Positive news magazine #3

Good news worth sharing.

The food sharing revolution

Olio is the best idea if you want to help others (and hate food waste).

While the focus recently has been on waste created by supermarkets or in production processes, of the 15 million tons of food thrown away each year in the UK, nearly half is chucked out by us at home.  

OLIO hopes to help solve this problem.  It's a free app connecting neighbours with each other and with local shops so surplus food and other items can be shared, not thrown away.

"Building a sense of community is one of the chief reasons people sign up for Olio" Tessa Cook

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The surpising decline in violence

It may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.

Akon Providing Solar Lighting in Africa for 600 million people

Despite being best known for making pop music, Akon's decided to give filling dancefloors a break in favour of bringing solar energy to people living in rural Africa.

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How Denmark is leading the way in teaching empathy to children

Contrary to popular belief, most people do care about the welfare of others. From an evolutionary standpoint, empathy is a valuable impulse that helps humans survive in groups. In American schools, this impulse has been lying dormant from a lack of focus. But in Denmark, a nation that has consistently been voted the happiest place in the world since Richard Nixon was president, children are taught about empathy from a young age both inside and outside of school.

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Genes are selfish people are not

The word “altruism” was coined by Auguste Comte, the 19th-century social philosopher and early founder of sociology. It derives, in turn, from the Latin alter, for “other.” Although most people are grateful that altruism exists, evolutionary biologists have historically had trouble with it—or rather, trouble explaining altruism’s widespread existence in the natural world. 

The problem is that natural selection is not conducive to benefiting “others.” After all, natural selection is quintessentially a selfish process, in which winning—or at least staying in the game longer than others—is the bottom line.

Evolution proceeds by the differential reproduction of genes, so the challenge is to explain the persistence of a trait that, by definition, leads to an increase in the success of another while not increasing the success of oneself. Selfishness should defeat altruism every time, at least at the gene level.

“Does Altruism Exist?” presents a simple arithmetic model purporting to show how altruism can readily evolve by group selection.  From there, it is easy to see that group selection “works” and that altruism can win out over selfishness, even though individual altruists are less fit than their selfish colleagues.

Although group selection remains exceedingly unlikely as a mechanism driving evolution in non-human organisms, Mr. Wilson may be on the right track for one particular group: human beings. 

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