generated by a nuclear power station in a neighboring state. The barista, being a pretentious sort of fellow, made the coffee with mineral water from Fiji. As for that flaky croissant, the flour came from Canada, the butter from France, and the eggs from a local cooperative. The pastry was heated and browned in a Chinese-made oven. Many more people worked in supply lines that straddle the planet to bring these staples together.
Delivering that hot coffee and croissant also relied on a vast number of ideas, which have been widely disseminated by the remarkable medium of language. The result is a tightly woven network of cooperation stretching across the generations, as great ideas are generated, passed on, used, and embellished, from the first person to drink a beverage based on roasted seeds to the invention of the light bulb that illuminates the coffee shop, to the patenting of the first espresso machine.
The result, that simple everyday breakfast, is an astonishing cooperative feat that straddles both space and time. That little meal relies on concepts and ideas and inventions that have been passed down and around among vast numbers of people over hundreds, even thousands of years. The modern world is an extraordinary collective enterprise. The knowledge of how to select beans, make flour, build ovens, and froth milk is splintered in hundreds of heads. Today, the extent to which our brains collaborate matters as much as the size of our brains.
This is the bright side of biology. The range and the extent to which we work together make us supreme cooperators, the greatest in the known universe. In this respect, our close relatives don’t even come close. Take four hundred chimpanzees and put them in economy class on a seven-hour flight. They would, in all likelihood, stumble off the plane at their destination with bitten ears, missing fur, and bleeding limbs. Yet millions of us tolerate being crammed together this way so we can roam about the planet.
Our breathtaking ability to cooperate is one of the main reasons we have managed to survive in every ecosystem on Earth, from scorched, sun-baked deserts to the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the dark, crushing ocean depths. Our remarkable ability to join forces has enabled us to take the first steps in a grand venture to leave the confines of our atmosphere and voyage toward the moon and the stars beyond.
By cooperation, I mean more than simply working toward a common aim. I mean something more specific, that would-be competitors decide to aid each other instead. This does not seem to make sense when viewed from a traditional Darwinian perspective. By helping another, a competitor hurts its own fitness—its rate of reproduction—or simply 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; you donate fifty dollars to charity rather than spending it on yourself. The cells in your body, rather than reproduce willy nilly to selfishly expand their own numbers, respect the greater needs of the body and multiply in an orderly fashion to create the kidney, the liver, the heart, and other vital organs.
Many everyday situations can be viewed as choices about whether or not to cooperate. Let’s say you want to open a savings account with a British bank (as we discovered in Mary Poppins, which appeared long before the credit crunch, “a British bank is run with precision”). Imagine that you are standing at the counter as a smiling clerk patiently explains the various options on offer. Banks like to confuse their customers by offering a large number of accounts that differ in terms of fees, interest rates, access, and conditions. If you ask for the best interest rate, the clerk can interpret this apparently simple question in two ways. From his point of view, the best interest rate is the most meager and restrictive, the one that earns the bank the maximum profit. From the customer’s point of view, the best rate is the one that earns the most money. If the clerk offers the former, that is an example of defection. But if he recommends an account that gives you, and not the bank, the maximum return, that is an example of cooperation.
Once cooperation is expressed in this way, it seems amazing. Why weaken your own fitness to increase the fitness of a competitor? Why bother to look after anyone besides number one? Cooperation goes against the grain of self-interest. Cooperation is irrational. From the perspective of Darwin’s formulation for the struggle for existence, it makes no sense to aid a potential rival, yet there is evidence that this occurs 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 neighboring cells too—rivals in the struggle to survive.
This looks like a fatal anomaly in the great scheme of life. Natural selection should lead animals to behave in ways that increase their own chances of survival and reproduction, not improve the fortunes of others. In the never-ending scrabble for food, territory, and mates in evolution, why would one individual ever bother to go out of its way to help another?
BEYOND COOPERATION
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
—George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
Scientists from a wide range of disciplines have attempted for more than a century to explain how cooperation, altruism, and self-sacrifice arose in our dog-eat-dog world. Darwin himself was troubled by selfless behavior. Yet in his great works, the problem of cooperation was a sideshow, a detail that had to be explained away. That attitude prevails among many biologists even today.
In stark contrast, I believe that our ability to cooperate goes hand in hand with succeeding in the struggle to survive, as surmised more than a century ago by Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), the Russian prince and anarchist communist who believed that a society freed from the shackles of government would thrive on communal enterprise. 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. This suggestion … was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself.”
I have spent more than two decades cooperating with many great minds to solve the mystery of how natural selection can lead to mutual aid, so that competition turns into cooperation. I have introduced some new ideas to this well-explored field and refined this mix with my own specialty, which relies on blending mathematics and biology. My studies show that cooperation is entirely compatible with the hard-boiled arithmetic of survival in an unremittingly cold-eyed and competitive environment. Based on mathematical insights, I have created idealized communities in a computer and charted the conditions in which cooperation can take hold and bloom. My confidence in what I have found has been bolstered by research on a wide range of species, from bugs to people. In light of all this work, I have now pinned down five basic mechanisms of cooperation. The way that we human beings collaborate is as clearly described by mathematics as the descent of the apple that once fell in Newton’s garden.
These mechanisms tell us much about the way the world works. They reveal, for example, that your big brain evolved to cope with gossip, not the other way around; that your guts have cone-like glands to fend off that potentially deadly breakdown of cellular cooperation 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; genes may not be that selfish, after all; if you are a cooperator, you will find yourself surrounded by other cooperators so that what you reap is what you sow; no matter what we do, empires will always decline and fall; and to succeed in life, you need to work together—pursuing the snuggle for existence, if you like—just as much as you strive to win the struggle for existence. In this way, the quest to understand cooperation has enabled us to capture the essence of all kinds of living, breathing, red-blooded evolving processes.
Cooperation—not competition—underpins innovation. To spur creativity, and to encourage people to come up with original ideas, you need to use the lure of the carrot, not fear of the stick. Cooperation
