The Benefits of Sharing—Nice Guys and Girls do Finish First - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 22

2.3 Why Should You Share and Be Nice Anyway—The
Theory
The idea that the evolutionary theory of survival of the itest can be transferred to social in-
teractions among humans has gained widespread acceptance in our society, most notably in
some corporate cultures. Following this theory, it is argued that concepts such as charity, fair-
ness, forgiveness and cooperation are for losers—evolutionary loose ends, soon to go extinct
and of litle consequence. This idea, which historically would have been considered perverse,
is perhaps best summarized by the novelist Ayn Rand, when she explicitly argues that selfish
ness should be considered a virtue. Following this thinking, we are encouraged to pursue our
own self-interest at all costs, to maximize not only our own outcomes but also those of all of
the society. Some authors have even cynically claimed that altruism is self-interest in disguise.
Anyone that has played a team sport, like basketball or football, might immediately notice a
law in this logic based on their practical experience, yet the virtue of selfishness still holds in-
credible sway in our culture and has even infected many of our academic laboratories [ 2 ].
What if selfishness not only is not optimal for everyone, but it even hurts the selfish indi-
vidual? New data challenge the standard model and show exactly that. For example, in Su-
percooperators — Beyond The Survival of the Fitest: Why Cooperation, not Competition, is the Key to
Life, Harvard's celebrated evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak explains that cooperation is
central to the 4×10 9 year old puzzle of life [ 17 ]. Consider the following scenario: You are on
the sidewalk in front of your lab and notice that a small child chasing a ball is about to enter
the street and get hit by an oncoming car. Your natural reaction is probably to yell and rush
into the street to save the child. Good for you. But wait, if life is about survival of the fittest
why would you trouble yourself at all let alone risk your own life to run into the street to save
a stranger? You do it because our ancestors had a distinct evolutionary advantage to cooper-
ate. Selfish cavemen got left by the clans to starve on the savannah alone. 14 As Nowak shows,
cooperation not competition is the defining human trait [ 17 ] . Similarly, recent work by Kelt-
ner demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are “nasty, brutish, and
short”—we are in fact born to be good [ 18 ] .
If I am working on a 3-D printer at home and drop a screwdriver, my 2-year-old son will
pick it up and hand it to me. Now it is true that he is awesome and you would be right in
assuming he is gifted far beyond his years; but, it turns out you can do the same experiment
in front of any young child and get the same results. This is not a learned behavior as psycho-
logist Michael Tomasello has shown through observations of experiments on young children
[ 19 ] . Tomasello shows that human children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Other
species just do not do it. For example, when apes are run through similar experiments, they
demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to. That selfishness has
made them evolutionary losers—humans not apes are the dominant species on the planet. As
our children grow, their hard-wired desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes
diluted and perverted by our culture. As our children become more aware of being a member
of a group(s), the group's mutual expectations can either encourage or discourage altruism
and collaboration. Makers , 15 for example, have a mutual expectation of collaboration, which is
why they reacted so negatively when Makerbot, a formally open-source 3-D printer company,
announced that their latest printer (Replicator 2) would not come with all the source code
[ 20 ] and MakerBot CEO worked so hard to maintain their reputation of “niceness” [ 21 ]. Either
way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behaviors.
The open-source philosophy thus is aligned with our natural tendency toward cooperation.