  Biological and cultural evolution show a trend towards increasing
hierarchical organization, in which entities at one level combine cooperatively
to form a new entity at a higher level of organization. In each case where such
a cooperative transition has been studied, we have some understanding of how
the transition came about, but it is difficult to formulate a unified theory
that covers all of these transitions. John Stewart has proposed a theoretical
framework called Management Theory, which attempts to explain all of the major
cooperative transitions in biological and cultural evolution. The idea is that
successful transitions require the integration of managers and workers into a
cooperative organization. This theory seems appropriate when we consider the
cultural evolution of corporations, where managers and workers are clearly
essential, but it seems less plausible when we consider the biological
evolution of entities that do not invite anthropomorphic projection. However,
in the following article, we define managers and workers in an abstract way
that enables us to apply these terms over a broad range of cases, including
cultural evolution, biological evolution, and computational simulations of
evolution. The core idea is that a worker is an entity that takes the main role
in the production of something and a manager is an entity that plays a
supporting role in the production of something. We apply this abstract view of
managers and workers to a computational simulation of evolving cooperative
transitions in John Conway's Game of Life. The simulation confirms the
expectations of Management Theory: Manager-worker relations result in robust
and productive cooperation, whereas workers without managers tend to lack
robustness, and managers without workers tend to lack productivity.
