Cooperation

As we face new existential challenges, successfully making the next evolutionary transition will depend on our ability to increase cooperation in the pursuit of long term goals (new challenges require novel cooperative arrangements).

Cooperation in the world today:

"I believe that we humans, who know so much about cosmology and immunology, lack a framework for thinking about why and how humans cooperate... By necessity, useful new understandings of how humans cooperate and fail to cooperate is an interdisciplinary task. I don't believe that the obvious importance of such an effort guarantees that it will be successfully accomplished. Problems and challenges in everyday life in the home, office, factory, public places and global behavior such as conflict, pollution, resource sustainability are all being addressed with very little comprehensive knowledge about cooperation. In regard to cooperation theory, fragmentary and specialized knowledge is advancing in a dozen or more different fields, but in terms of putting this fragmented knowledge together into a systemic whole, we’re still in the pre-microscope era."
 - Howard Rheingold

"Martin Nowak of Harvard University has identified at least five basic mechanisms of cooperation. He shows 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."
- Roger Highfield

"We are coming very close to an understanding of human cooperation that can generalize to society as a whole. I am hopeful that these breakthroughs may eventually lead us to form a science of human peace and harmony."
- John Gottman, "The Trust Metric"

"For many human reciprocal altruists the anticipated repayment is not necessarily for the person who makes the initial sacrifice or even for their family members. The expectation is that sufficient others will engage in altruistic acts as needed to ensure the well being of those within the boundaries of the given community. The return to such long-sighted reciprocal altruists is the establishment of norms of cooperation that endure beyond the lifetime of any particular altruist."
- Margaret Levi, Reciprocal Altruism

"There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state." [We can blame China for their trade policies, and we can despise the rising dictatorship of Xi Jinping, but by doing that we may risk ignoring this high level of cooperation that exists in their society. More than anything else this could lead to China's ascendance as the United States sees its role in global politics decline. We in the West look at China and tend to focus on their state controlled media and politics, but the Chinese may be looking at the lack of cooperation in our government and wonder how we can be so backwards.]
- Geoffrey Miller

"We are descended solely from those better equipped with coalitional instincts. In this new world, power shifted from solitary alphas to the effectively coordinated down-alphabet, giving rise to a new, larger landscape of political threat and opportunity: rival groups or factions expanding at your expense or shrinking as a result of your dominance. And so a daunting new augmented reality was neurally kindled, overlying the older individual one. It is important to realize that this reality is constructed by and runs on our coalitional programs and has no independent existence. You are a member of a coalition only if someone (such as you) interprets you as being one, and you are not if no one does."
- John Tooby, Coalition Instincts

"For a social species like us, the benefits of cooperation (and the opportunity costs of its absence) can hardly be overstated."
- Oliver Scott Curry

The evolutionary basis:

"The two fundamental principles of evolution are mutation and natural selection. But evolution is constructive because of cooperation. New levels of organization evolve when the competing units on the lower level begin to cooperate. Cooperation allows specialization and thereby promotes biological diversity. Cooperation is the secret behind the open endedness of the evolutionary process. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world."
- Martin Nowak, "Five rules for the evolution of cooperation"

“A positive-sum game is a scenario in which agents have choices that can improve the lots of both of them at the same time. A classic positive-sum game in everyday life is the exchange of favors, where each person can confer a large benefit to another at a small cost to himself or herself. Examples include primates who remove ticks from each other's backs, hunters who share meat whenever one of them has felled an animal that is too big for him to consume on the spot, and parents who take turns keeping each other's children out of trouble. A key insight of evolutionary psychology is that human cooperation and the social emotions that support it, such as sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, and anger, were selected because they allow people to flourish in positive-sum games.” [In Pinker's earlier response to Wright's book Nonzero, he pointed out that "humans do not directly seek wider cooperation and more complex societal organization; they care only about comfort, sex, family, friendship, knowledge, pride, being entertained, and so on. An increase in social complexity is just one way of getting more of these..."]
- Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of Our Nature"

"The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have argued that an evolutionary dynamic which creates positive-sum games drove the major transitions in the history of life: the emergence of genes, chromosomes, bacteria, cells with nuclei, organisms, sexually reproducing organisms, and animal societies. In each transition, biological agents entered into larger wholes in which they specialized, exchanged benefits, and developed safeguards to prevent one from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole." [Nonzero sum cooperative relationships lead to emergent qualities; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.]
- Steven Pinker, "Positive-Sum Games"

"The evolution of cooperation and helping behaviour is a beautiful and simple explanation of how nature got complex, diverse and wonderful. It's not restricted to the charismatic meerkats, or fluffy bumble-bees. It is a general phenomenon which generates the biological hierarchies that characterise the natural world. Groups of individuals (genes, prokaryotes, single-celled and multicellular organisms) that could previously replicate independently, form a new, collective individual that can only replicate as a whole."
- Seirian Sumner

"It is the selective advantages arising from various synergistic effects that constitute the underlying cause of the apparently orthogenetic (or directional) aspect of evolutionary history, that is, the progressive emergence of complex, hierarchically organized systems."
- Peter Corning, "The Synergism Hypothesis," 1983

Cooperative interactions of various kinds, however they may occur, can produce novel combined effects - synergies - that in turn become causes of differential selection. In effect, the parts (genes, genomes, individuals, groups, or even species) that are responsible for producing the synergies may become interdependent “units” of evolutionary change. It applies both to biological and socio-economic evolution, most notably in humankind. This functional synergy is the underlying cause of cooperation, and complexity, in living systems.
- Peter Corning and Eörs Szathmáry, "Synergistic Selection": A Darwinian frame for the evolution of complexity. 2015

The next major transition in evolution must sustain and enhance our interdependent “collective survival enterprise.” In the final reckoning, if our species fails to meet this great survival challenge, we will squander our evolutionary inheritance and betray what untold generations of our ancestors struggled to achieve over millions of years.
- Peter Corning, Synergistic Selection

"Many neural sub-systems cooperate to maintain a unified and coherent field of conscious experience, sustaining the experiences we typically have as humans."
- Barry C. Smith

"Cancer is widespread among multicellular organisms, afflicting mammals, birds, fish and reptiles. It clearly has deep evolutionary roots, probably stretching back over a billion years to the dawn of multicellularity. Indeed, it represents a breakdown of multi-celled cooperation."
- Paul Davies, "Somatic Mutation Theory of Cancer"

"A cell can work only with standardized building blocks (amino acids, carbohydrates, DNA, RNA, etc.). Could something as complex as a cell ever work outside of standards? Further up the chain, in biology, the question is how to get huge numbers of unrelated individuals to cooperate flexibly. I suggest that standardization is at least part of the solution. People can cooperate in ample numbers without standards though all the known mechanisms. But, eventually, groups that use standards, for example of language (writing), value (money), and weights, outpace groups that do not." [That the US has refused the metric system may be more consequential than generally appreciated.]
- Rolf Dobelli, "General Standardization Theory"

"One struggles to think of a greater contribution to world cooperation than progress to universal communication. But automated, near-universal translation is coming. And it will change everything."
- Daniel L. Everett

"Humans were different. They didn’t just forage for information; they domesticated it, just as early farmers domesticated the land, rivers, plants and animals that surrounded them. Like farming, domesticating information was a collective project."
- David Christian, "The Noösphere"

"The metadiscipline of synoetics studies the cooperative interaction of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system whose mental power is greater than that of its components. It presents a picture of the integrated way in which many currently separate disciplines should be developed and taught to do justice to their mutual roles."
- Louis Fein, "The Computer-Related Science (Synnoetics) at a University in the Year 1975," unpublished paper (December 1960)

"I coined the term synoesis, parallel to symbiosis, and synoetic system, parallel to symbiotic system. I then decided that what we are really dealing with, typically nowadays, is not computer science - we do that as a branch of a much broader science which deals not only with individual entities having mental capabilities like a person or a computer but also deals with synoetic relationships between them." [This sounds similar to what Rachel Armstrong and others are researching today.]
- Louis Fein interview, 1979

Reasons for concern:

"Global human cooperation now teeters on a threshold. The accelerating wealth and industry of Earth's increasing inhabitants - itself a triumph of cooperation - is exhausting the ability of our home planet to support us all. Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation." [Collusion and corruption are another type of cooperation - a secret or illegal cooperation - to gain additional profit at other's expense. So one can see that cooperation is itself a part of competition, and where there are competing interests, those who are best able to form "countervailing powers," to use Kenneth Galbraith's term, will have a better chance at success.]
- Roger Highfield

"If we can create institutions and infrastructure to support truthful communication without costly signalling, the world will become a much more efficient place."
- Steve Omohundro, Costly Signalling

"In the artificial lulls when atavism is forced into abeyance we are happy to forget Hobbes’s admonition that it is only through the careful cultivation of institutions that stable peace is at least possible."
- Timothy Taylor

"Deception commends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of human cooperation."
- Sam Harris

"Perhaps our core problem today is that, though we are well evolved to cooperate in groups the size of hunter-gatherer clans (dozens or hundreds of people), we struggle to organize ourselves well at larger scales."
- David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands

"We don’t know how cooperation works when you go from small groups of people to a planetary level. We lack the knowledge for successful intervention. We come to this problem at crunch time with empty hands. We should worry about that."
- Daniel Haun

"Cooperation in societies is not always for the good: you can find cartels of anti-social people who don’t care at all for the common good and prefer to cooperate for keeping a status quo that suits them even if the collective outcome is a mediocre result."
- Gloria Origgi, "How To Be Bad Together: Antisocial Punishment of Pro-social Cooperators"

"Homophily lies at the root of many social and economic problems, and understanding it can help us better address the many issues that societies around the globe face, from inequality and immobility, to political polarization."
- Matthew O. Jackson, Homophily

"If we are trying to build an enduring and encompassing ethical society, tight boundaries around deserving beneficiaries of altruistic acts becomes problematic. If we accept such boundaries, we are quickly in the realm of wars and terrorism in which some populations are considered non-deserving of beneficence."
- Margaret Levi, Reciprocal Altruism

Case study among the Pirahã:

"What is there to learn? Let me give some examples from my own field research among Amazonian peoples.

Cooperation: I once thought it might be fun to teach the Pirahã people about Western games. So I organized a 'field day', with a tug of war, a foot race, and a sack race, among other things. In the foot race, one Pirahã fellow got out in front of everyone else. He then stopped and waited for all the others to catch up so they could cross together. The idea of winning was not only novel but unappealing. We cross the line together or I don't cross it. And the same went for the sack race. The tug of war contest was a joke — just guys keeping the slack out of the rope talking. The people loved it all, laughing and conversing all day and told me they had a good time. They taught me more than I ever taught them: you can have a great time and have everyone win. That is not a bad lesson. That is a fine lesson.

Pluralism: The Pirahãs, like the Narragansett and other American Indians, believe that you use your knowledge to serve yourself and to serve others in your community. There is no over-arching concept of Truth to which all members of society must conform.

Communalism: The Pirahãs seem to accept only knowledge that helps, not knowledge that coerces. Think of our English expression 'knowledge is power'. The concept as practiced in most industrial societies is really that 'knowledge is power for me so long as I have it and you don't'. But to many peoples like the Pirahãs, knowledge is something for us all to share. It is power to the people, not power to a person. The Pirahãs don't allow top secret conversations. Every member of their society knows what every other member is doing and how they are doing it. There is a communal mind. There is freedom and security in group knowledge.

Toleration: In Western society we associate tolerance with education — the more you learn, the more you tolerate. But there is little evidence for this thesis when we look at our society as a whole (where education is even compatible with religious fundamentalism, one of the worst dangers for the future of our species). Yet among some hunter-gatherer societies, toleration of physical, mental, and religious diversity can be much greater than our so-called pluralistic Western societies. Not everyone has to look alike, act alike, behave alike, or believe alike. In fact, they don't even have to pretend to do so.

I am optimistic that we will learn the simple and useful truths of cooperation, pluralism, communalism, and toleration and that no one Idea or Truth should be the ring to bind us all."
- Daniel L. Everett

Future prospects for cooperative engagement:

"Non-zero-sum games have always been part of life. You have them in hunter-gatherer societies, but then through technological evolution, new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non-zero-sum games, involving more people over larger territory. Social structure adapts to accommodate this possibility and to harness this productive potential. ...I think we're going to have to have a major round of moral progress in the world. I think you're just going to have to see less hatred among groups, less bigotry, and, you know, racial groups, religious groups, whatever. There's going to have to be moral progress. There's going to have to be a lessening of the amount of hatred in the world, given how dangerous it's becoming. ...Now, social organization has reached the global level ...we've come too far to screw it up now."

- Robert Wright

"We can apply the modern AI technique of deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to age-old questions in social science such as the mystery of the emergence of cooperation. As a consequence, we may be able to better understand complex multi-agent systems such as the economy, traffic systems, or the ecological health of our planet - all of which depend on our continued cooperation." [Game theory is described as “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.” The use of AI to study cooperation is an ideal application.]
- DeepMind

"Are there long-term trends we could feel optimistic about? Thirty years of work on the evolutionary trajectory of cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination. It seems likely that when similar models are produced for varying degrees of deceit and self-deception, long-term trends toward honesty to others and self will (at least under some conditions) be favored. Is there any reason to believe that we will survive long enough to enjoy any of these long-term trends? This is far less certain. Evolution does not plan for contingencies that have not yet occurred and the vast majority of species go extinct. There is no reason to expect humans are exempt from these rules."
- Robert Trivers

"Given the history of human society in cooperatively plundering the resources of a meager but beautiful planet with currently abundant resources, who can possibly be optimistic about the long-term future of humanity?"
- George Smoot

"Remember this if you are ever tempted to write off all humanity as a lost cause. We have our flaws, without a doubt, but we can also lay claim to being the species shaped by evolution to possess the most open hearts and the most abundant capacity for care on earth."
- Abigail Marsh


Keywords: cooperation, emergence, evolution, game theory, interdependence, nonzero, reciprocity, symbiosis

Additional resources:
Corning, Peter. 2018. Synergistic Selection. (more by this author)
Moss, Gordon. 2011. The Dawning Age of Cooperation. 
Nowak, Martin. 2011. The Evolution of Cooperation.
Wright, Robert. 2000. Nonzero.

 Additional quotes (uncategorized):

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation."
- Bertrand Russell, "Human Society in Ethics and Politics" (1954) p212

"My argument, stated generally and briefly, is that the driving force in nature, on this kind of planet with this sort of biosphere, is cooperation."
- Lewis Thomas, The Fragile Species

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand."
- Matthew 12:25

"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
- Benjamin Franklin

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
- Aristotle

"Knowledge comes by taking things apart: analysis. But wisdom comes by putting things together."
- John A. Morrison

"When spiderwebs unite, they can tie up a lion."
- African Proverb

In a world increasingly connected not just by trade in goods but also by the exchange of violence, information, viruses, and emissions, the importance of social preferences [such as a concern for the well-being of others and for fair procedures] in underwriting human cooperation, even survival, may now be greater...
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and It's Evolution

Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time ― a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.
- Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan, The Mermaid's Tale

John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry in "The Major Transitions in Evolution" wrote that the inculcation of proper behavior is often achieved by ritual and myth. (272) So that "throughout their lives, in speech, story, and song, all people sing the same tune" (Plato, Laws). To see an example of this, John Miller in his book, "A Crude Look at the Whole" writes that on the island of Bali, the need for coordinated cropping by farmers opened up "a niche for an elaborate religious institution with various shrines and temples tied to the irrigation systems." Balinese rice farming is an example of system wide cooperation leading to centuries of sustainable agriculture.