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.