For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote an exploration of cooperative behavior across species.
It’s easy to take cooperation for granted. Children team up to complete a project on time. Neighbors help each other mend fences. Colleagues share ideas and resources. The very fabric of human society depends upon working together. Cooperation is also ubiquitous in the natural world: lions collaborate on hunts, flowers share nectar with bees, and even bacteria produce essential resources that benefit their neighbors. But cooperation goes beyond mere quid pro quo — mutual aid for mutual benefit — and also takes the form of extreme self-denial. Worker ants give up reproduction to help their colony, and humans’ very bodies – like the bodies of all multicellular organisms – are the product of cooperative self-sacrifice. In a sense, all forty trillion cells in the human body sacrifice themselves in order for the few sperm or egg cells to pass on. This sort of cooperation presents a profound puzzle that dates back to Darwin: if traits persist or disappear according to their contributions to reproductive fitness, why would a trait — like resource-sharing or self-sacrificial behavior — that could reduce or eliminate an organism’s reproductive ability ever manage to stick around?
Key parts of that puzzle have been answered, but some big questions — and many fascinating avenues for research — still remain in the study of cooperation. Sir John Templeton was a firm believer that cooperation was one of the most important human virtues, and that insights from biology and psychology could help people learn to cultivate and optimize its benefits. In that spirit, the John Templeton Foundation recently commissioned a white paper providing a deep dive into the current scientific understanding of cooperation, at scales ranging from single cells to complex societies. It’s a story that shows how much the scientific understanding of cooperation has advanced, and highlights exciting new areas for experimentation as researchers develop ways to watch cooperation evolve in the laboratory.