Thursday, September 8, 2011

natural selection and altruism


I love Radiolab because it's "a show about curiosity" and as it happens, that's just what I'm about. After listening to a recent short titled Mapping Tic Tac Toe-dom, I decided to peruse through some of the older seasons and listen while I worked.

I think The Good Show (Season 9, Episode 1) is particularly relevant to this blog AND it's an interesting seed of thought for anyone in the good-doing business.
"In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?"
The episodes are an hour long, but worthy background conversation for time that would otherwise be spent in silence. Of course, I also highly recommend Car Talk for these purposes.