Index
- Definition of cooperation
- Forces that shaped life on earth.
- The primary architect of evolution
- The most helpful animal
- Good examples of cooperation in Society
- Evolutions
- The evolution of competition
- Mechanism governing the emergence of cooperation
- Cooperation in images
- Examples of Cooperation in nature
- ‘Chickens have a lot to teach us about collaboration
- Improving collaboration
- Conclusions after the chicken lesson
- School_classroom_dilemma
I want to start this post with this collaboration photo from a Italian teacher colleague and a message from Dalai Lama
“Love and kindness are always right. If you believe or do not believe in rebirth it doesn’t matter, you will always need love in this life. If we have love, there is hope to have authentic families, authentic brotherhood, authentic peace.” ( Dalai Lama )
Love is for me the greatest kind of collaboration. This post is the result of my research about collaboration. I hope you enjoy it.
Coopperation is defined by www.dictionary.com/browse/cooperation ) with these examples:
- an act or instance of working or
acting together for a common purpose or benefit; - a joint action.
- more or less active assistance from a person, organization, etc.
- cooperation of various civic leaders.
- as defined in economics:
the combination of persons for purposes of production, purchase or distribution for their joint benefit: - producers’ cooperation
- consumers’ cooperation.
- as defined on sociology:
activity shared for mutual benefit. - as defined in ecology:
mutually beneficial interaction among organisms living in a limited area.
forces that shaped life on earth.
“Competition is not the only force that shaped life on earth.”
I found an article in Scientific American from July 1012 called “The evolution of Cooperation. This article is the reason why I write this post. One could say that the evolution of cooperation went on togetherl with the biological evolution of competence within specific arts. The evolution of cooperation in the article is mainly focused on the evolution of cooperation among Homo sapiens. The article does not document in detail known cooperation berween different arts like e.g. in between the Merlin falcon ( Falco columbarius )and one of their prey shows ( Monticola saxatilis ) a kind of cooperation I will talk more about below.
As the article says:
The primary architect of evolution
“Far from being a nagging exception to the rule of evolution, cooperation has been one of its primary architects”
( See the beginning of the article in https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-help-evolution-cooperation/ )
Competition, struggle, war and evilness is what I mainly think about when we talkread about the humam beings and our Society.
It was surprising for me that the article tells that the most helpful art is Homo sapiens. Why? This article explains like this “Only humans have a full blown language which allow us to share infomation about everyone and everything.”
Good examples of cooperation in Society
The article start telling about a 20 year old young maintenance worker who almost offered his life. He entered the radiation poisoned nuclear plant of Fukushima march 2011 stopping it from melting, avoiding a total disaster. He knew he could never marry and have a family after this heroic act.
Image source (wiki )
This reminds me about all those Christian martyrs who offered their life for the sake of the Christian Community. Without these martyrs, we would today maybe still venerate Roman gods.
There are many other examples of brave humans who offered their life to fight evilness, like eg during the second world war. Without the second war heroes we would maybe still have Nazism and dictatorship in Europe.
producer cooperation
There are also examples of good producer cooperation in successful companies. Google is known as a company where the owners and leadership takes care of the employees. The extraordinary success and creativity of this company are the result of a great cooperation and good climate in between the employees.
Larry Page and Sergey brin cooperated and today Larry and Sergey are billionaires.
( Source: https://www.slideshare.net/GurjitSingh2/presentation-ongoogle )
I see example of such cooperation here on Lipari where a team of engineers and architects have created gorgeous hotels and still are working hard with other projects.
We had a good cooperation in my school (lövgärdeskolan) several years ago. Teachers and headmaster cooperated to help all young kids coming from the war in Bosnia to get a better future. In the ninethies ours school had a very good reputation and we had visit to our school from teacher all over Sweden. Cooperation was the spirit of my schools (in Swedish “Lövgärdessandan”). But the political leadership had other plans and the school loosed thereafter its good reputation.
The Kidlink project is another good example of cooperation where volunteers all over the world cooperate to run global school projects. I had the honor to participate in this project since 1997.
The evolution of cooperation is not the only one There have been several kind of evolutions.
From the evolution of particles (nucleosynthesis) to the chemical and organic evolution (recently called abiogenesis) to the biological evolution and finally the cultural evolution. As shown in this Swedish image from http://gardeborn.se/
read more in https://www.britannica.com/science/evolution-scientific-theory/The-science-of-evolution#ref311657
The article just mention competition but we all know how the competion has evolved with new methods and tools in the latest century especcially in media and Internet with eg terror and with tools like nuclear weapon and radioactive poisons.
Mechanism governing the emergence of cooperation
the article present five mechanism governing the emergence of cooperation. These are:
- direct reciprocity (.g., if a bat misses chance to feed directly on a prey, it will beg from peers)
- spatial selection (e.g. neighbors tend to help one another)
- cooperation among genetically related individuals. (sacrifices for their relatives) (
Kin selection
)
- indirect reciprocity (help another based on anothers reputation)
- group selection (selfless acts for the greater goods)
“Without any mechanism (
Kin selection,
direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, group selection etc) for the evolution of cooperation , natural selection favors defectors. In a mixed population defectors, D, have a higher payoff (=fitness) than cooperators,”
Read more at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279745/
This paining is made by two artists: “Although Brueghel was responsible for the composition, Rubens started the painting…” (Read more about the paininting in https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/explore/the-collection/artworks/the-garden-of-eden-with-the-fall-of-man-253/ )
Source: http://torturedcreative.blogspot.it/2011/06/cooperation.html
How many times havent we struggled each other to discover later was better cooperate. When will e.g. Russia discover that? Cooperation means sacrifice but in the long term it is a winning solution. You waste less energy and time.
Source; http://globalebc.mx/cooperation-program
I have let my teenage students do this. Good cooperation = faster solution. Typical no cooperating behaviour. One sits down and does nothing. Motivation: “I can not help out” or “I dont want to work with him/her”.
Source : https://renegadeinc.com/competition-versus-cooperation/
I love to see when small kids comunicate with each other and cooperate ) This image from renegade is great.
Examples of Cooperation in nature
Common raven (Corvus corax, see imag below) is a egg predator on Merlin falcon and Rock trush. The falcon and the trush cooperate to protect themselves from the raven. Trushes have big nest comunities and allow a Merlin falcon to have its nest in the middle of the trush community even if the Falcon now and then ear Trush. This cooperation is observable in northern Sweden. The trush warns the falcon if a raven is nearby. The falcon with its fast attacks from behind the raven, is expert in having the raven to schoose other hunting areas.
Corvus corax |
|
 Falco columbarius |
Monticola saxatilis |
Why complex animal societies …
like those of elephants, starlings, ants etc?
Read more about Kin selection, Hamilton’s rule and more in www.nature.com
“How were paper birch and Douglas fir communicating? Well, it turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbonbut also nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and allele chemicals and hormones — information. ” ( Source: www.ted.com )
I like very much this resumé of renegadeinc: “All of the great evolutionary leaps forward, in biology, culture and society, have come when antagonistic, competing groups have come to realize that they’d be better off cooperating with their erstwhile enemies in pursuit of common aims. Only in respect of the economy have we yet to learn this lesson…”
( Source: https://renegadeinc.com )
Collaboration – Chickens have a lot to teach us about collaboration
A Tedx Santa Cruz video with Jim Tamm, a former law professor and senior administrative law judge for the state of California. He mediated nearly 2,000 employment disputes and handed down legal decisions that impacted national labor policy. He’s worked for 40 years in the field of alliance building and conflict resolution, and is an expert in building collaborative workplace environments. He’s the author of “Radical Collaboration,” published in 2005. Source: ( https://www.youtube.com )
Collaborated with Bill Muir professor of Genetics
Breed collaborative instints into chicken to see impact on egg production
There are two types of chickens
- Red zone chickens
These are star egg producer not by themselves but by suppressing the egg production of the other chickens by pecking on them. They often tend to be aggressive.
2. Green zone chickens
are not star egg producer but are nice to each other.
Breeding up green zone chicken and separating the green zone chicken from the red zone chicken
The green zone chicken became healthy and productive. 50% of the red zone chicken died because they killed each other.
Separating green zone chickens from red zone chicken gave a egg production rise of 260% in 1 year
Red Zone environment produce more3 red zone behavior
Read more about this experiment in https://www.2civility.org/super-chickens-lesson-competition/
By manageing your defensivness
Premises
- Defensiveness does not protect us from other people.
- It defends us from fears we don’t want to feel.
- Defensiveness helps us hide our fears from ourselves and we do so e.g. by blaiming others for being wrong.
Effects of defensiveness
- your thinking becomes rigid
- your IQ drops about 20 points (these effects are maybe caused by stress hormones flooding your blood circulation and brain?)
Create your own early warning system
try understanding your own signals of defensiveness.
- withdrawal into silence
- Playing poor me
- All or nothing thinking
- Wanting to be right
- Blaming or shaming others
- Sudden drop in IQ/confusion
- High charge of energy in the body
- catastrophing everything
- Wanting the last word
- obsessive thinking
- Flooding with information to prove a point.
- complete denial of your own defensiveness
(source; https://youtu.be/vjSTNv4gyMM?t=11m43s )
Action step to move forward and to practice
- Acknowledge you own defensiveness
- Getting an early warning system
- Slow down by taking a few deep breath or take a walk somewhere else (to the bath room maybe?)
- check negative self-talk
- Create an Action step
- Start over
We don’t want to appear incompetent so we blaim the other to be incompetent.
Conclusions after chicken lesson
Using Jim Tamms vocabulary one could say we have red zone humans (who are nice to each other) and green zone humans (aggressive ones) .
Learning from the egg production experiment, to improve our whole planets net production (getting less starving, suffering and conflicts), we could maybe
- start thinking vegan (as I wrote about some time ago in http://www.kinberg.net/2017/11/01/vegan-dilemma/ ).
- We must among others also isolate the red zone humans from conditioning and “infecting” green zone humans
- the green zone humans, must learn to become more cooperative e.g. with the methods presented by Jim Tamm.
In practice
- Put aggressive people in prison or under treatment?
- Do not vote on aggressive people or let them get leading position like Trump and similar people
Inspired by Jim Tam in the video above, I use below the term “”red kid” in a similar way, to normally indicate a kid that easily becomes aggressive and destructive in the classroom byinterrrupting the calm, by e.g. annoying other classmates. Some “red kids” may however be fast learner but react aggressively, with defense reactions becoming very offensive if their will is not met positively.
I had a discussion with a neighbor working in apublic school in the village. They have the same problem we had and still are having in my sold chool.
In Sweden and Italy it is prohibited to isolate or segregate kids in different groups according to their behaviour. All talks about the benefits of heterogeneous classrooms. This may work well if you in a class of 30 kids have one or maybe two red kids. Although two red dominant kids can cause a lot of damage, a school can maybe handle this supporting the green kids to not be infected.
My last experience with a eigth grade was a total catastrophy as there were
- 4 red kids,
- 2-5 slow learnergreen kids that required a simplified teaching at elementary level.
- a few kids with attention deficit who needed tranquility to be able to listen
- 3 red skilled kids who required to be teached their way.
- I alone could not manage to make all these kids happy.
I personally believe that there is no meaning to oblige unmotivated red kids to study if they arent receptive for teaching. It is better to take them a part temporarily to have a dialog with them buiding a constructive relationship.
Being a treacher I am not a psychologist nor a therapist. We have had cases in wich parents did not allow the school to let a psychologist or therapist talk with a red kid, helping me as a teacher with the right advices .
My schools expect the teacher to solve everything modificating the teaching methods or the way the teacher relates to the students. But this is if course unsuccessful in many cases.
I dont know a teacher who has been able to have lessons that makes both red, green, slow and fast learner kids happy. During all my years as a teacher, I have never found a teaching method that accomplish this. The only “solution” I saw and tested was been to find time for separate dialogs with “red” kids, one at a time. But I did not get time for the many red kids I had.
The result of our heterogeneous classroom experiments ni my school has been that many green kids have left our school to continue in private schools where they do not have so many red kids. The last years, red kids have become more and more dominant in my school and several green kids have become red. I heard that red kids ule over the school now.
This is what the old Bible deuteronomy 21:18-21 says we shall do with a rebellious son:
If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:
19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;
20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”
Jesus has learned us a different method.
A teacher in my Swedish school was recently killed.
Similar things happens in Italian schools. A teacher in my village was attacked by a very young pupil. A teacher in Italy was yesterday (?) attacked with a knife by a student. The president receives the teacher.
How are Swedish and italian teachers dealing with “red” (aggressive) students?