Yet despite the importance of what Darwin called the “struggle for life most severe”, it does not tell the whole story. Something profound is missing – and as we argue in our new book, that something is co-operation. Creatures of every persuasion and level of complexity co-operate to live. Some of the earliest bacteria formed strings, in which certain cells in each living filament died to nourish their neighbours. Today, ants form societies of millions of individuals that can solve complex problems; bees tirelessly harvest pollen for the good of the hive; and mole rats generously allow peers to dine on their droppings.
Human society, too, fizzes with co-operation. Stopping for coffee could draw on the labours of a small army of people: beans grown in Colombia, sugar from Brazil, milk from a local farm, heated by electricity from a nuclear plant in a neighbouring state. And the drink’s existence depended on a vast number of ideas, shared and disseminated across the generations, from the initial one of drinking a beverage based on roasted seeds, to the invention of the light bulb illuminating the coffee shop, to the patenting of the first espresso machine.
The modern world is an extraordinary collective enterprise, dependent on a breadth of collaboration that makes us the supreme co-operators in the known universe. Put 400 chimpanzees in economy class on a seven-hour flight, and they would stumble off the plane with bitten ears, missing fur and bleeding limbs. Yet millions of us tolerate being crammed together in this way so we can roam about the planet. Our breathtaking ability to co-operate is one of the main reasons humanity has managed to survive in every ecosystem, from scorched, sun-baked deserts to the frozen wastes of Antarctica. But by co-operation, we mean more than working toward a common aim. We mean that would-be competitors decide to aid each other instead.
Vewed from a traditional Darwinian perspective, this does not seem to make sense. By helping another, a competitor hurts its rate of reproduction or blunts its competitive edge. Yet it is easy to think of examples: a friend drives you to the dentist, though it makes her late for work. The cells in your body, rather than reproduce willy-nilly to selfishly expand their numbers, respect the greater needs of the body and multiply in an orderly fashion to create the kidney, liver and heart.
Once co-operation is expressed in this way, it seems amazing. Why weaken your fitness to increase that of a competitor? Why bother to look after anyone besides number one? Yet there is evidence that such practices occur among even the lowliest creatures. When one bacterium goes to the trouble of making an enzyme to digest its food, it is helping to feed neighbouring cells, too – rivals in the struggle to survive.
In the great scheme of life, this looks like a fatal anomaly. Natural selection should lead animals to behave in ways that increase their own chances of survival and reproduction, not improve the fortunes of others. So, for more than a century, scientists from a wide range of disciplines have attempted to explain how co-operation, altruism, and self-sacrifice arose in our dog-eat-dog world. Darwin was troubled by selfless behaviour – yet in his great works, the problem was a sideshow, a detail that had to be explained away. That attitude prevails among many biologists even today.
In stark contrast, we believe that our ability to co-operate goes hand in hand with succeeding in the struggle to survive, as surmised more than a century ago by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince and anarchist. In Mutual Aid (1902), Kropotkin wrote: “Besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest.”
One of our pair of co-operating writers, Martin Nowak, has spent more than two decades co-operating with many great minds to solve the mystery of how natural selection can lead to mutual aid. His studies, which blend biology and mathematics, show that co-operation is entirely compatible with the hard-boiled arithmetic of survival. Based on mathematical insights, he has used computers to create idealised communities, and charted the conditions in which co-operation can take hold and bloom.
Our confidence in what he has found has been bolstered by research on a wide range of species, from bugs to people. The result is the discovery of five basic mechanisms of co-operation: direct reciprocity (you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours); indirect reciprocity (the power of reputation); spatial games (the idea that it pays to be nicer to those who live closer to you); group selection (the power of the tribe); and kin selection (we help our relatives because blood is thicker than water).
Taken together, these five mechanisms tell us much about the way the world works. They reveal that your big brain evolved to cope with gossip, not the other way around. They explain why your guts have cone-like glands, to fend off that potentially deadly breakdown of cellular co-operation that we know as cancer; that you are more generous if you sense that you are being watched (even if you are not); that the fewer friends you have, the more strongly your fate is bound to theirs. They show that our genes may not be that selfish, after all; that no matter what we do, empires will always decline and fall; that if you are a co-operator, you will find yourself surrounded by other co-operators; and that to succeed in life, you need to work together.
Read more at The Telegraph
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