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The Origins Of Virtue Analysis

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Does the open source culture relate to human morality and instinct? These two topics may seem strange to compare to some people. However, this essay will demonstrate how the topic of human instinct presented in the text The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley very closely relates to the idea of open source culture presented in the essay Homesteading the Noosphere by Eric Steven Raymond. This essay will dive deep into ideas presented in Ridley’s text and relate these ideas to Raymond’s essay. There are many topics and ideas presented in Ridley’s text that strongly support the ideas presented in Raymond’s paper. Most notably, there are benefits to cooperation, reciprocity is ubiquitous in our society, and ordered and successful systems can emerge without design.
The idea that cooperation has benefits is presented immediately in the first paragraph in The Origins of Virtue. Ridley uses many different examples of how cooperation helps other animals and insects thrive. The example that will be discussed here in greater detail is the ant. Ridley mentions in his book that there is an estimated ten trillion ants on this planet, which weighs more than every human on this planet combined. Obviously ants are doing quite well, but what makes ants do so well for themselves? The answer is cooperation. Ridley states in the first chapter, “A single ant or honey bee is as feeble and doomed as a severed finger. …show more content…

The three major topics that were discussed in Ridley’s text The Origins of Virtue That support the ideas mentioned in Raymond’s essay Homesteading the Noosphere are that there are benefits to cooperation, reciprocity is ubiquitous in our society, and ordered and successful systems can emerge without design. To some people the idea of comparing human morality and instinct to open source culture may seem strange. However, once a person become more knowledgeable about these topics as we have described in this paper, they will find that these ideas are not so different

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