#3-Competition or Cooperation?

I love the scientists at the start of the twentieth century. They said things like “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.” Lord Kelvin said that in 1900, five years before Einstein’s first paper was published.

I think that, if we have learned anything, it is that things are usually more complicated than we think they are. No matter what you’re talking about, and no matter when you’re saying it.

For instance, I believe this to be true of evolution. We all know how it works: survival of the fittest; red in tooth and claw.

The bacterium that is most resistant to a given antibiotic survives to propagate. But it can be a little more complicated than that.

For one thing, it may be the bacteria itself that is producing the toxin, eliminating its competition (such as vibrio cholerae). But its siblings also aren’t affected. In fact they’re helped, because now they don’t have any competition, either. They are actually helping each other, a form of cooperation.

Two others (pseudomonas and pedobacter) cannot move on a dry surface. But combine them, and instead of competing, they take cooperation a step further and can ooze along in search of food.

We are all familiar with such examples of different species working together, such as bees and flowers, peas and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, or coral with its pretty, photosynthetic algae. What we don’t think about much are the social species that work together, cooperating within the species to out-compete other species and the environment.

Many of these, ourselves included, show signs of intelligence. Because they are social they are required to communicate (as bees do), so they develop languages (and like Orcas, these can lead to cultures). They learn from and teach one another skills (lions have been seen doing this). They assist one another and work together (even writing blogs and books).

In simulations researchers have found that ‘cooperators’ form networks that grow over time and consistently outperform competitors whose networks tend to be divisive (‘We can’t both be first, so why should I help you?’).

In a previous session we discussed the hubris in assuming that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. Consider how long all this has been going on, and over how much territory. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that some species, somewhere, some time, has figured out that if they stopped competing with each other and started cooperating, they’d be way ahead of the game?

And if they did, what then?