Читать книгу SuperCooperators - Roger Highfield - Страница 8

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 is the architect of creativity throughout evolution, from cells to multicellular creatures to anthills to villages to cities. Without cooperation there can be neither construction nor complexity in evolution.

I can derive everyday insights—as well as many unexpected ones—from mathematical and evolutionary models of cooperation. While the idea that the trajectory of spears, cannonballs, and planets can be traced out by equations is familiar, I find it extraordinary that we can also use mathematics to map out the trajectory of evolution. And, of course, it is one thing to know how to foster cooperation but it is quite another to explain why an action helps us get along with each other and to what extent. The mathematical exploration of these mechanisms enables us to do this with profound understanding and with precision too. This is proof, as if we need it, that math is universal.

In the following chapters I will explain the origins of each mechanism of cooperation and interweave this train of thought with my own intellectual journey, one that began in Vienna and then continued to Oxford, Princeton, and now Harvard. En route, I have had the honor to cooperate with many brilliant scientists and mathematicians. Two of them proved particularly inspirational: Karl Sigmund and Robert May, for reasons that will become clear. I have also had to enlist the help of computer programs, students willing to play games, and various funding bodies, from foundations to philanthropists. It is a lovely and intoxicating thought that a high degree of cooperation is required to understand cooperation. And to further underline this powerful idea, this book is also a feat of cooperation between Roger Highfield and myself.

The implications of this new understanding of cooperation are profound. Previously, there were only two basic principles of evolution—mutation and selection—where the former generates genetic diversity and the latter picks the individuals that are best suited to a given environment. For us to understand the creative aspects of evolution, we must now accept that cooperation is the third principle. For selection you need mutation and, in the same way, for cooperation you need both selection and mutation. From cooperation can emerge the constructive side of evolution, from genes to organisms to language and complex social behaviors. Cooperation is the master architect of evolution.

My work has also shown that cooperation always waxes and wanes. The degree to which individuals are able to cooperate rises and falls, like the great heartbeat of nature. That is why, even though we are extraordinary cooperators, human society has been—and always will be—riven with conflict. 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. There’s rising pressure on each of us to compete for the planet’s dwindling resources.

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. The biggest issues of all—saving the planet and maximizing the collective lifetime of the species Homo sapiens—cannot be solved by technology alone. They require novel ways for us to work in harmony. If we are to continue to thrive, we have but one option. We now have to manage the planet as a whole. If we are to win the struggle for existence, and avoid a precipitous fall, there’s no choice but to harness this extraordinary creative force. We now have to refine and to extend our ability to cooperate. We must become familiar with the science of cooperation. Now, more than ever, the world needs SuperCooperators.