Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows

Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.

This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first.

Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of "the prisoner's dilemma", a scenario of game theory - the study of strategic decision-making.

Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.

Game theory involves devising "games" to simulate situations of conflict or co-operation. It allows researchers to unravel complex decision-making strategies and to establish why certain types of behaviour among individuals emerge.

Freedom or prison
A team from Michigan State University, US, used a model of the prisoner's dilemma game, where two suspects who are interrogated in separate prison cells must decide whether or not to inform on each other.

In the model, each person is offered a deal for freedom if they inform on the other, putting their opponent in jail for six months. However, this scenario will only be played out if the opponent chooses not to inform.

If both "prisoners" choose to inform (defection) they will both get three months in prison, but if they both stay silent (co-operation) they will both only get a jail term of one month.

The eminent mathematician John Nash showed that the optimum strategy was not to co-operate in the prisoner's dilemma game.

Headline, August03, 2013

'''THE MUSICAL -GENIUS- FROM

 BEIJING'''

Even his name  -pronounced lawng lawng and meaning ''brilliance of the sky'' in Mandarin  -suggests something comet like and blinding. ''This is a guy who had hardly mastered his own bowels by the time he had mastered his first chords, beginning his formal education in piano at age three after stunning his parents by plunking out a snatch of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no,2 he'd heard on a Tom and Jerry Cartoon.

By nine, he was a boy genius at Beijing's top music conservatory; today, at twenty three, he's using his amazing finger speed and control to reinterpret the classic in his own fervently imaginative style. Sounds emerge from Lang Lang's Steinway that are ordinarily outside the piano's range, like pitch-perfect evocations of ringing bells and cascading waterfalls.

Even composers get a little woozy after his hands transform their notes.''Land Lang is a poet and has magical powers,'' recently raved Tan Dun, who followed his Grammy for the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score by creating a special work for Lang Lang.

Oh, he gets ripped by the occasional old-school purist who's appalled when he sends a piano bench flying, or plays with one hand while pumping up the startled orchestra with the other, or goes way overhead to slam down a note like Jimmy Snuka landing a Superfly Death Leap. What they don't understand is that Lang Lang plays the same way in solitude, completely immersed in what Christopher Eschenbach, his mentor and fellow savant,calls, ''the theater of the music.''

Lang Lang has spent so much time alone, coming to the U.S. at Fifteen with no friends or knowledge of English, that his interpretations aren't just just expressions of feelings but the feeling themselves. Which is where the video vixens come in, ''For me, music is a language,'' Lang Lang is saying.''That's why I like to perform, because it's the way I speak out. But most people my age, you talk to them about classical music and it's the forbidden thing, this weird thing wrapped in plastic. I'm trying to change that. Put me on MTV, man. Let people see how cool Beethoven is''.

At least the way Lang plays him.

With respectful dedication to all the students and Professors and Teachers of Chile. See ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless : The Most Indelible Music in the Composing!

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless