UM Professor to receive National Medal of Science award today

Submitted by Drew_Silver on

From Crain's

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20141120/NEWS/141129999/um-prof-to…

 

In 1984, Axelrod wrote the highly acclaimed The Evolution of Cooperation, a book on how to de-escalate conflict. The next year, at age 43, he became the youngest political scientist elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1987, he won a five-yearMacArthur Foundation genius grant.

 

Go Blue!

Don

November 20th, 2014 at 3:08 PM ^

I'm not questioning that in any way.

College athletics, especially football, has always been a ruthless, survival-of-the-fittest enterprise, and is almost a cartoon embodiment of Social Darwinist "nature red in tooth and claw" attitudes. Vanquish your rivals year after year and you will likely spawn a coaching tree to carry on your coaching legacy DNA; lose too many games to your rivals and you'll likely be out of a job fairly quickly, and there's no coaching tree. Even something as relatively benign as apologizing to a rival for an on-field incident is widely attacked and scorned by the fans of the apologist's team as a sign of weakness and defeat.

By contrast, Axelrod's research has shown that cooperation and altruism are far from infrequent in many disparate cultures, and that they in fact confer concrete evolutionary advantages over the purely Darwinist conception of competition within and between cultures.

MGoCombs

November 20th, 2014 at 5:11 PM ^

You are correct about his research, but his subjects aren't limited by the finite rules of football competition. While complex, football lacks the complexity of the social conflict situations he studied. More importantly, football is measured in wins and losses and there's no sharing (edit: between teams). It's also a zero sum situation. You can't make every team better, and everyone can't win. For every win, someone is losing. That's quite different than an evolving society that succeeds through altruism and cooperation, progressing and moving forward the aggregate.

Anndddd I can't believe we are having this conversation on a sports blog.

Profwoot

November 20th, 2014 at 5:04 PM ^

Darwin was well aware of cooperation in nature, and many of his thoughts on the topic have since been supported by evidence and are still in use today.

I'm also finding irony in the way you insist on characterizing what is often referred to as the greatest team (i.e., cooperative) sport ever invented as a purely selfish enterprise.

Michigasling

November 20th, 2014 at 1:25 PM ^

Congratulations to the Prof. 

Seeing that he's also won a MacArthur "Genius" award, I guess it's not OT to mention that this year's MacArthur grantees include two more Michigan-connected folk (out of a 2014 class of 21):  UM English professor and poet Khaled Mattawa, and Alum Tara Zahra (Ph.D. '05), now teaching history at U. of Chicago.

Article in M Alumni Magazine for more info about their work and relationship with Michigan.

2Blue4You

November 20th, 2014 at 1:24 PM ^

Michigan is a football school and I feel like we are focusing on his academic achievement while overlooking his lack of football ability. I don't think he could cut it on the gridiron like our student athletes.

1936

November 20th, 2014 at 5:54 PM ^

Thankfully, Michigan is being recognized for academic excellence. While our football history has been nice, we are a UNIVERSITY first and foremost. It's about time the football GAMES (and they are solely that) take back seat academics.

We could lose every football game this year, but at least there is always next year. It's not every year that one of professor's receive the National Medal of Science, and that to me is much much much more important than a couple of 20 year old's wearing Maize and Blue bumping into some other 20 year old's wearing different collered jerseys