Survival of the Kindest?
By Heather Wax — Special Contributor
Competition is fundamental to the way we understand the biological world. Mutation generates variation, and natural selection chooses the fittest. In nature’s pitiless calculus, there are winners, and there are losers. And yet, theoretical biologist Martin Nowak points out, at every level of complexity, individual creatures help one another. They join forces and collaborate, building more complicated structures and higher levels of organization, from cells to human societies. Cooperation, not competition, he argues, is the “master architect of evolution.”
The hard part is figuring out how cooperation evolved by natural selection. Nowak, a Templeton grantee and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, turned to game theory and computer simulations that mathematically express the behavior of real organisms. According to his models, if individuals in a population randomly meet and compete with one another, non-cooperators have greater fitness than cooperators; they are the winners. This means that natural selection needs help to favor cooperative behavior. Something must ensure that individuals gain more from working together than acting alone.
The evolution of cooperation is the subject of Nowak’s first book for a popular audience, SuperCooperators, written with New Scientist editor Roger Highfield. The book brings together more than 20 years of research, including work done under the $10.5 million Templeton-funded Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology program, beginning with what Nowak identifies as five mechanisms that can make us work together. Explains Nowak: “Direct reciprocity is based on repeated encounters between the same two individuals. I help you and you help me. Indirect reciprocity is based on reputation. I help you and somebody helps me. Spatial selection means that clusters of cooperators can prevail. Neighbors help each other. Group selection occurs if there is competition between groups. The members of a group help each other. Kin selection is based on interaction between close genetic relatives. Brothers help each other, for example.”
All five mechanisms are found, to some degree, throughout the animal kingdom, Nowak writes, “but no animal species can draw on the mechanisms to the same extent as seen in human society. Even our closest relatives, the apes, lack full-blown language and thus lack the full potential of indirect reciprocity.” This is because, in indirect reciprocity, individuals benefit by taking into account the experiences of others. As such, it depends heavily on an ability to think abstractly enough to evaluate past behavior, and to communicate.
In his full-length interview with Big Questions Online, Nowak explains how “nice guys finish first” in a world where we interact again and again with the same people, and constantly monitor their actions. Where there is direct and indirect reciprocity, he says, his mathematical models show that the best approach is to be “hopeful, generous, and forgiving.” In practice, this means that we always begin by cooperating with a new person, trusting that our kindness will be rewarded. Sometimes it means we cooperate even when a person has harmed or hurt us.
Punishment rarely pays off, Nowak says. In one experiment, for example, his research team asked volunteers to play a game in which they could decide how much money to donate to a common pot, and how much to keep for themselves. They could also reward or punish other players for their decisions. After many rounds, reward and punishment proved equally good at promoting cooperation within the group. But groups in which people rewarded each other ended up wealthier than groups in which people punished others.
As Nowak explains, peer punishment often escalates conflict, leads to revenge and vendettas, and “is that which destroys much human productivity.” Abstaining from this type of punishment, he says, is often a form of cooperation.
The usefulness of SuperCooperators ultimately lies in what it teaches us about the true value of working together, and how we can apply this knowledge to real-world interactions and problems. “Martin Nowak’s work demonstrates that the consequences of cooperation are much more intricate than formally thought,” says Barnaby Marsh, executive vice president of strategic initiatives at the Foundation. “These important new insights will be of interest to scientists seeking to understand cooperation and its benefits.”
Nowak's Ideas Spreading
Martin Nowak’s work on the evolutionary basis for altruism is drawing wide attention. In late March, Nowak delivered a prominent lecture on “Evolution and Christianity” at The Catholic University of America in which he presented a case for how God works through evolutionary theory. Nowak said the discovery of language and religion by early humans inaugurated a new kind of evolution.
“Evolution required reproduction of information,” he told the Washington, DC, audience. “Human language allows unlimited reproduction of nongenetic information. The evolution process involves people talking to each other, listening to each other. It is no longer based on genetic information.”
More recently, the Foundation’s director of publications Rod Dreher wrote an Easter Sunday essay for The Dallas Morning News in which he discussed Nowak’s ideas in the context of the lives of Christian saints, and the power religiously charged stories have to shape our behavior. And the Boston Globe covered the controversy around pre-eminent evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson’s work with Nowak, in which Wilson rejects the scientific orthodoxy on how altruism evolved—an orthodoxy upon which Wilson built his own career. Nowak, a mathematician, told the Globe that his and Wilson’s critics among fellow evolutionary biologists simply do not understand the complex math behind their theory.
“Let Newton Be!” in America
England’s Menagerie Theatre Company is winding down a tour the United States performing Let Newton Be!, playwright Craig Baxter’s stage drama about Sir Isaac Newton. The play closely examines the complex relationship between Newton’s intense religious convictions and his epoch-making scientific pursuits. As a rave review in Times Higher Education put it, Baxter’s play is “a fascinating medium for considering the overall coherence both of Newton's self and of his intellectual projects.” The leading science journal Nature called the play “probably a more enjoyable hour and a half with Newton than anyone ever had in his lifetime.”
Let Newton Be! was commissioned by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University (where Newton taught), and partially funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. A Foundation grant also helped support an earlier Baxter play, Re:Design, based on the correspondence of naturalist Charles Darwin and the devoutly Christian botanist Asa Gray. The final two American performances on the Newton drama’s current tour took place at the Roberts Studio Theatre at Boston University on April 29 and 30.
Lord Rees: Science, Religion Must Reconcile
Cambridge University cosmologist Martin J. Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal and winner of the 2011 Templeton Prize, defended in an April 23 New Statesman essay his decision to accept the award. Responding to harsh criticism from biologist Richard Dawkins and other so-called “New Atheists,” Lord Rees said that even though he is himself an atheist, he considers it “socially counterproductive” for Dawkins and others to campaign indiscriminately against all forms of religion. The crises threatening the humanity’s survival on our planet mandates constructive cooperation among people of good will from diverse disciplines, he argues, not chronic confrontation.
“Wise choices will require the effective efforts of natural scientists, environmentalists, social scientists and humanists,” Lord Rees wrote. “All must be guided by the knowledge that 21st-century science can offer—but inspired by an idealism, vision, and commitment that science alone can’t provide.”
Besides, he said, there is no reason to believe that humans are capable of knowing everything, which ought to inspire in us a certain humility. Wrote the Cambridge scientist: “We could easily be as unaware of crucial aspects of reality as a monkey is of the theory of relativity.”
