Pyrrhic victories

Pyrrhic Victories for Scientific Realism

Pyrrhic victories: the need for social status drives costly competitive behavior

Competitive behavior is commonly defined as the decision to maximize one's payoffs relative to others. We argue instead that competitive drive derives from a desire for social status. We make use of a multi-player auction task in which subjects knowingly incur financial losses for the sake of winning auctions. First, we show that overbidding is increased when the task includes members of a riva...

Environmental cost of conservation victories.

In recent years, Marine Protected Areas (MPA), where fishing is severely restricted or not allowed, have become the Holy Grail of marine conservation for both nongovernmental organizations and governments. In the United States, the Papah anaumoku akea Marine National Monument in the NW Hawaiian Islands became the first large-scale reserve closed to fishing in 2006 (1). This reserve is 90% the s...

Victories and deceptions in tumor immunology

The last year closed with negative news for tumor immunology. Stimuvax, an investigational therapeutic anticancer vaccine that Merck licensed from the US biotech firm Oncothyreon, failed to increase overall survival in a Phase III clinical trial designed to evaluate its efficacy in a cohort of non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) patients. Stimuvax, also known as L-BLP25 or BLP25, is a liposom...

Scientific American: Rapid Victories Against Extreme Poverty

Around one billion people live in extreme poverty, suffering from economic deprivation so severe that they must struggle daily for survival. Extreme poverty is sometimes defined as living on under $1 a day, but more accurately it is the lack of reliable access to basic needs, including adequate food, basic health services, safe drinking water and connectivity with the wider world (via roads, po...