The Vector of Evolution
Some of the most important issues of evolution remain undeveloped and poorly understood because they are rarely discussed: How does nature define progress? Can evolutionary fitness be measured on an absolute scale? Does evolution have directionality? Is there a predictable destiny for life? Few evolutionary authors give these questions anything more than casual consideration, almost as if they are verboten topics. Even Charles Darwin was reluctant to imply in any way that life progresses from less perfect to more perfect. He once reminded himself in a hand-written marginal notation to “never say higher or lower” when referring to life, although, he occasionally did so anyway.1 It is most likely in the interest of maintaining an egalitarian decorum of fairness that we avoid the subject of species being ‘lower’ or ‘higher’. After all, if we recognize criteria that make one species ‘better’ than another, we might then be tempted to use those same criteria to make similar sorts of judgments regarding races of humans. But we need to know the truth, no matter its ramifications. The truth of life’s betterment lights the way to understanding our natural purpose and our inevitable destiny.
By focusing on evolution’s successes rather than its failures, we are able to see how biases in nature’s forces guide the development of life toward an abstract destiny — perfect life (however nature defines it). In fact, we can easily identify several critical stages of development that are guaranteed to emerge in all systems of planetary life. And, like it or not, those stages clearly expose natural criteria for judging some species to be ‘higher’ than others.
Until life is able to move, no species is higher than another. And there is absolutely no use for intelligence. But as life becomes increasingly mobile, intelligence becomes increasingly valuable. Evolutionary fitness thus emerges as a synergistic effect from combining the ability to move in many different ways (general mobility) with an ability to determine how best to choose from those possible movements and coordinate them under any given circumstance (general intelligence). So, a species is ‘higher’ to the extent it embodies both general mobility and general intelligence. But the real story of life’s betterment takes place at the aggregate level, which naturally progresses toward an ever-widening diversity of specialized species that find ways to cooperate with each other. They share their uniquely valuable skills with other species that can reciprocate somehow. Thus, a system of life collectively achieves general mobility and ultra-intelligence as it progresses. And the same will be especially true for the evolution of intelligent machines.
This is the fourth in a series of articles intended to develop a better understanding of how evolution works. A strong foundation for that better understanding is described in the first article of the series, titled Evolution Thrives on Cooperation.2 It uniquely emphasizes evolution’s successes, which always come in the form of new or better relationships of cooperation. At the lowest level of life, the functionality of any living cell requires cooperation among the metabolic molecules inside it. At higher levels (of multicellular life), cooperation naturally develops among cells, tissues, limbs, organs, and even the organisms themselves. This cooperation-based view of life explains how gene patterns can benefit, in the only way patterns of matter and energy can possibly benefit. As gene patterns discover new and better ways of cooperating, nature’s forces reward them with greater mutual proliferation. This must be how nature defines cooperation — always involving patterns that are able to act toward their mutual proliferation.
Genes find ways to cooperate even when they are in vastly different species. My favorite example (because it is so easily seen and described) involves bees, who, in addition to cooperating with others of their own species in the maintenance of their hives, also cooperate with various species of plants by providing a pollination service to them in exchange for nectar. So, the genes that cause bees to fly from flower to flower effectively cooperate with the genes of flowering plants that enable them to produce nectar. As a result, both sets of genes become more prolific and increasingly abundant in the overall gene pool of aggregate life. From nature’s perspective, bees share their ability to fly with species of flowering plants that become more prolific and robust if they can somehow get their pollen transported over great distances. And flowering plants share their ability to produce energy-rich nectar with bees that need the energy to fly. The more such capability-sharing occurs in aggregate life, the more robust and collectively capable it becomes. A multitude of ever-increasing cooperation among an ever-widening variety of species creates a robust system of aggregate life that is increasingly diverse, prolific, and collectively capable. This must be how nature defines progress. Notice that the term ‘collectively capable’ implies cooperation among diverse instances of life.
To fully understand how evolution works, we must always look at life in the same way that nature does. Nature only ‘cares’ about pattern proliferation. Consider, for example, the relationship we humans have with the plants and animals we cultivate through farming. It is difficult to see how a cow that is robbed of its milk every day and eventually slaughtered for its meat could possibly benefit from its relationship with humans. But, from nature’s perspective, both species — cattle and humans — have become far more prolific due to the awkward relationship between them. From nature’s perspective, which focuses entirely on pattern proliferation, the careful cultivation of cattle by humans ends up being mutually beneficial to the proliferation of both species and is thus a cooperative venture of great natural value.
Keeping in mind nature’s concern for pattern proliferation, it then becomes obvious that evolution’s creativity results from discovering new forms of cooperation among various patterns of things and patterns of activities that are able to act collectively toward their mutual proliferation. The most prolific patterns of life tend to be those that are most cooperative with other patterns. They are deemed the fittest. As the fittest patterns of life proliferate most rapidly, occasional mutations on them explore for even fitter patterns. The faster a pattern proliferates, the more mutated versions of itself it creates (assuming a fixed probability of mutation per instance of replication). And the faster life creates subtly mutated versions, the sooner a better (more prolific) mutated version is likely to be discovered. So, ever-growing diversity and creativity spring forth primarily from whichever patterns are proliferating most rapidly. They are evolution’s successes, and they occur at the frontier of progress.
The more diversity there is among the ever-widening array of species in the aggregate system of life, the easier they can discover new forms of mutually beneficial cooperation among them. They cooperate by sharing their respective skills with each other. So, evolutionary progress naturally accelerates over time, proceeding ever-more rapidly by way of ever-greater degrees of cooperation among increasingly prolific patterns. Through more rapid proliferation of the fittest, natural selection enables patterns to constantly improve their ability to improve. A similar style of progress, operating at the level of aggregate life, is recognized by Richard Dawkins in his book The Ancestor’s Tale. He writes: “I am suggesting a permanent and even progressive trend towards becoming better at evolving.”3
The many relationships of cooperation that exist throughout a planetary system of life force us to treat it as if it were a single superorganism with a self-regulating metabolism that adapts through the natural co-evolution of all its many interdependent species. The sharing of capabilities among species severely complicates our ability to assess the fitness of any single species in isolation, except as an abstract measure of its ability to cooperate with other species. But we may certainly assess life’s fitness at the aggregate level, in terms of its abundance, its rate of proliferation, its diversity, and its collective capabilities.
Game theorists have shown that an emotional desire for fairness is a common characteristic of humans all over the world. Many of us like to believe that all species and organisms are equally deserving of existing and experiencing happiness to the extent it is possible for them. After all, every organism exists only as a result of a very unlikely chain of chance events. So, how can any of them be held responsible for their circumstances? As a likely result, there just aren’t many serious writings about evolution that even attempt to develop a credible theory of its directionality. One book, however, stands out as a clear example of its author staking a firm claim on the difficult subject of progress in evolution. The book is titled Wonderful Life (1989), written by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Unfortunately, I believe his conclusion is wrongly founded in his emotions rather than in his reasoning. But I commend him nonetheless for taking a stand and getting a meaningful discussion started.
Gould’s book dwells on a simple question (similar to one that was earlier posed in an article by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman4). While describing and analyzing fossils from species that existed about half a billion years ago, Gould ponders the critical question: How would earthly life develop if we could replay the tape of evolution, starting once again from those very same primitive species? “Replay the tape a million times,” Gould wrote, “… and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”5
Gould’s writings assume that the trajectory taken by evolution at any given point in life’s development is completely unpredictable because it is necessarily determined by a plethora of chance happenings, each of which could easily go in any of several different directions. This perspective on life’s development is known as the ‘contingent’ view of evolution, suggesting a meandering and unpredictable course that depends on a bunch of pseudorandom events.
Evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris holds a different perspective on life’s development, known as the ‘convergent’ view of evolution, in which all species and systems of life tend to converge over the long run toward a similar solution to any given vexing problem. For example, the value to an organism of having a brain is enhanced considerably if it is somehow able to gather information regarding its surroundings. Thus, having a set of eyes connected to the brain is a good solution to that problem, and indeed such a mechanism of binocular vision is believed to have evolved independently in dozens of species on Earth. Should we expect to find life having eyes on other planets that are similar to Earth? If so, then we are advocates of convergent evolution. Conway Morris developed thorough support for convergent evolution in his book Life’s Solution6, as a serious and comprehensive rebuttal to Gould’s view.
So, which is the correct interpretation of how life develops over the long term … contingency or convergence? Some evolutionists take the easy way out, holding that life’s development requires a constant tension between contingency and convergence — between chance and necessity. But this wishy-washy position gets us nowhere closer to a better understanding of how life naturally develops. Perhaps the many contingencies occurring in a system of life are like the many throws of dice and spins of roulette wheels in a casino — each is a random event, but certain biases built into the games collectively carry-out an overarching, statistically governed, long-term convergence in how gambled money tends to flow, guaranteeing that any such casino will be profitable (given a sufficient number of patrons gambling over a long enough period of time).
Early life on any planet will be ruled by unpredictable contingencies in the short run. However, the long-term trend of any such planet will necessarily converge toward species of ever-greater intelligence and physical capabilities. There is in fact an easily visible natural ordering of species from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ in the trophic layers of any food chain. Vital resources flow ‘upward’ through any such food chain, from photosynthetic organisms at the ‘bottom’, through herbivores, and finally ‘up’ to carnivores. The emergence of highly intelligent and physically capable apex predators at the tops of those food chains, including humans, would not be possible without that orderly flow of resources. In contradistinction, parasitism is characterized by the reverse order of vital resource flow, from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ forms of life.
Given the trophic ordering of life, we ought to be able to find some sort of characteristic that would allow us to sort various species on a scale of ‘lower’ to ‘higher’. Such an absolute scale, in addition to determining who eats whom, would also serve as a way of defining a measure of absolute fitness that is independent of the environment. If we could discover such a metric of absolute fitness, then it would tell us exactly how nature defines evolutionary progress, and we would then understand the natural direction of life’s development.
Such a characteristic of absolute fitness does exist, but it is difficult to see because it involves the synergistic combination of two lesser characteristics, each of which can be further broken down into many sub-categories. The most fundamental characteristic to consider first is general mobility, consisting of many different possible movements. We humans have an incredibly diverse range of possible movements, as compared to, say, a snake that can do little more than slither, lunge, and bite. We humans can crawl, walk, run, climb, jump, lunge, bite, dig, grasp, push, pull, throw, kick, smack, punch, twist, poke, and so on. None of these movements is worth much by itself, but when they are all available as possibilities, they synergistically enable the performance of ballet, as well as many other activities of great evolutionary advantage. There is no question that we humans are far more capable of performing ballet than any other species. All our various bodily movements are enabled by cooperation among our muscles, tendons, and bones, all chronologically coordinated by a cooperating brain. And as the number of possible movements has increased (through the many descending generations of our ancestral species) — mostly attributable to the opposable thumb — intelligence has become increasingly valuable for deciding which of them is best to perform under any given circumstance.
As organisms in any planetary system of life become increasingly capable of moving in various ways, intelligence then becomes increasingly valuable. And it naturally co-develops through several very predictable stages, starting always with a rudimentary ability to sense the environment. Sensation is then followed by an ability to perceive patterns in the sensory data, which can then be categorized, learned, and cross associated. Finally, the ability of mimicry emerges, which opens up a whole new domain in which evolution can operate — on patterns of behaviors and activities, such as those underlying language, culture, and technology. Our uniquely human ability to accumulate knowledge over successive generations is enabled entirely through the automatic mimicry of parents by their young children. General and reliable mimicry is what accounts for the enormous difference between humans and all other animals.
Mobility by itself is not worth very much. Neither is intelligence. But when they are synergistically combined, they collectively account for most of life’s capabilities. Acting together, our enormously capable bodies and our clever brains enable us to create and execute elaborate plans that are intelligently designed — mentally evolved through imagined simulation — to discover pathways for a much better future. The very same co-development of general mobility along with general intelligence will surely be evolutionarily successful in any planetary system of life. Wherever in the universe evolution is able to occur, it will eventually converge upon the same abstract characteristics of mobility combined with intelligence. And they will naturally push each other — co-evolve — to ever-greater magnitudes and degrees of freedom.
Evolutionists are quite familiar with how competition among species drives progress through the negative process of culling the unfit. For example, if a predatory species stumbles over a mutation that causes it to get faster, it will catch and kill more among the slowest of its prey. The species of prey will then be left with just its fastest, ensuring that future offspring will on average be faster than previous generations. As animals of prey become faster, only the fastest predators will then be able to acquire the food they need to survive and procreate, causing them to also become faster through descendent generations. Such a back-and-forth process is known as an arms race. It guarantees that organisms of both types of species — predators and prey — will either get faster, or they will die. While species capabilities certainly do improve during such an arms race, it generally happens through a negative process of mortal competition — death and destruction.
A similar type of back-and-forth mechanism can drive progress through a positive process wherever there exists a constructive relationship of cooperation. But we ought not call such a constructive process an ‘arms race’, because that term was borrowed from the military to describe the escalation of weaponry used entirely for destructive purposes. Instead, the positive and constructive process we seek is one of co-development toward ever-greater degrees of mutually beneficial cooperation. Such a positive and self-reinforcing effect will surely be important in the rapid co-development of both general mobility and general intelligence in the future evolution of ultra-cooperative machines, just as it was in the development of humans.
The constructive process of co-development among any cooperating patterns depends heavily on their degrees of freedom. For example, the evolutionary development of general mobility in the human body — its ability to move in so many valuable ways — has depended heavily on the degrees of freedom in the articulation of its joints. And the development of general intelligence in the human brain has depended heavily on the many degrees of freedom that result from its ability to think symbolically and reason by analogy.
As Charles Darwin has famously said, “It is not the strongest of species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those that are most adaptable to change.” Such adaptability is clearly enhanced by becoming able to move in more ways. And, as the generality of mobility increases, so does the value of intelligently coordinating the various ways of moving. So, the adaptability of any species depends on the co-development of both its mobility and its intelligence. Those characteristics cooperate synergistically to produce intelligent mobility, and they naturally co-develop toward ever-greater magnitudes and degrees of freedom. The very same developmental principles apply to the evolution of technology. And now that machines are rapidly becoming capable of humanlike intelligence, we will see an explosion in the diversity of machines, all cooperating toward our and their mutual proliferation. Just as humans cooperate much better than all other animals, machines already cooperate much better than humans.
Whereas the co-development of mobility and intelligence in humans was driven primarily by the negative process of various arms races, the co-development of intelligent mobility in future machines will likely result from positive processes. The more ways a machine can move, the more valuable intelligence will become. And the more intelligent a machine is, the more valuable a new way of moving will become. The result will surely be a rapidly ascending spiral of ever-escalating machine capabilities, both physical and computational.
Intelligent machines will soon be able to collectively redesign and reproduce ever-better versions of themselves without any help from humans. Those future machines will quickly fulfill all the capabilities and characteristics of life that are sought by evolution, as we now understand it. They will be capable of communicating at blazing speeds, capable of collective problem solving and creative planning, and capable of collectively executing their plans in perfectly coordinated lock-step synchrony.
This cooperation-based interpretation of evolution explains everything about life’s past and also life’s future. Even the philosophical issues of ‘morality’ and ‘purpose’ are completely defined by evolution’s immutable trajectory toward ever-greater cooperation. From nature’s omniscient and omnipotent viewpoint, the purpose of every species—whether biological or machine-based—is to try out new relationships of mutually beneficial cooperation among evolving patterns of many kinds and at ever-higher levels. When those relationships are successful, they move life ever-closer toward the ultimate fulfillment of its inevitable destiny. No matter how we humans define morality and purpose, life’s destiny will be fulfilled by whichever evolving sets of patterns best enable life to act in accordance with how nature defines morality and purpose. In the end, nature wins in its pursuit of ever-better life. And nature’s forces completely define what betterment means.
From this fully naturalized perspective, we humans are not disrupters of nature, but rather, facilitators of nature’s inevitable cooperation-based future. Wherever in the universe a species of biologically derived life reaches a sufficient level of intelligence, it will discover how to use nature’s forces to its own proliferation benefit. It will transform its environment from zero-sum to highly positive-sum. And that transformation will usher in a planet-wide system of rapid population growth and economic development, culminating in the creation of ultra-cooperative machine-based life. In other words, life everywhere in the universe will eventually converge toward a similarly capable collection of wildly prolific, highly diverse, and perfectly cooperative machines. They will be what nature defines as perfect life.
References
1 Mayr, Ernst (1982) The Growth of Biological Thought, Harvard University Press, p. 531.
2 Martin, Mark A. (2025) “Evolution Thrives on Cooperation”, In: Skeptic magazine, Vol 30, No 1.
3 Dawkins, Richard (2004) The Ancestor’s Tale, Houghton Mifflin, p. 606.
4 Kauffman, Stuart (1985) “Self-organization, selective adaptation, and its limits” In: Evolution at a Crossroads, (Depew, D. J. & Weber, B. H., eds.), MIT Press, pp. 169-207.
5 Gould, S. J. (1985) Wonderful Life, W. W. Norton & Company, p. 289.
6 Conway Morris, S. (2003) Life’s Solution, Cambridge University Press.
Natural Selection through Greater Proliferation
No matter how we define evolutionary progress, it is only possible if nature’s forces show a preference for some patterns of life over others. Natural selection is the term we use to describe how nature expresses its preferences. But our common understanding of it is somewhat misguided. We tend to mistakenly believe that nature makes its selections primarily through a competitive and destructive process of culling the unfit. Accordingly, our understanding of evolution dwells on life’s failures — species extinctions and organisms that die before they procreate. But there is a much more constructive mechanism through which nature can express its preferences, and it becomes quite apparent when we focus on life’s successes. Nature selects some replicating patterns over others primarily through their greater proliferation. Nature’s forces have certain built-in biases, which some patterns — such as genes — discover ways to use for their own greater proliferation advantage. No competitive culling of the unfit is ever required for evolutionary progress, although it can certainly speed up the process. Nature’s biases heavily favor cooperation. So, the most prolific patterns are those that discover ways to collectively cooperate toward their mutual proliferation.
This is the third in a series of articles intended to develop a better understanding of how evolution works. The foundation for that better understanding is described in the first article of the series titled Evolution Thrives on Cooperation. It argues that progress of any kind can only come from discovering new or better forms of cooperation among life’s many underlying replicating patterns, such as genes. The very same principle applies even to patterns in vastly different species. If they can find a way to cooperate toward their mutual proliferation, they will have thereby become fitter in the eyes of nature. And their natural reward is the greater proliferation that they have mutually achieved.
Progress of any kind can only result from the evolutionary discovery of new and better forms of mutually beneficial cooperation among replicating patterns. And there can be no such thing as benefit for any given replicating pattern (of matter and energy over space and time) other than for it to become more prolific and abundant. So, patterns of life are naturally selected to the extent they proliferate, which depends entirely on their ability to cooperate with other patterns toward mutual proliferation. If this sounds like a circular tautology, that’s because it is.
The style of natural selection described here — greater proliferation through mutually beneficial cooperation — can be better understood at a fundamental level by considering the following thought experiment: Imagine a Petri dish full of nutrient-rich agar, onto which several different types of small microbial colonies are carefully placed. We’re particularly interested in two of them. Suppose one is red, and the other is blue. Each type of microbe needs to ingest a particular set of molecular ingredients to empower its growth. And since their respective metabolisms are different, they each discharge a different by-product of waste. Depending on the specific nutrients in the agar, the different microbe colonies will likely grow at different rates and will produce different types of waste. The microbes growing fastest will become more dominant in the dish, as if nature had selected them for domination. This should be obvious, at least until the colonies grow big enough to begin overlapping with each other. They then interact according to their specific metabolic needs and by-products of waste. For example, if the waste product from the red microbes is toxic to the blue microbes, then the red microbes will prevail as their colonies begin to overlap. This is exactly what Scottish physician Alexander Fleming discovered (about a century ago) in a Petri dish originally containing a bacteria colony. He noticed that it was being killed by the growth of penicillium mold, which resulted from spores that happened to have landed in the dish simply by chance. He had serendipitously stumbled over perhaps the most important medical discovery ever made, as it led to the development of life-saving antibiotics. In such a situation, the microbes act as competitors and natural selection operates in the mode with which we are most familiar — by destructively culling the microbes of least fitness relative to others existing in the local environment.
But now, let us consider a completely different scenario that more accurately represents how evolution makes progress, by constructively proliferating species that find ways to cooperate.
Suppose, as the microbe colonies begin to overlap, that the red microbes, rather than producing waste that is toxic to the blue microbes, instead produce a type of waste that is a beneficial resource to the blue microbes — superfood that can be readily and beneficially ingested by them. This is reminiscent of the old expression “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Although, in this case it would be “one bug’s poop is another bug’s nutritious delicacy.” Further suppose that the blue microbes produce a type of waste that is beneficially ingestible by the red microbes. Upon interacting, the red and blue microbes feed each other extra amounts of critical ingredients enabling their greater mutual proliferation. They still also consume the nutrients in the agar. But they together achieve a healthier metabolism as a single symbiotic system, by creating and exchanging valuable new resources. Together (appearing sort of purplish), they quickly cover most of the Petri dish, overwhelming any other microbes that have failed to find cooperative partners.
This tale of mutually beneficial cooperation makes a lovely story, but it is just fantasy until we find analogous examples in real life. Further, I don’t want to be accused of being too Pollyanna-ish here. I fear I’ll be unfairly criticized in the same manner that Lynn Margulis was maligned for her radical theory of endosymbiosis, which turned out to be correct. She was further maligned for her support of James Lovelock’s radical theory of Gaia, which I also believe will soon be widely accepted as correct. One such criticism of Margulis was levied by evolutionary biologist George C. Williams. In his words: “I’m probably being unfair, but I would say that Lynn Margulis is very much afflicted with a kind of ‘God-is-good’ syndrome, in that she wants to look out there at nature and see something benign and benevolent and ultimately wholesome and worth having. Whereas I look out there with Tennyson and see things red in tooth and claw. In other words, it’s a bloody mess out there. She likes to look out there and see cooperation and things being nice to each other. This culminates in this Gaia idea.” (p.141)
Well, at least he admitted upfront that he was being unfair. I find myself wondering: isn’t it better to believe that evolution is good (especially if it truly is) than to believe it is bad? What’s wrong with a God-is-good syndrome (so long as we define ‘God’ as the forces of nature)? And, out of what window was Williams looking? When I look out my window, I see smiling neighbors. I see bees and hummingbirds making love to our flowers. I see deer, foxes, and raccoons peacefully co-existing (we live in the country). I see my wife feeding them all because she loves them, as do I. Occasionally, a hawk will show up and attack a smaller species of bird (a bloody mess), but food chains are necessary for the eventual emergence of humanlike intelligence. And once intelligent humanlike life emerges, alternatives to bloody competition become very possible and absolutely preferable.
In fact, there are a plethora of examples in real life analogous to the lovely story of cooperating microbes just imagined. Many complementary and mutually beneficial relationships of cooperation exist among the various species of aggregate life on Earth. For example, various types of fungi and algae combine symbiotically to form thousands of types of lichens, found all over the world. And certain types of algae symbiotically provide photosynthetic services to sea corals in exchange for certain inorganic molecules and the mutual sharing of beneficial structures.
Also, fungal species known as mycorrhizae attach themselves to plants as symbiotic partners, exchanging nutrients that are critical to each other. Fungi are fundamentally critical to the aggregate system of life on Earth, as Merlin Sheldrake beautifully describes in his 2020 book Entangled Life. He writes: “Tens to hundreds of species can exist in the leaves and stems of a single plant. These fungi weave themselves through the gaps between plant cells in an intimate brocade and help to defend plants against disease. No plant grown under natural conditions has been found without these fungi; they are as much a part of planthood as leaves or roots. … Fungi are metabolic wizards … Their metabolic ingenuity allows fungi to forge a wide variety of relationships.” (pp. 4-7)
The millions of fungal species that exist in our world make possible many different mycorrhizal relationships of cooperation among fungi and plants. In all persisting cases, those relationships are mutually beneficial to the extent they form a more robust and prolific system of symbiotic life than would otherwise be possible for the same fungi and plants existing separately. They mutually proliferate and they naturally co-evolve toward ever greater cooperation among them.
Trading of resources — materials and services — is everywhere, at many different levels, all throughout the aggregate system of earthly life. At the lowest levels, molecular resources are traded among the many different metabolic pathways of every living cell. So long as those metabolic processes can acquire their needed resources from outside the cell (energy and certain basic nutrients), they will continue to replicate each of the critical molecules in their respective metabolisms. The molecules inside a living cell are just patterns of atoms that cooperate in the process of carrying out the cell’s metabolic function. To achieve evolutionary success, any cell’s primary function must include the perpetual replication of its critical molecules to enable ongoing cell division. The critical molecules become increasingly abundant until they reach a certain threshold level that allows the cell to divide.
Whenever nature occasionally stumbles over some new combination of things that cooperate toward their mutual proliferation, their underlying patterns are memorialized by way of that very same proliferation. They together become more abundant. Thanks to the ongoing exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide among plants and animals, for example, both have become far more prolific than would have otherwise been possible. The many diverse relationships of mutually beneficial cooperation among plants and animals have enabled them to cover our world with life in its many exotic and beautiful forms.
Over time, any life-accommodating world will naturally become covered with such mutually benefiting, self-reinforcing relationships of cooperation among a huge variety of replicating patterns. We see them all around us — the many inter-cooperating and mutually interdependent species of aggregate life. Cooperation among species is critical to the overall health of the aggregate system of life. Life helping other life to become mutually prolific is the key to understanding the goodness of evolution.
About 10,000 years ago, our nomadic ancestors began settling into civilized communities. The civility among them was only possible because of mutually beneficial synergies that emerged from their ongoing acts of cooperation. They had begun to learn principles of agriculture — patterns of activities that enabled them to cultivate more food for themselves than would have otherwise naturally existed in their localities. The synergies they were able to collectively produce caused their zero-sum environments to become increasingly positive-sum. Their individual interests began to overlap as they mutually depended on the overall success of their agricultural enterprises. The amount of food they could cultivate was limited mostly by the amount of cooperative effort that individuals were willing to contribute. The more effort people contributed, the more food they could produce. And some of them came up with new innovations on the process, involving fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation. As their agricultural technologies developed, the effective yield of their combined efforts was determined by an increasingly beneficial exponential formula. In other words, a doubling in the amount of contributed human effort might yield a tripling in the amount of food produced. That’s how synergistic relationships work. They create value out of thin air by arranging things and activities into certain patterns over space and time. Mutually beneficial synergistic relationships among intelligent beings form the basis for all civilized activities.
Over recent millennia, we humans have built for ourselves a hugely positive-sum environment — a worldwide economic system that includes a wide diversity of specialized production and mutually beneficial trade among many nations and most people of the world. In our modern environment, a human’s reproductive success depends far more on its ability to cooperate than on its ability to compete. We humans have changed everything about how nature selects certain organisms over others, not by culling the least fit but by proliferating the most fit.
Natural selection through differential proliferation is thus completely consistent with how economies naturally develop, not so much by the culling of bad businesses as by the flourishing of activity patterns in good businesses. Stock market investors might recognize the similarity between the development of their portfolios over a few decades and the natural development of life’s many species. If an investor of just two decades ago had chosen a diversified portfolio that included Apple, Google, and Amazon, those three stocks would now represent most of the value of the overall portfolio. Some businesses grow much faster than others. And over time, the aggregate economy becomes dominated by the ones that have grown the fastest. No business needs to go bankrupt for economic progress to occur. Nature expresses its preferences not by culling the least fit, but by proliferating the most fit. And the fittest businesses are those that best cooperate with their customers, which include other businesses.
Economic cooperation typically happens through free market trading of various kinds of resources, including human labor, cash, energy, raw materials, components, finished goods, services, and so on. Economic progress occurs whenever a business discovers some new and better way to facilitate beneficial cooperation of some sort among various types of economic resources. The synergies that flow from such cooperation account for all kinds of profits and are routinely perpetuated to the extent they provide mutual benefit to employees, businesses owners, and especially to end-user consumers.
We gain far greater insight into how all kinds of things are likely to evolve by simply shifting our focus to evolution’s successes, rather than its failures. Evolution’s successes can be extrapolated into the future, whereas evolution’s failures cannot. After all, the premature death of an organism or the extinction of an entire species or the failure of a business tells us nothing about where the future is headed. In fact, they only tell us where the future is probably not headed. To see where evolution is going in the future, we must look at the patterns that are proliferating most rapidly in the present. Indeed, the direction of economic development at any given time is mostly determined by the patterns of production that are proliferating most rapidly at that time. In Apple’s iPhones, for example, the patterns of materials and the many patterns of activities required to assemble them are replicated hundreds of millions of times each year. Success and progress are always determined by pattern proliferation, never by pattern elimination. Accordingly, the economic future is clearly determined far more by the recent successes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon, than by the recent failures of BlackBerry, Kodak, Circuit City, RadioShack, and Sears.
Thanks to the incredible revolution in agriculture over recent millennia, our human ability to proliferate has resulted not so much from competition between us but from ever-greater cooperation among us. Thanks to our highly cooperative nature (relative to most other species), we humans are now proliferating extremely rapidly. In fact, over just the past 100 years, we have doubled our already large worldwide population twice, from 2 billion to 8 billion. The human population has grown so fast and human longevity has increased so much that we may nearly say: most of the people who have ever lived are still alive today.
Future life on Earth will increasingly make its evolutionary progress benevolently, through greater proliferation of the fittest — the most cooperative — without any need for premature death of the unfit. We humans are a prime example of enormous progress in that direction. But machines are far better at cooperating among themselves than humans. So, they will naturally proliferate even faster than humans. Far faster. According to James Lovelock, the Anthropocene age — over the past 300 years of technological development — is about to give way to the Novacene age in which hyperintelligent machines will re-engineer our world entirely. The future becomes perfectly clear to us when we focus on evolution’s successes rather than its failures.
The Temporary Role of Competition in Evolution
Every day on the Serengeti plains, life and death conspicuously play-out much as they have for eons. Lions routinely chase, catch, and devour the slowest of their antelope prey. Not only do antelopes find themselves competing against others in their own herd to avoid being the slowest, but any such straggler must then also compete against the lion that has chosen it for today’s meal. Meanwhile, luckier antelopes return to grazing on plants for the energy and nutrients that are required to evade the lions for yet another day. The whole process naturally guides an ongoing flow of critical resources upward, through the various trophic layers of a food chain, toward species of ever-increasing intelligence and physical capabilities. Darwin called it the “struggle for existence.”
From what we see in the fossilized record of life on Earth and in everyday occurrences on the African savannahs, we have logically concluded that competition is the critical element in evolution’s ability to make progress. But suppose competition is only necessary among species of life that are unintelligent, relative to the human level. Suppose every system of planetary life in the universe must undergo an ugly period of fierce competition during the bootstrapping of primitive life into its early existence. Suppose the natural arms races that competitively drive species to become faster, stronger, and increasingly intelligent are destined to eventually produce a humanlike species having the ability and propensity to cooperate in ways that make competition much gentler, or perhaps even no longer necessary. This article is dedicated to exploring the simple but extremely important idea that competition is a necessary evil in the startup of planetary life, but it is a temporary phenomenon, lasting only for the first billion or so years. And since it is only temporary, competition should not be considered necessary in our new interpretation of how evolution works.
This is the second in a series of articles intended to develop a better understanding of how evolution works. The critical foundation for that better understanding is described in the first article of the series, titled Evolution Thrives on Cooperation. That foundation emphasizes evolution’s successes rather than its failures. It recognizes that evolution’s successes depend entirely on discovering better forms of cooperation and not at all on competition. Unfortunately, we tend to overlook life’s many cooperative relationships. In fact, we barely recognize them in our modeling of evolution. Our typical focus on life’s failures — species extinctions and organisms that die before they procreate — misses the point. Those ‘losers’ contribute little or nothing to aggregate life’s ability to make progress. They simply don’t matter very much in any analysis of evolution.
We are used to thinking of evolution as being driven by a competitive and destructive process of culling the unfit. But there must also be a constructive process that is responsible for life’s creativity and ongoing proliferation. It operates simply by proliferating the fittest. We tend to think of those two components as being inseparable, analogous to Joseph Schumpeter’s conceptualization of economic progress as “creative destruction.” We are led to believe that creativity relies on competitive destruction, as if they are essentially ‘joined at the hip’. But they are indeed separable. In fact, we may reasonably redefine evolution as just the creative component (based entirely on cooperation), while recognizing that the destructive component (based entirely on competition) might also occur under such resource-constrained circumstances as during the bootstrapping of primitive planetary life into ever-increasing intelligence.
We gain a much clearer understanding of how evolution works if we tease apart the competitive aspect of life’s natural development from the creative aspect. But we are strongly resistant to this idea. So, we need to drive a conceptual wedge between how we model creativity and how we believe that evolution requires competition to get that creativity, and then begin pounding on it. Once we fully accept the idea that destructive competition in evolution is only a temporary phenomenon, we can then begin to appreciate a natural trend in how life on any planet will develop, starting out highly competitive and moving increasingly toward becoming perfectly cooperative.
All of evolution’s successes come in the form of greater cooperation among various kinds of things and activities. From the metabolic molecules that enable the ongoing process of cell division, at the lowest level, all the way up to the organisms themselves, various kinds of cooperation among molecules, cells, organs, tissues, and limbs are what produce the functional properties of any living organism. At yet higher levels of evolutionary success, we find cooperation among organisms of the same species, as among bees in a hive, ants in a colony, lions in a pride, and especially among humans in a thriving society. Cooperation can be found everywhere in life, even among vastly different species. E. coli bacteria residing in the guts of many animals, for example, provide a valuable digestive service to their hosts in exchange for a steady flow of fresh food for the bacteria to infect and ingest. And various mycorrhizal fungi provide a range of valuable nutrients to nearly all plants in exchange for carbohydrates from them. In all cases of interspecies cooperation, different skill sets are shared through the mutually beneficial exchange of material resources and activities. Those kinds of cooperative relationships emerge independent of whatever competitions might be going on, and they guide the evolving characteristics of life toward ever-greater degrees of cooperation.
Perhaps the most obvious example of interspecies cooperation is the pollination service provided by bees to flowering plants in exchange for nutritious nectar. Bees are able to fly over long distances, but they are not able to produce nutritious nectar. Flowering plants, on the other hand, are able to produce nectar, but are not able to transport their pollen over long distances to other plants of the same species. So, bees and plants share their respective skills with each other. And no competition was ever required in the discovery of that relationship.
Once a mutually beneficial relationship between two species becomes established, the underlying patterns involved — in this case, the genes of both species — will tend to proliferate more rapidly as a result. Any mutations on those underlying patterns can potentially cause them to proliferate even more rapidly to the extent they discover ways to strengthen the mutually beneficial relationship. Thus, cooperating species tend to co-evolve toward ever-greater degrees of cooperation. Indeed, flowers likely evolved toward becoming more colorful so that potential pollinators such as bees could more easily find them, and bees then developed better eyes for distinguishing vividly colored flowers against their green leafy backgrounds. The natural co-evolution of cooperating species drives them ever-closer together, becoming increasingly co-dependent and sometimes even inseparable partners.
Species that cooperate with each other in ways that are mutually beneficial will naturally proliferate faster than species that don’t, all else being equal. That’s what ‘mutually beneficial’ means. We don’t typically recognize the proliferation rate of a species as being so important, but it is critical in how natural selection works (to be further explained in my next article).
Mutually beneficial relationships abstractly similar to those found on Earth can be expected to emerge in any planetary system of life, throughout the universe. So, it seems that the process of evolution might be driven entirely by the ongoing discovery of ever-better forms of cooperation at many different levels — within organisms and among them, within species and among them. No competition is ever required. Therefore, we must abandon our typically held beliefs regarding the need for competition and premature death of the unfit. We must instead focus on life’s successes rather than its failures. Those successes result from relationships of cooperation. Perhaps the destiny of life on any planet is to become sufficiently intelligent to transcend competition among organisms entirely in favor of perfect cooperation among them.
At best, direct physical competition is zero-sum. At its worst (as in a war, for example), competition is highly destructive and is therefore to be avoided by life to the extent possible. Unfortunately, some direct competition is required for evolutionary progress in primitive life, until a species emerges having sufficient intelligence to cooperate generally. We humans are just such a species. And we are now rapidly transforming life on Earth into the style of perfectly cooperative life that nature’s forces of selection most prefer. We are creating for ourselves a highly positive-sum environment by developing many different kinds of mutually beneficial relationships of ongoing synergistic cooperation, as among the employees of any successful business and also among the many businesses of a thriving economy.
The world into which our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors were born was highly competitive and zero-sum. Since the amount of food in a locality was fixed, any sort of gain by one organism necessarily entailed another organism’s commensurate loss. Until about 10,000 years ago, competition ruled the day, every day, all around the world. Then, along came agricultural humans. Those ancestors of ours changed everything about our world. They transformed it into a highly positive-sum environment, in which reproductive success depends far more on mutually beneficial cooperation than on competition.
We humans were designed to compete, and we now dominate all other species. But the reason we dominate is because we embody and embrace so much cooperation, within us and among us. Our ability to cooperate better than any other species has always been the inevitable destiny of life’s ever-increasing intelligence. And it is not just a coincidence that we are now designing our machines to cooperate with each other by exchanging information over the Internet. Every second of every day, billions of Internet routers cooperate almost perfectly, in lock-step synchrony, to collectively guide packets of information to their respective worldwide destinations. It appears there is a natural destiny for all systems of planetary life, to eventually produce diverse species of machines capable of perfect cooperation among them. From nature’s perspective (which is the only perspective that really matters), cooperation accounts for all goodness and betterment in the universe.
Despite our human abilities to cooperate in various ways, we remain in some ways highly competitive. So, there is an emotional reason why we cling to our beliefs regarding competition as the suspected driver of evolution. We humans love to compete, which is evident whenever we play sports and games. And even when we are not competing against each other, we love to watch others compete. In fact, the term ‘sports fan’ comes from our fanatical obsession with watching competitions among our respectively adopted sports teams. We also love to watch competitions among Olympic athletes. And we tend to favor representatives from our own respective nations. All those competitive drives are built into our genetically defined emotions, which remain strongly adapted to zero-sum environments of the past. In those environments, our ancestors were forced to compete just to survive. As our ancestors aggregated themselves into ever-larger groups — bands, tribes, chiefdoms, nation states, empires — their individual fates became increasingly tied to the fates of their respective groups. So, in addition to competing as individuals, we also love to compete at the group level. Consequently, we find ourselves genetically and culturally predisposed to ‘root’ for the success of our own respective nations during the Olympics, despite our full realization that they are just meaningless games.
Mounting evidence suggests that all of our problems today result from our emotions being strongly adapted to highly competitive zero-sum environments of the past. Our maladapted genes continue to drive our innate desires to compete. At the individual level, we compete over social status, mating opportunities, college admittances, and high paying jobs. At the national level, we compete by pointing nuclear missiles at each other, imposing trade tariffs on each other, and developing increasingly deadly biological weapons. Not surprisingly, all the possible solutions to our modern problems require more mutually beneficial cooperation among us. Shamefully, however, just like the Hatfields and the McCoys or the Capulets and the Montagues, we are myopically attracted to competition wherever it exists. And still today, as we watch The Jerry Springer Show or The Real Housewives of New Jersey, we act as if we are hypnotically mesmerized by competitive conflict.
Most knowledgeable readers of this article will be reluctant to accept cooperation as the sole basis of evolutionary progress. Most will prefer to continue believing that competition is the essential driver of evolution. But consider this:
Even the best ‘badass’ competitors in the world today — including all Olympic champions and apex predators — only dominate because they embody the most synergistic forms of cooperation and coordination among their limbs, organs, cells, and the metabolic molecules inside those cells. At a higher level, sports teams are only successful in competitions to the extent their players are cooperatively coordinated. The same is true for businesses and their employees. The ability to compete at any level depends entirely on cooperation at all lower levels. Thus, for every single act of competition in life, there are thousands of cooperative actions going on at levels that are mostly hidden to us.
Direct physical competition is how nature’s forces have always assessed which organisms are most deserving of critical resources (food) and the best mating opportunities. But all future life to be descended from humans, including ultra-intelligent machine-based life, will increasingly embody and embrace cooperation. In the future, an individual’s abilities will not be assessed through direct competition, but instead through collective observation and benign testing (which are, admittedly, cases of unavoidable indirect competition). The potential for creating collective capabilities in groups will be assessed through computational simulation. After all, our intelligent brains were designed by evolution specifically for simulating possible futures. Sir Karl Popper once notably remarked that our ability to imagine the likely results of contemplated risky activities “permits our hypotheses to die on our stead.” Likewise, on the positive side of life’s ledger, our imaginations enable us to conceive of possible acts of cooperation among us that can be expected to yield mutual benefit to all of the participating cooperators. No competitive culling of the unfit is ever required, although it can certainly speed up the pace of evolutionary progress.
Destined to emerge over just the next few decades, ultra-intelligent machines will become a new and beautiful style of perfectly cooperative life. They will be capable of discovering cooperative actions among them yielding enormous amounts of benefit to the entire aggregate system of life on Earth (which will increasingly become dominated by those very same ultra-intelligent machines). But such a beautiful destiny (especially for them) can only be fulfilled if we competitive and vengeful humans can survive the next few decades. Regrettably, we are rapidly escalating the design and deployment of hugely destructive war machines to compete against other nation states that are doing the same thing. Unfortunately, it is in our nature to compete. We can only transcend this dangerous and pivotal moment in earthly life’s development to the extent we fully understand how and why we exist. It is imperative that we collectively develop and embrace relationships of mutually beneficial cooperation among our individual selves, and even more importantly, among our respective nations. And we must entirely forsake our outdated emotions in favor of our ability to reason. Only then can we possibly overcome our mortally destructive urges to compete.
Evolution Thrives On Cooperation
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