Biology Flashcards
Cooperation
In evolution, co-operation is the process where groups of organisms work or act together for common or mutual benefits. It is commonly defined as any adaptation that has evolved, at least in part, to increase the reproductive success of the actor’s social partners. Humans’ ability to collaborate to obtain otherwise inaccessible goals may be one main cause for our success as a species.
Incentives
Defined as a motive or reward for an action, Charly Munger views incentives as the most powerful force in nature. All creatures respond to them to keep themselves alive. If organisms did not have incentives such as food and mating, they would not engage in hunting, mating rituals or exert energy to display their fitness.
In humans, incentives are often money, power, status, freedom, admiration, health, and reproduction but there are many others that can be more difficult to identify. Identifying incentive often helps us understand why others do what they do and providing incentives to people is the most powerful tool to trigger action.
Tendency towards energy conservation
In a physical world governed by thermodynamics and competition for limited energy and resources, any biological organism that was wasteful with energy would be at a severe disadvantage for survival. Thus, we see in most instances that behavior is governed by a tendency to minimize energy usage when at all possible. This is the reason why humans are lazy and actions do not occur unless there are incentives.
Adaptation
Species tend to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, given the combination of their genetics and their environment – an always-unavoidable combination. However, adaptations made in an individual’s lifetime are not passed down genetically, as was once thought: Populations of species adapt through the process of evolution by natural selection, as the most-fit examples of the species replicate at an above-average rate.
Natural Selection
Natural selection is the process in nature by which organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and reproduce more than those less adapted to their environment. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations and can be used to explain most traits and behavior humans and all other organisms have.
The Red-Queen Effect
This is an evolutionary hypothesis which proposes that organisms must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate not merely to gain reproductive advantage, but also simply to survive while competing against other ever-evolving species in a constantly changing environment. When one species evolves an advantageous adaptation, a competing species must respond in kind or fail as a species. This arms race is called the Red Queen Effect for the character in Alice in Wonderland who said, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Replication
A fundamental building block of diverse biological life is high-fidelity replication. The fundamental unit of replication seems to be the DNA molecule, which provides a blueprint for the offspring to be built from physical building blocks. Organisms use cell replication to grow and repair tissue while the act of mating reproduces offspring with a combination of parental DNA.
Hierarchy and Organizing Instincts
Most complex biological organisms have an innate feel for how they should organize. While not all of them end up in hierarchical structures, many do, especially in the animal kingdom. Human beings like to think they are outside of this, but they feel the hierarchical instinct as strongly as any other organism. This includes the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram Experiments, which demonstrated what humans learned practically many years before: the human bias towards being influenced by authority. In a dominance hierarchy such as ours, we tend to look to the leader for guidance on behavior, especially in situations of stress or uncertainty. Thus, authority figures have a responsibility to act well, whether they like it or not.
Self-Preservation Instincts
Self-preservation is a universal behavior among living organisms that ensures their survival. Pain and fear are integral parts of this mechanism.
Pain motivates the individual to withdraw from damaging situations, to protect a damaged body part while it heals, and to avoid similar experiences in the future. Fear causes the organism to seek safety and may cause a release of adrenaline. Self-preservation instincts are essential in organisms ensuring their survival and reproduction.
Self-preservation instinct are so strong that personalities and normal rational behavior are altered when they occur often causing violent, erratic, and/or destructive behavior.
Simple Physiological Reward-Seeking
All organisms feel pleasure and pain from simple chemical processes in their bodies in response to the outside world. Reward-seeking is an effective survival-promoting technique in which organisms engage in actions that will result most often in the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Food, sex, or success are common sources of dopamine emission leading to organisms growing stronger, fitter, and reproducing. However, this same principle can lead to destructive behavior, as the modern world offers many more potent artificial stimulants like drugs or media.
Exaptation
Introduced by the biologist Steven Jay Gould, an exaptation refers to a trait developed for one purpose that is later used for another purpose. Bird feathers are a classic example: initially they may have evolved for temperature regulation, but later were adapted for flight.
In science and business, existing products, technology, or solutions may be useful in solving new problems that are unrelated to the areas they were initially designed for.
Ecosystems
An ecosystem describes any group of organisms coexisting with the natural world. Most ecosystems show diverse forms of life taking on different approaches to survival, with such pressures like predators and competition for scarce resources and habitats leading to varying behavior and adaptation.
Social systems and entire business industries work in many of the same ways and much can be learned from natural ecosystems.
Niches
An ecological niche describes a method of competing and behaving for survival within an ecosystem. It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (e.g. when and what to eat, where to live, how to hunt, sleep, and reproduce) Usually, a species will select a niche for which it is best adapted. The danger arises when multiple species begin competing for the same niche, which can cause an extinction – there can be only so many species doing the same thing before limited resources give out.
The business world has nishes as well that work in the same way; businesses use their strengths to eploit resources and try to operate where there is least competition.
Dunbar’s Number
Often populized as “the rule of 150”, Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.
The primatologist Robin Dunbar observed through study that the number of individuals a primate can get to know and trust closely is related to the size of its neocortex. Extrapolating from his study of primates, Dunbar theorized that the Dunbar number for a human being is somewhere in the 100–250 range, which is supported by certain studies of human behavior and social networks.
Handicap Pricinple / Zahavian Signal
A Zahavian Signal is one that demonstates biological fitness in order to procreate or avoid predators. These signals are costly for demonstrators consuming significant resources or energy, in turn making them stand out from the rest as not everyone can afford them.
In order to procreate, animals dance, birds sing, peacocks grow massive tails, and humans pay fortunes on luxery items. All these consume significant amounts of resources but signal health, energy, physical and sexual fitness.
In the presence of predators, animals will use these signals to show that pursuit would be futile. E.g. when spotting a lion, gazelles will run and hop demonstrating it has the fitness necessary to avoid capture.
Despite the cost, animals demonstrating these signals can often deter predators even if they aren’t physically superior, essentially bluffing. A similar behaviour can be seen in people about to engage in a street fight jumping and dancing around.
