Читать книгу SuperCooperators - Roger Highfield - Страница 7

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Biology has a dark side. Charles Darwin referred to this shadowy aspect of nature as the struggle for existence. He realized that competition is at the very heart of evolution. The fittest win this endless “struggle for life most severe” and all others perish. In consequence, every creature that crawls, swims, and flies today has ancestors that once successfully thrived and reproduced more often than their unfortunate competitors. As for the rest, they forfeited any chance to contribute to the next generation. They lost, and now they’re gone.

The struggle was born at least 4 billion years ago, with the first primitive cells. They were simple bacteria, each one little more than a tiny, organized collection of chemicals. If one of these chemical machines had an advantage over its peers, it would reproduce faster. Given better-than-average access to a limited food source, it would prosper and its rivals perish. This struggle continues, and across a spectrum of habitats. Today, Earth is the planet of the cell. Microorganisms now teem in almost every habitat, from poles to deserts to geysers, rocks, and the inky depths of the oceans. Even in our own bodies, bacterial cells outnumber our own. When adding up the total number of cells on Earth today—around 10 to the power of 30, or 1 followed by 30 zeroes—all you have to do is estimate the number of bacterial cells; the rest is pocket change.

The struggle can also be found in those organized collections of cells that we call animals. On the African savannah, a lion crouches in the long grass, muscles tensed and senses tightly focused on a nearby herd. Slowly and silently it stalks the antelope and then suddenly, in a burst of speed, sprints toward an animal, leaps, grabs its neck, and pierces the skin, blood vessels, and windpipe with its long, sharp teeth. It drags the prey to the ground and holds tight until the antelope breathes its last. When the lion finishes with its kill, a shroud of vultures wraps the bloody remains.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin remarked that modern man was born of the same struggle on the same continent. “Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” Our ancestors spread out to colonize the Earth during the last 60,000 years or so, outcompeting archaic species such as Homo erectus and the big-brained Neanderthals (though if you are European, Asian, or New Guinean, you may have a trace of Neanderthal blood racing through your veins). The struggle for existence continues apace, from competition between supermarkets to drive down prices to cutthroat rivalry between Wall Street firms.

In the game of life we are all driven by the struggle to succeed. We all want to be winners. There is the honest way to achieve this objective. Run faster than the pack. Jump higher. See farther. Think harder. Do better. But, as ever, there is the dark side, the calculating logic of self-interest that dictates that one should never help a competitor. In fact, why not go further and make life harder for your rivals? Why not cheat and deceive them too? There’s the baker who palms you off with a stale loaf, rather than the one fresh out of the oven. There’s the waiter who asks for a tip when the restaurant has already added a service charge. There’s the pharmacist who recommends a well-known brand, when you can get a generic version of the same drug much more cheaply. Nice guys finish last, after all.

Humans are the selfish apes. We’re the creatures who shun the needs of others. We’re egocentrics, mercenaries, and narcissists. We look after number one. We are motivated by self-interest alone, down to every last bone in our bodies. Even our genes are said to be selfish. Yet competition does not tell the whole story of biology. Something profound is missing.

Creatures of every persuasion and level of complexity cooperate to live. Some of the earliest bacteria formed strings, where certain cells in each living filament die to nourish their neighbors with nitrogen. Some bacteria hunt in groups, much as a pride of lions hunt together to corner an antelope; ants form societies of millions of individuals that can solve complex problems, from farming to architecture to navigation; bees tirelessly harvest pollen for the good of the hive; mole rats generously allow their peers to dine on their droppings, providing a delicious second chance to digest fibrous roots; and meerkats risk their lives to guard a communal nest.

Human society fizzes with cooperation. Even the simplest things that we do involve more cooperation than you might think. Consider, for example, stopping at a coffee shop one morning to have a cappuccino and croissant for breakfast. To enjoy that simple pleasure could draw on the labors of a small army of people from at least half a dozen countries.

Farmers in Colombia grew the beans. Brazil provided the lush green fields of swaying sugar cane that was used to sweeten the beverage. The dash of creamy milk came from cows on a local farm and was heated with the help of electricity 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?