Evolution Thrives On Cooperation
The process of evolution is often described by the phrase “survival of the fittest,” coined by Charles Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer.1 The phrase reflects a popular sentiment that nature is best described as, in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s colorful and oft-quoted expression, “red in tooth and claw.”2 But Spencer’s phrase is misleading, inasmuch as he was applying it according to his own idiosyncratic views, while failing to properly reflect Darwin’s attitude toward the theory he developed. It directs our attention to organisms and species on the cusp of survival. But, as I shall argue here, they are the least fit and therefore least relevant in evolution’s ability to make progress toward an aggregate system of life that is increasingly abundant, diverse, and collectively capable. Life’s progress comes primarily from “proliferation of the fittest.” It might seem insignificant to focus on life’s ability to proliferate, far beyond its ability to just survive, but the payoff is enormous. This opens up the possibility for an even bigger idea: Evolution seeks sets of patterns (such as genes) that cooperate toward their mutual proliferation. And nature selects some patterns over others by simply proliferating them more rapidly. Culling of the unfit may be part of the evolutionary process for early planetary life, but it is not required for evolutionary progress after life has achieved a critical threshold of intelligence. This article describes a cooperation-based interpretation of evolution that extends the Gaia hypothesis proposed decades ago by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.
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It is the nature of life to proliferate—to become more diverse and abundant in whatever environment it exists. Wherever in the universe planetary life is established, as it continues it will likely discover millions of ways to adapt and flourish. After a few billion years, any such accommodating planet will likely be covered with life, spectacularly diverse and wildly prolific—call it constructive proliferation.
Why, then, do we tend to model evolution in terms of its destructive elements—competition and culling of the unfit? Why do we dwell on life’s failures—species extinctions and organisms that die before they procreate? They play almost no role at all in evolution’s ability to make progress in life—toward ever greater abundance, diversity, and capability. The traditional manner of thinking about evolution in terms of competition and elimination misses this important element of the process, namely constructive proliferation.
Modern thinking on evolution has been heavily influenced by the renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, himself reflecting the work of Robert Trivers, William D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, and others pursuing a “selfish gene” model of the evolutionary process.3 Dawkins revealed valuable insights into evolution by showing us how to look at life’s development from a gene’s eye view. As such, he focuses more on the destructive than constructive elements of evolution. For example, Dawkins describes evolution metaphorically in terms of a “Darwinian chisel” sculpting the characteristics of a species: “The gene pool of a species is the ever-changing marble upon which the chisels, the fine, sharp, exquisitely delicate, deeply probing chisels of natural selection, go to work.”4He uses the chisel metaphor to show how a subtractive process, such as chipping away at a big block of marble, can eventually reveal a beautiful statue. By analogy, we are supposed to believe that evolution’s subtractive process of culling the unfit can eventually reveal a beautifully adapted, incredibly capable apex predator, such as a lion.
It is the nature of life to proliferate—to become more diverse and abundant in whatever environment it exists.
The phrase “survival of the fittest” does indeed reflect this subtractive process, but as I shall argue, it leaves us with a dilemma—before a lion can survive, it must exist. “Survival of the fittest” does not explain how a new species is created, a point made by the evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner in his aptly titled book Arrival of the Fittest.5 Before a lion can survive, it must first arrive. So, by what mechanism is new and better life created in the first place?
Along with the negative aspect of evolution that culls unfit life, there must also be a positive aspect to account for the initial creation and ongoing proliferation of new and successful life. It must be more than just the effect of a random mutation or genetic recombination, because neither can account for how a slightly different set of gene patterns might be better. And since the overall system of life is so prolific (over time), we may reasonably conclude that the positive aspect of the evolutionary process must be greater in magnitude than the negative aspect, perhaps far greater. So, let us try to tease apart the positive and negative facets of evolution. In other words, rather than focusing on evolution’s failures, let us turn our attention to its creative successes. To do so, we must consider evolution in terms of nature’s most basic elements. And when we do, we find cooperation everywhere.
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Life is all about patterns of matter and energy that are able to self-organize and replicate. There is no such thing as natural benefit to life other than the greater proliferation of its underlying patterns. Everything of interest or benefit to life comes down to pattern proliferation, which—for biological life on Earth—involves gene-like patterns (in DNA or RNA) acting collectively toward their mutual replication. Inside a typical cell, molecules collectively catalyze themselves into ever greater abundance by combining nutrients that have permeated through the cell wall. This cooperative process continues until the critical molecules have become sufficiently abundant to generate two cells, allowing the cell to divide. Cell division is the very basis for life, and the central mechanism by which life is able to proliferate. This is made possible by cooperation among the cell’s metabolic molecules. At higher levels, cells cooperate to produce organs, and organs cooperate to produce highly capable organisms. Higher still, organisms cooperate in collectivities like beehives, ant colonies, and human societies.
Cooperation among certain things at one level can produce something very different at a higher level. And the very different something that emerges from cooperation can sometimes yield new value—call it pattern synergy—recognizing that when certain things are carefully arranged into a particular pattern, they can collectively produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts—often referred to as emergence. The gears and springs of a mechanical clock, for example, take on much more value when they are precisely arranged into a device that keeps accurate track of time. And, just as the design of a better clock requires enhanced cooperation among its gears and springs, the evolutionary design of better life also requires enhanced cooperation among its various components—molecules, cells, organs, and limbs.
The concept of pattern synergy was recognized at the molecular level (and above) by the famed designer and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller in his 1975 book Synergetics, in which he defined synergy as “behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.”6Fuller’s work focused primarily on the geometric designs that naturally emerge from certain combinations of atoms and molecules. But the concept of pattern synergy can apply at many higher levels as well. At each level, emerging synergies become the building blocks for the next higher level.
Life is all about patterns of matter and energy that are able to self-organize and replicate.
Another contributor to the concept of pattern synergy is biologist Peter Corning, starting with his 1983 book The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution.7 In his 2003 book Nature’s Magic, he notes: “The thesis, in brief, is that synergy—a vaguely familiar term to many of us—is actually one of the great governing principles of the natural world. … It is synergy that has been responsible for the evolution of cooperation in nature and humankind …”8
Then there is Robert Wright’s runaway 2000 bestseller, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which focused on a critical distinction made by game theorists in their modeling of relationships as either zero-sum or nonzero-sum. Zero-sum games involve competitive relationships in which the positive gain of the winner equals the negative loss of the loser, summing to zero. Nonzero-sum games, on the other hand, involve relationships in which the interests of the game’s participants overlap. Two players of a game can both win, yielding a positive (nonzero) benefit to both. In real life, people find many ways of cooperating synergistically toward their mutual benefit, and Wright devotes his entire book to the proposition that life’s most successful relationships among organisms—both within and between species—are based on these kinds of nonzero win-win scenarios: “My hope is to illuminate a kind of force—the nonzero-sum dynamic—that has crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth so far.”9
As an example of Wright’s way of thinking, consider how patterns from very different domains can cooperate toward their mutual proliferation. Cooperation among humans accelerated greatly about 10,000 years ago when our ancestors began working together in fields to cultivate farm crops, such as wheat. Those agricultural activity patterns persisted and proliferated because they allowed the genes of humans and the genes of wheat to mutually proliferate. And just a century ago, the patterns of materials and activities underlying tractor production began cooperating with the patterns of genes in humans as well as the patterns of genes in all species of agricultural production toward a veritable “orgy” of mutual proliferation. The human population has doubled twice since then, from 2 billion to 8 billion. And patterns of production in agriculture and industrial manufacturing have also proliferated roughly in tandem with humans. Our modern economy is highly positive-sum, thanks to the many synergies that result during production.
Life’s progress comes primarily from “proliferation of the fittest” … far beyond its ability to just survive.
In most nonzero-sum game-theoretic paradigms, the players have the option of cooperating (as if synergistically) toward their mutual benefit. However, they also have the option of betraying (or defecting), which may earn an even higher short-term payoff than cooperating. This tradeoff between the short-term temptation of betrayal versus the long-term benefits of ongoing cooperation was recognized by Robert Axelrod as a fundamental characteristic of life’s many relationships. In The Evolution of Cooperation (1984), Axelrod ran through computer simulations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and discovered a successful strategy for encouraging ongoing cooperation based on reciprocity--known as tit-for-tat. “So while it pays to be nice, it also pays to be retaliatory. Tit-for-tat combines these desirable properties. It is nice, forgiving, and retaliatory.”10
Unfortunately, any system of cooperative life will naturally breed cheaters and defectors. Let’s just call them all parasites. Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson has described parasites as “predators that eat prey in units of less than one.”11 Here, we recognize them as species that routinely act to divert life’s critical resources away from their best synergistic uses—away from the hosts that earn them to the parasites that simply steal them. Wilson goes on to say: “Tolerable parasites are those that have evolved to ensure their own survival and reproduction but at the same time with minimum pain and cost to the host.” While parasites can be wildly prolific in the short term, the burdens they place on their hosts ultimately limit their ability to proliferate over the long run. Since parasite species depend on their host species for future infestations, the relationship between them is ultimately competitive and dysergistic. There are a couple of ways that nature can eliminate parasitism: Mutations to the host species can sometimes discover an immunity to the parasite. Even better, mutations to the parasite species can sometimes discover a way for it to become mutualistic with the host. Parasites are actually prime candidates for discovering new forms of mutually beneficial cooperation. After all, the flow of benefit from the host to the parasite is halfway to the kind of relationship evolution prefers. To become fully mutualistic, all that is needed is for the parasite to reciprocate some sort of commensurate benefit to the host.
Consider how E. coli bacteria in the guts of most animals evolved to provide a valuable digestive service in exchange for a steady supply of food on which the bacteria can feed. The initial infestation of bacteria into the guts of animals, long ago, might have started out as purely parasitic. But, if so, mutations to E. coli bacteria at some point found a way to cooperate by reciprocating benefit to their hosts. No matter how cooperative relationships come to exist, they are always preferable to—more prolific than—competitive relationships. In Richard Dawkins’ words: “Parasites become gentler to their hosts, more symbiotic.”12
Nature’s forces cause synergies to emerge from certain cooperative arrangements of things and activities. And it happens at all levels, from the atomic to the galactic. At every level, a new type of synergy emerges from cooperation among patterns of things and activities at lower levels. Evolution’s ability to discover new and better forms of pattern synergy at ever higher levels of cooperation is the natural source of all creativity.
By shifting the emphasis to evolution’s successes rather than its failures, we reveal a clear directionality … always toward ever greater degrees of synergistic cooperation.
Nowhere is pattern synergy more obvious or valuable than in the arrangement of the human brain, where 85 billion neurons cooperate to produce a vivid conscious awareness and ability to reason. In fact, each organ of a human body consists of many cells that all cooperate to produce a specific biological function. And at an even higher level, the complementary functions of human organs and limbs cooperate to produce a body capable of performing ballet. Cooperation is everywhere in life, within organisms and among them.
Many different types of species routinely cooperate toward their mutual proliferation by exchanging various services and molecular resources. We have already considered the mutually beneficial relationship between animals and the E. coli bacteria in their guts. As another example, bees provide a pollination service to flowering plants in exchange for nutritious nectar. In Entangled Life (2020), Merlin Sheldrake describes how certain fungi attached to plant roots can isolate and donate critical environmental nutrients to the plants in exchange for carbohydrates: “Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi … which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the ‘wood wide web’.”13 These are just a few of the most obvious cases in which vastly different species find ways of cooperating toward their mutual proliferation. There are many other forms of cooperation among species that are far less obvious. When they are all tallied up, it becomes apparent that each species depends on many others for its existence, and the entire system of life develops almost as if it were a single self-regulating organism.
Cooperation toward mutual proliferation appears to be what nature seeks.
At ever higher levels, cooperation toward mutual proliferation appears to be what nature seeks. The occasional discovery of a better form of cooperation is what accounts for all types of evolving progress. (The term better here means more mutually prolific.) From nature’s perspective, the only way to define cooperation is in terms of patterns acting collectively toward their mutual replication and ongoing proliferation. Cooperation is the basis for everything of benefit or value to life. In this sense, evolution’s “purpose” is to discover ever better forms of cooperation among replicating patterns of things and activities, causing their ever-increasing mutual proliferation.
So, life is about much more than just survival. Evolution seeks patterns that cooperate toward mutual proliferation. And the better they cooperate, the more they proliferate. From this perspective, natural selection works through the differential proliferation of patterns (such as genes)—some proliferating more rapidly than others (of which some will experience negative proliferation). Over time, any life-accommodating world may naturally become covered with species that best embody and embrace cooperation, making them most prolific. Importantly, in this interpretation of evolution, neither competition nor culling of the unfit is required for evolutionary progress.
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Pioneers in this view of life are the chemist James Lovelock and the biologist Lynn Margulis, both of whom saw cooperation everywhere in the aggregate system of life. Margulis, for example, developed a cooperation-based theory of the origin of the eukaryotic cell—the complex cellular structure out of which all plants and animals are made—from simpler prokaryotic cells. Margulis theorized that the more complex eukaryotes resulted from the symbiotic union of different types of prokaryotes. Perhaps the very first eukaryotic cell resulted from a parasitic infestation by one type of prokaryote into another type. If so, the parasitic prokaryote then discovered a way to provide benefit to its host, and the parasitism gave way to mutualism. The patterns in those combined prokaryotes stumbled into a way of cooperating toward their mutual proliferation by together creating a better type of cell, a process Margulis called endosymbiosis.14
Most biologists were initially skeptical, but the tenacious Margulis heroically persisted in developing and presenting evidence to support her theory, and in the fullness of time her peers were forced by the weight of the evidence to finally accept it. An early adopter of Margulis’ theory was James Lovelock, who showed how different species naturally coevolve in ways that allow them to cooperatively regulate critical aspects of their common environment. Lovelock named his theory Gaia, after the primal Mother Earth goddess from Greek mythology.15
Nowhere is pattern synergy more obvious or valuable than in the arrangement of the human brain.
To the extent any two species in a system of aggregate life successfully cooperate toward their mutual proliferation, they together may become increasingly abundant. Plants that participate in cooperative relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, for example, will tend to proliferate more rapidly than plants that don’t. So, it is not just a coincidence that our world has become covered by such cooperative plants. By comparison, noncooperative species become relatively diluted and decreasingly relevant to the overall system. The species that are best able to cooperate toward their mutual proliferation increasingly influence the entire system of life. In various ways, they collectively produce a stable environment that is conducive to their mutual ongoing proliferation. Thus, a subsystem of cooperation may naturally rise like a Phoenix out of the ashes of primitive and chaotic life. Species cultivated by farmers (corn, wheat, pigs, chickens) have certainly risen in abundance relative to other species due to their cooperation with humans, arguably the most poignant example of which is the domestication of wild wolves into modern dogs.
The entire web of life becomes more robust as semiredundant cooperative mechanisms emerge in the set of all interspecies relationships. For example, in addition to bees, there are many other species of insects and small birds that redundantly pollinate flowering plants. So, if a few bee species were to go extinct, other pollinating species would likely pick up the slack. Likewise, there are many species of plants that redundantly produce the oxygen required by animals, and many species of animals that redundantly produce the carbon dioxide required by plants.
Through all the redundancies across the many various mechanisms of cooperation, the whole system of aggregate life develops an evolutionary toughness, becoming increasingly stable, robust, and resilient to exogenous shocks. Accordingly, Margulis titled an essay on the subject “Gaia Is a Tough Bitch.” It describes how our planet’s temperature and atmosphere “are produced and maintained by the sum of life.”16 In her 1998 book Symbiotic Planet, Margulis says that plants and animals cooperate to hold the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere steady, at a level that “hovers between a global fire hazard and the risk of widespread death by asphyxiation.”17
According to Lovelock’s hypothesis, many different species cooperate to produce a very stable system of aggregate life able to regulate its own critical parameters—a capability known as homeostasis. And the interdependencies among species cause the entire system to increasingly act like a robust superorganism at a higher level. This view of earthly life as a superorganism was characterized by Richard Dawkins thusly: “Lovelock rightly regards homeostatic self-regulation as one of the characteristic activities of living organisms, and this leads him to the daring hypothesis that the whole Earth is equivalent to a single living organism. … Lovelock clearly takes his Earth and organism comparison seriously enough to devote a whole book to it. He really means it.”18
The discovery of new gene patterns that are better able to cooperate … is the constructive mechanism through which evolution develops new and better biological life.
Dawkins’ writings have often carried the assumption that evolution happens in a parallel fashion among multiple competing organisms from which the unfit are fatally culled. With regard to the evolution of Gaia, for example, he wrote: “there would have to have been a set of rival Gaias, presumably on different planets. … The Universe would have to be full of dead planets whose homeostatic regulation systems had failed, with, dotted around, a handful of successful, well-regulated planets of which Earth is one.”
As evolution is described here, however, it does not require competition among multiple species, along with extinction by some. The discovery of new gene patterns that are better able to cooperate toward their mutual proliferation is the constructive mechanism through which evolution develops new and better biological life. Neither competition nor culling of the unfit is necessarily required.
To his already enormous credit, however, Dawkins also wrote: “I do not deny that somebody may, one day, produce a workable model of the evolution of Gaia … although I personally doubt it. But if Lovelock has such a model in mind he does not mention it.”19 Well, allow me to suggest a workable model of an evolving Gaia.
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Natural selection chooses some patterns of life over others primarily on the basis of their respective abilities to proliferate. This allows us to conceive of evolution operating on a sole entity, such as a single system of aggregate life composed of many interdependent species. It is a serial style of evolution based on ever better forms of cooperation among its various species. The beneficial changes resulting from this style of evolution simply unfold sequentially through time, as new and better forms of cooperation are discovered. And the net effect is ever greater proliferation of aggregate life. It appears to be a much more accurate description of how evolution really works than the widely accepted parallel style that relies on competition.
This serial style of evolution applies to Lovelock’s model of Gaia in which evolving patterns build themselves up through ever better relationships of cooperation. From among those patterns, the fittest—which tend to be the most cooperative in this model—are naturally selected by way of their greater proliferation, without any need for competition or culling of the unfit.
Consider the 2016 book by Russian complexity scientist Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth.20 The central idea is that physical competition and mortal conflict were necessary for eliminating entire groups of noncooperators, leaving just the groups of cooperators to survive. But when we model natural selection in terms of differential proliferation, we may conclude that no war was ever required. While many wars certainly did happen over the past 10,000 years, general cooperation was likely destined to emerge and flourish even if they hadn’t happened.
Cooperation naturally emerges because it creates mutually beneficial synergies. And those synergies yield evolutionary advantage to the cooperators, enabling their greater proliferation. Two cooperative families, for example, might take turns caring for each other’s children, realizing synergistic efficiencies that would enable both families to diligently raise more children than would have otherwise been possible. We should therefore expect groups full of cooperators to proliferate their populations more rapidly than groups full of competitors. And any planetary system of sufficiently intelligent life will, over time, become increasingly dominated by the faster-growing groups of cooperators, without anyone ever having to die prematurely.
Life is about much more than just survival. Evolution seeks patterns that cooperate toward mutual proliferation. And the better they cooperate, the more they proliferate.
This cooperation-based interpretation of evolution gives us new insight into a decades-old debate among evolutionists over the concept of group selection. The debate focuses on whether natural selection needs to operate at the group level to explain how group-benefiting behaviors can naturally emerge. To fully expose the dilemma, Richard Dawkins imagines two very different groups—one composed of cooperative altruists and the other composed of individuals who are purely selfish. Dawkins suggests that the group of altruists, “whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first.” But, there’s a catch: “Even in the group of altruists, there will be a dissenting minority who refuse to make any sacrifice. If there is just one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the rest, then he, by definition, is more likely than they are to survive and have children. Each of these children will tend to inherit his selfish traits. After several generations of this natural selection, the ‘altruistic group’ will be overrun by the selfish individuals, and will be indistinguishable from the selfish group.”21
Dawkins has expressed his belief that natural selection operating at the level of genes is sufficient to account for the emergence of group-benefiting behaviors. And arguments presented here support that belief. When natural selection is defined as proliferation of the fittest (rather than elimination of the unfit), there is then no difference between selection at the genetic level and selection at the group level. Groups are selected to the extent genes within them proliferate.
Groups are naturally selected by their differential ability to grow their populations. And cooperative groups will always tend to proliferate more rapidly than uncooperative groups. Mutually beneficial cooperation simply bubbles forth from within such a group. No individual needs to die, and no group needs to be eliminated, for group selection to occur. In fact, no competition at all between groups is ever required for evolutionary progress, other than to see which can sustainably grow its population the fastest.
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The evolutionary value of cooperation over competition was recognized more than a century ago by the Russian intelligentsia. But the concept remained largely ignored by evolutionary thinkers in the West until nobleman Peter Kropotkin was exiled to English territory for political reasons. There, he wrote a series of articles (in English) discussing Darwin’s central theme of “struggle for existence,” later collected into a book titled Mutual Aid.22 About a century later, evolutionary theorist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould penned one of his monthly columns titled “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot.” “Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more common results of struggle for existence,” Gould opined. “Perhaps communion rather than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most circumstances.”23 Gould then presented a fascinating account of how and why Russians were more predisposed than Westerners to appreciate the evolutionary value of cooperation among animals and among humans.
Just a subtle twist in how we think of natural selection opens a new interpretation of evolution that emphasizes cooperation. We have simply elevated our focus, away from nature’s less favored species that are concerned with mere survival, upward to nature’s more preferred species capable of rapid proliferation. By shifting the emphasis to evolution’s successes rather than its failures, we reveal a clear directionality in how all kinds of progressive systems naturally develop—always toward ever greater degrees of synergistic cooperation among replicating patterns. That natural directionality determines how nature defines goodness and betterment, providing a bedrock foundation for a new system of naturalized philosophy. It also suggests a purpose to life—to advance evolution in the direction it was always destined to go—toward ever greater cooperation, mutualism, and symbiosis.