idea gets spread, but it never gets spread to 100%.
Google has sent me the following link The Male-Warrior Hypothesis with extremely interesting observation on gender based differences in behavior. Scientists have found that males do cooperate more within their own group if there is another group competing with them. Scientists try to explain this by the fact that males were warriors. There is other link to the scientific work "Gender differences in cooperation and competition" .
This seems extremely plausible. Actually, we watch this daily, in soccer, ice hockey and other games, football, basketball, cricket. In any kind of team games or sports, we see the cooperation.
Women also do practice these team sports but not so much. I have tried to find out what might make females different. I believe it is the sexual selection. Females usually do not get involved in wars, unless forced by males, one reason could be that they do not care, because they will be “raped” anyway, and actually, from the point of sexual selection in evolution from the female point of view, the winner is good enough to mate with, no matter who the winner is. The signal for females is the winning: a male or groups of males winning over another group of males are more attractive to females.
So females do not have to get involved in such cooperation, they only “harvest” the results of male competition. And because males know that, they try to make coalitions, teams, groups, to have chances to win against other groups and so have the chance to pass their genes on.
Females then take care of their children, and they do not need any cooperation, they need help with the work load they have to accomplish, mostly females prefer help from grandparents, males on the other hand prefer going out and get into groups of other males to accomplish their collective tasks.
Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. If it were not, there would be no evolution. Always something must happen for the first time and then the idea gets spread, but it never gets spread to 100%.
# posted by Dalibor @ 4:27 AM 
