Cooperation

# Cooperation and Evolution

For years scientists have struggled to explain how the phenomenon of cooperation, so widely observed in nature, in animal as well as human behavior might be compatible with evolution understood in Darwinian terms as the "struggle for life". In his article *"Warum sind wir hilfsbereit?"* Martin Nowak proposes that cooperation and competition are no opposites but rather that both of them have shaped evolution from the very beginning. He traces this insight back to one of the most fundamental yet most misunderstood observations made by Darwin himself, the "*survival of the fittest*" - the one most fit to the circumstances he or she is living in. Nowak holds that these circumstances the individual lives in, are fundamentally shaped by other people and therefore cooperation is vital to adapt to these circumstances. In other words, to be fit one has to cooperate.

His approach uses the methodology of Game Theory which has traditionally been used to prove the supremacy of egoism versus altruism and competition versus cooperation.
He took the original setup of one of the most prominent models of Game Theory, the  Prisoner's Dilemma and constructed a series of computer simulations testing the behavior of communities of prisoners. The simulation would face a random selection of cooperative people with a random selection of deflectants, after every round they would reproduce and their offspring would generally stick to their parent's strategy. While at first almost everyone became a deflectant after some time a new strategy emerged: players would cooperate by copying their co-players strategy. This quickly produced a number of cooperative communities.
This phenomenon of cooperation between individuals which repeatedly or even regularly encounter each other is called **direct reciprocity** and is the first possible mechanism by which cooperation might arise in a community.
However, not only that, the simulation went even further. In just 20 generations of players the experimenters were able to virtually watch the development of *indulgence*, in the sense that players would continue to cooperate even if the other player had deflected.

The second possibility for cooperation to take hold in a community is the **spatial selection**, meaning that cooperators and deflectants are not evenly distributed through the population but that there are concentrations of both groups. That way cooperative clusters form in the community which can soon persist in competition with their deflecting counterparts.

The third possibility for the development of cooperation in the community is the **relative selection**, the tendency of individuals to cooperate with others that are genetically close.

The fourth mechanism that is conducive to a cooperative community is **indirect reciprocity**. This mechanism describes the motivation of individuals to help or support others with the aim to increase their own reputation. As opposed to direct reciprocity there is no direct payback for the cooperative action but a greater likelihood of future benefits being granted to the cooperative individual.

The fifth mechanism is **group selection**, which describes the willingness of individuals to act against their own benefit and even to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group as a whole. Studies of Nowak have shown that such a group selective behavior may range from groups comprised of individuals that share the same genes, to larger groups and even entire species.

These five mechanisms apply to all kinds of organisms, from single-cell organisms to mammals. Nowack further sustains that the human is the most cooperative species of all, which has all but enabled this species to come as far as it did to the present day. Nowak then claims that humans have developed such a strong cooperation because they are especially inclined to cooperate motivated by indirect reciprocity, since the human language makes it possible to exchange information and thus to construct a true reputation in the first place. In addition to that (and in a way due to that) reputation also plays an immensely important role for most humans.

He then directs his attention to a different kind of gametheoretical approach which applies to set-ups where more than two players are involved. These games are specifically shaped to analyze situations of social dilemmata and are called *public goods games*. In these games although cooperation makes everyone better off, the individual can make much larger benefits by suddenly switching from cooperation to deflection. So paradoxically every individual hopes for everyone else to continue cooperating but at the same time plans to betray them. Naturally, if everyone in the group thinks like that the community of cooperation rapidly changes into a community of deflection. This problem had already been identified by Garrett Hardin in 1968 as the *Tragic of the Allmende*. Now, Nowak cites a series of studies conducted by the Max Planck Institute which identify factors that motivate people to care for the public goods instead of deflecting on their care.

One of these factors was information. People tended to act more altruistically when they were truly informed and educated about the problem at hand which they were supposed to take care off. Reputation again played a big role, so indirect reciprocity is also vital when dealing with common goods dilemmata. However, computer simulations also clearly indicated that cooperation was evolutionary unstable and large periods of cooperation would inevitably fade into periods shaped more by deflection and egoism.

In the article *"Gute Zusammenarbeit"*, Gary Stix advocates a similar theory but sustained with different claims. He also postulates that cooperation has decidedly contributed to evolution, but rather in the sense that *social competence* instead of motoric abilities is the deciding factor which has allowed the humans to evolve past other primates.

Stix starts off by referring to the long-held belief in science that motoric abilities and skills to work with numbers and symbols were the distinguishing feature of humans. He then points out that this hypothesis is now commonly excepted as misguided as extensive experiments with other primates show that their motoric as well as numeric abilities are more than a good match to the human's. What according to him is the real outstanding feature of humans is the cognitive ability to create what he calls an *interplay of the minds*. It is recognized especially in very young infants and thus sometimes referred to as the 'nine-months revolution'. Scientiests assume that this interplay of minds supposed a cognitive revolution for early communities of people and paved the way for language and culture. Stix points out that this is still a highly disputed theory which has been constructed from a series of experiments with infants as well as similarly constructed experiments with chimpanzees.

These experiment have mainly been conducted by the German Max-Planck Institute under the direction of Michael Tomasello. One of the first experiments was concerned with learning processes and its main finding was that chimpanzees are not as prone to imitation as humans. When creating typical learning situations they found that although chimpanzees might take behavior of others as an example in a very general way (such as copying a certain tool others used) they were not as attentive to the specific, concrete behavior (such as technique) and they did not engage in trial and error in order to find the "best" or most efficient technique. Humans, on the contrary, are very prone to experimenting to perfection a certain process or approach and also to pass this optimized process on to the next generation. To explain these processes, Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford developed the hypothesis of the **social brain**, postulating a growth of the brain relative to growth of communities and social complexity. In the situations of having to care for a much larger population the factor of cooperation is thus believed to play a positive role in selection. Whoever cooperates is much more likely to fullfil the requirements to adequately care for the community.

In almost all experiments comparing infants to chimpanzees, apes and humans do equally well on almost all task. It is only social competence where children clearly beat their ape counterparts. This is based on a set of cognitive abilities which lead children to develop a *"Theory of the Mind"* very early on in their lives that allows them to anticipate what others might know about a certain situation what they might think and how they would act. This ability to put oneself in somebody's position and to henceforth take action with a common goal has been called **shared intentionality**. Tomasello regards this as a skill of evolutionary adaptiveness possessed only by humans. While experiments have shown chimpanzees to also have the ability to put themselves in somebody's position they usually use this to then pursue their own personal benefit. It is usually put into practice in situations of competition. Tomasello presumes that it might have been this ability that gave rise to the development of sign language and subsequently of language as such. This ability is also crucial for one major defining feature of human language to develop: the *pointing to something absent*, while both people engaged in the conversation exactly know what is being talked about. Scientists like Tomasello assume that it is this capability to communicate about the absent which paved the way for abstract concepts to arise which have made possible the complexity of today's social relations. These developments would at their time have greatly increased cognitive abilities which then lead to the establishment of increasingly complex practices, traditions and conventions. Such **social norms** depend on a certain group conscience in which every individual assumes a role and lives up to the expectations connected to this role. The moral principles arising from these relations then paved the way for present day institutions, regimes and states.

This hypothesis, however, is far from undisputed. There is a number of scholars which have conducted experiments with apes or have observed them in wildlife that come to directly opposed conclusions that attribute a similar capacity for cooperative behavior to apes. In a nutshell, these scientists assume that the cooperative ability of apes might greatly exceed nowadays assumptions. Future projects of these groups of scientists include measuring the *Oxytocyin* level of apes in a diverse array of challenging settings. There is, however, also the directly opposite group of critics, who claim that Tomasello and his scientists are still overestimating the cooperative abilities of chimpanzees. They claim that chimpanzees have a strong tendency to misinterpret the behavior of others and lack even the most basic foundation for cooperative behavior.

In the article *"Die Wurzeln der Kooperation"*, Frans de Waal presents a theory which identifies the ability to cooperate as the distinctive feature enabling humans to evolutionary adapt to their environment. According to him it is this ability to cooperate which has given rise to complex morality which includes ascribing a lot of importance to taking responsibility for others. He then cites from a series of studies on cooperative behavior of primates which have rendered three important insights.

1. **Genetic relation** is **no necessary condition** for cooperative behavior in primates. On the contrary, observatory studies have found that chimpanzees and bonobos from groups largely composed of members with different DNA.
2. Cooperation stems from **reciprocity**. If a favor has been done it is likely to be returned at a later point.
3. The underlying emotions of cooperation are most likely **empathy** and **compassion**.

* De Waal defines **Empathy** as the capacity to identify oneself with others and, especially in situations where the other feels pain or misery, to experience similar feelings oneself and oftentimes to experience an impulse to help. Studies allegedly have found even rodents to possess this capacity. In primates, however, it goes beyond this basic definition. They have been found to be extremely concerned with the feelings of others and in studies have been observed to act generously in order to assure the well-being of another participant, even if this generosity implies a clear disadvantage for themselves.
* De Waal puts forward the hypothesis that **compassion** developed starting from maternal care of mammals. The susceptibility for feelings and emotional states of the offspring seems to have been internalized and subsequently influence all social relations. Compassion is said to strengthen emotional ties, empathy and cooperation in larger communities.

The most common form of cooperation in animal species is a direct reciprocity in doing and receiving favors. When more than one species is involved in this process it is referred to as **mutualism**. This form of cooperation might render both, immediate and future benefits for the cooperating partners and can thus lead to higher forms of cooperation. De Waal regards the thus constructed relation between sharing and survival, for which there are prominent examples especially in human communities, as especially important. Studies based on the  Ultimatum Game have shown that especially communities which rely entirely on the community to supply food for everyone are inclined to share, at least more so than their counterparts from subsistence economies.

According to de Waal the first distinguishing feature of the human is his willingness to cooperate with outsiders and even with complete strangers, whereas Primates typically tend to encounter alien groups with direct confrontation. Here, de Waal departs from the widely held view that this is a capacity which calls for a specific evolutionary explanation. He rather proposes that this was the result of other evolutionary processes that had led to the development of cooperation in the first place, however, applied to a broader frame then the direct community. He regards it as an additional function of the factor cooperation and not as a separate factor itself.
De Waal then points out that animals tend to cooperate as part of their self-organization, adopting different roles according to their skills and abilities which enable a better end result of group actions. He then identifies the main difference to human cooperation as the human particularity to reach highly structured and organized cooperative achievements. This is based on the human capability to establish hierarchic structures and to undertake projects of high complexity. The second defining feature of human cooperation is how emphatically it is strengthened and even demanded by social context. Cooperation gains people a good reputation (for more details on the importance of reputation in encouraging cooperative behavior, see Martin Nowak "Warum sind wir hilfsbereit?" ), while refusing to cooperate to maximize personal benefits is reprimanded. De Waal even suggests that it might be possible that it was this wish to gain a good reputation which lead people to cooperate and thus form larger communities in the first place.

# References

1. ↑  Nowak, M, 'Warum sind wir hilfsbereit?', Spektrum der Wissenschaft, November 2012, S. 76-81
2. ↑  Stix, G, 'Gute Zusammenarbeit', Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Mai 2015, S. 53-59
3. ↑  Nowak, M, 'Warum sind wir hilfsbereit?', Spektrum der Wissenschaft, November 2012, S. 76-81
4. ↑  De Waal, F, "Die Wurzeln der Kooperation", Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Mai 2015, S. 60-63