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.