Evolution, Games and God

I reviewed Martin Nowak's own book on cooperation in the last issue, and this current multi-author volume builds on this work and was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. It provides an antidote to the selfish and competition-driven model of evolution, even arguing that cooperation is a third key evolutionary principle alongside mutation and natural selection. I had not realised that the term altruism, often elided with cooperation, was originally coined by Auguste Comte. A major corollary of the argument is that conditions of stable cooperation precede evolutionary breakthroughs. It is important at the outset to distinguish between cooperation and altruism: the former is characterised as a form of working together in which one individual pays the cost and another gains benefit, while altruism is a form of cooperation in which an individual is motivated by goodwill or love for another. A great deal of work, as the title suggests, has been done on game theory and cooperation. The six sections address evolutionary cooperation in historical perspective, the evolutionary phenomenon of cooperation, psychology and intentionality in the cultural evolution of cooperation, the significance of evolutionary cooperation in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind, cooperation, ethics and metaethics, cooperation, metaphysics and God. Contributors come from a variety of disciplines including mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy and theology. They also hold diverging views within these disciplines, so readers can gain an understanding of the fundamental debates within specialist fields. This is a technical treatment of an important emerging field. The more we understand about cooperation, the better chance we have of achieving it and making a difference to our common future.