Super Co-operators

This is a highly readable account of a very significant area of scientific research with important social implications. Subtitled 'evolution, altruism in human behaviour or why we need each other to succeed', the book ranges across a wide area, especially the interface between competition and cooperation, selfishness and altruism. The authors go beyond the definition of cooperation as working towards a common aim by specifying that would-be competitors try to help each other instead. They mention Kropotkin and his idea of mutual aid at the beginning of the book as a forerunner of their approach, insisting that cooperation rather than competition underpins innovation and is 'the master architect of evolution.' The challenges we face cannot be solved by technology alone but rather require new levels of cooperative endeavour – super-cooperation based on our extraordinary powers of language and communication that can take us to the next level of evolution. Indeed this is necessary for our very survival as a species.

The starting point of the book is the prisoner's dilemma and five ways of solving it: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, spatial games, group selection and kin selection. Evolution demonstrates many examples of cooperation, both within bodies and socially, for instance in ant colonies. There is an extensive discussion of the implications of the tragedy of the commons, highlighting the importance of celebrating individual contributions to resolving conflicts in the common good. This will give people the sense that their contributions can make a difference. People can also enhance their reputation in this way. Clubs are instituted as a means of harnessing cooperation, and more recently networks have taken this further. In the final chapter, Crescendo of Cooperation, Nowak brings to bear his appreciation of Mahler's music in its ambition to mirror the world. The authors restate the mechanics of cooperation in terms of the earlier chapters and we come back to Mahler's third Symphony as a key work and his hope that in his music "nature in its totality may ring and resound." This quest is continued in Das Lied von der Erde with its message of death and rebirth, of the 'tension between the dark pursuit of selfish short-term interests and the shining example of striving towards collective long-term goals.' The authors propose 'natural cooperation' as an addition to natural selection as a way of highlighting the necessity for humans to move to the next evolutionary stage. Interestingly, this is exactly the message of Elisabet Sahtouris, whose work is not mentioned in these pages. Taken in parallel with recent work on empathy and compassion, these studies represent a step forward in human understanding and evolution.