Fantasy Football is a dog-eat-dog world where the survival of the fittest principle holds center stage. It's tempting, therefore, to say that the inherent attraction of fantasy football is completely Darwinian, albeit that the concept of the Selfish Gene is replaced by that of the Selfish Team.
The Selfish Team:
There is no room for sentimentality in biological evolution. Nature can be harsh and the process of natural selection ensures that it is only the fittest that get to become ancestors. Similarly, there can be no room for sentimentality when choosing your fantasy football team. You can be sure that the winners will be those who use hard-nosed analysis to pick the players who have traits that maximize the probability of their team thriving.
Talking of evolution and Darwinism, the eminent science writer Richard Dawkins has postulated that evolution happens at the level of the gene rather than the individual or group. So while evolution may be about the Selfish Gene, fantasy football could be said to be about the Selfish Team!
Your role as manager of the Selfish Team is quite simple. It is to score as many points as possible, to secure the satisfaction of beating friends' teams and to win prizes. Whilst evolution is predicated around the concept of choosing a mate, fantasy football revolves around weighing up potential players. You probably have little desire to mate with your selected players but you have chosen them based on your view of how successful they will make your "baby", I mean "team". This may even mean picking players that you personally despise, and may lead to the bizarre situation where you are watching a match and rooting for players from teams you don't normally support!
Let's look then at some reasons why the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest wins out over community when we sign up for a fantasy football competition:
* Competitiveness is hard-wired into us. From the moment we're born, there's a basic desire to get what is best for us. When we're young, this might manifest via the desire to wrestle a building block away from our best friend. When we're older, it manifests as a desire to totally crush all and sundry with the brilliance of our fantasy football picks!
* Fantasy football is an individual pursuit. Your aim is to win for yourself rather than your favorite team, or your town or community.
* Community is a nice concept but rather wishy-washy. Most of us will state that we believe in the importance of community, but when we're pushed, it often emerges that community comes very far down our list of priorities. To see this in context, how many of us would agree to higher taxation so that the poorer members of our community can be provided for?
* Football does create a certain degree of community. Supporters congregate at the same stadium every other week, eat burgers, and moan about the referee or the ineptitude of their team's players. However, everyone's fantasy football team will be different so suddenly this togetherness falls down.
Further reading and viewing:
* Survival of the fittest: &playnext_from=PL&index=27
* Darwinism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism
* Fantasy Football: http://fantasy.premierleague.com/
* Richard Dawkins: http://richarddawkins.net/
* The Selfish Gene: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Selfish-Gene-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0192860925
* Community: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community
Submit Your Theory
What makes fantasy football players so obsessive? The variable reinforcement response.
Point spreads and fantasy football have the same net effect on fans.
Turns out, the meteorite that supposedly killed the dinosaurs may have been 300,000 years late.
Human motivation exists in a five-tiered structure. The five tiers from lowest to highest are sociological needs, personal security needs, social needs, esteem needs and the penultimate need: self-actualization.
Great man creat history through their actions, leadership, art, and innovation. At least, Carlyle thought so in the 19th century.
Want to know the secret to personalities and personal success? Use hair part theory. It worked for Margaret Thatcher.
A theory developed by Pavlov that shows one can change a stimulus part of a stimulus-response pattern (like a flinch from a loud noise) to something neutral (a blue light turning on) and generate the same response. In this example, the blue light could cause the subject to flinch.
The explanation for 'Lost' is Jason Hunter's Time Loop theory. But you have to see it to really get it.
The island used to be connected to the rest of the Earth, but was detached during electromagnetism experiments conducted by the Dharma Initiative. It is capable of traveling anywhere with the only parameter being gravity
The most widespread and enduring conspiracy theories—British intelligence killed Princess Diana, the U.S. government orchestrated 9/11—are completely absurd. But that doesn’t stop them from drawing a vast and vehement audience. David Aaronovitch picks apart 12 grand conspiracy theories to conclude that they are concocted and promoted, in large part, by educated losers. (Yes, he actually calls them losers.)
'Gravity' hints at the passion behind Newton's theoriesDetroit Free PressBY JOHN MONAGHAN It's an image planted in the mind of every schoolkid: Isaac Newton sits beneath an apple tree as a shiny red orb bonks him on the noggin. ... ABC's Lost: Lighthouse Episode Recap & TheoriesMetrowny.com...
The island used to be connected to the rest of the Earth, but was detached during electromagnetism experiments conducted by the Dharma Initiative. It is capable of traveling anywhere with the only parameter being gravity
Now that they've had two days to think about it, what can the Internet's brainiest 'Lost' theorists tell us about the show's final season?
Inflation theory, which posits that the universe ballooned from subatomic scale to the size of a soccer ball during its first 10-33 seconds, has had great ...
There are a million different ingenious theories out there that explain this or that certain phenomenon and many are very complicated. See which one are surfacing on the interwebs today.
Nick Jonas (and the Administration) has just released a new song and it's called "Conspiracy Theory."
Listen to the newest single from his upcoming album "Who I Am" below:
Amateur historian Rick Rogers has spent decades developing a theory that either Dutch or Spanish traders visited Hawaii before Captain Cook's 1778 arrival. Maps from 1589 showing an approximation of Hawaii's shape and location; remains of a 1664 women indicating she had syphilis and the disappearance of 5 Spanish ships plying the Manila to Acapulco trade in the 1500 and 1600s make his case.
Scholars at the global warming skeptics thinktank, "The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI)" say ocean acidification theory is a scare tactic ignores Cambrian data, the chemistry of CO2 and the alkaline affect of ocean rocks.
Twitter Activity
