Evolution of Freedom
Part I: Evolution of cooperation - Chapter 8
MAJOR TRANSITION
While biological evolution usually happens gradually, there are also major transitions in evolution during which an organism takes a great leap up in complexity. According to John Maynard Smith, the eminent evolutionary biologist, life has undergone approximately eight major transitions in evolution–first in biology, then in culture. Each transition is defined by fundamental changes in the way an organism communicates and cooperates.With digitalization, we are undergoing a major transition in evolution at this very moment.
Major evolutionary transitions occur when, instead of competition and slow adaptation, selection starts to favor higher forms of cooperation. When the best and perhaps the only way of solving a problem is cooperation, organisms form a cooperative group in which the cooperation is so well integrated that the new entity can be seen as a more complex organism in its own right.
For this to occur, the cooperative entities learn to specialize, suppress disruptive selfish behavior and direct the benefits of cooperation to all their members. The reason complex life forms exist in the first place is because this cooperative strategy increased the evolutionary fitness of all participants.
It’s easy to understand why this kind of cooperation produces a competitive advantage. Take any individual sport and imagine what would happen if instead of competing against an individual you had to compete against a whole team. In almost every case a sports team will win over an individual player.
This yields a profound equation:
Major evolutionary transitions occur when, instead of competition and slow adaptation, selection starts to favor higher forms of cooperation. When the best and perhaps the only way of solving a problem is cooperation, organisms form a cooperative group in which the cooperation is so well integrated that the new entity can be seen as a more complex organism in its own right.
For this to occur, the cooperative entities learn to specialize, suppress disruptive selfish behavior and direct the benefits of cooperation to all their members. The reason complex life forms exist in the first place is because this cooperative strategy increased the evolutionary fitness of all participants.
It’s easy to understand why this kind of cooperation produces a competitive advantage. Take any individual sport and imagine what would happen if instead of competing against an individual you had to compete against a whole team. In almost every case a sports team will win over an individual player.
This yields a profound equation:
LIFE = TEAM SPORT
A major transition in evolution occurred when individual genes linked up into a string to form a chromosome. Instead of competing individually for the same resources, they chose to work together to be copied into the next generation as a team. Another transition occurred when individual bacterial and archaeal prokaryotes joined together and formed a team to create a more complex eukaryotic cell. They did this using a novel division of labor, endosymbiosis, in which the bacterial cells became the mitochondria inside an archaeal cell.
The transition from single-cell to multicellular organisms represents another major transition in evolution. Creating a team conferred them a competitive advantage against single-celled organisms. To create a stable new entity, most cells had to learn to suppress their natural urge to reproduce and delegate the task only to the gonads. If the cells weren’t able to cooperate in this way, they would keep replicating individually, causing cancer.
According to evolution biologist Elisabeth Sahtouris, major transitions in evolution are driven by the maturation cycle. In the youthful phase of the maturation cycle, an organism competes for territory and resources with other organisms. When most of the resources are claimed, and there is no more territory to expand into, the cost of the zero-sum competition grows so high that switching to a more mature win-win strategy of cooperation becomes a sensible approach to increase one’s reproductive success
.
Being a eukaryotic cell in a world that had been dominated by simple prokaryotes for two billion years offered a selective advantage. This started a new competitive phase in which these single-celled organisms could again compete for the same territory and resources where simple bacteria had reached a stalemate. A billion years later, when the single-cell organisms again encountered the physical limits of the planet, competition again became too costly, and it became time to switch from the youthful phase of the maturation cycle to the mature phase. This is when the multicellular organism was born.
In every major evolutionary transition, an organism takes a step up in complexity. Multicellular species, such as us humans, contain at least three different layers of cooperation. The added complexity increased the reproductive success of the genes they carried, which allowed these more complex organisms to take over the planet.
Individual multicellular animals would again receive a benefit from forming herds, groups and communities. Eusocial animals such as ants and humans have been the most successful and widespread animals on the planet. Humanity has, in fact, become so successful that, as a species, we have now reached the physical carrying capacity of the planet.
Now, major transitions in evolution are not just limited to biological evolution. Human culture has also gone through major transitions. Since spoken language revolutionized how humans cooperate compared with all other animals, Maynard Smith considers it a major evolutionary transition. The same goes for the invention of written language, which enabled cooperation on an even larger scale. This allowed language to be preserved and transported through time and distance, and made the first civilizations and empires possible.
Digitalization has now ushered us into the middle of a third, uniquely human, major evolutionary transition offering tremendous cooperative potential on a global scale. The physical infrastructure of this major evolutionary transition is already in place, and the communication lines are open. What is still missing, however, is the new cooperative logic that will unite this global community into a more complex social organism.
Articulating this cooperative logic is the purpose of this book.
Until we have settled on this logic, the major evolutionary transition is not complete, and we continue to follow the cooperative logic of the previous transition. The problem is that by continuing to follow this obsolete logic, we are unable to suppress the disruptive influence of bad-faith actors. This creates a cascade of wicked problems that now threaten our very existence.
According to biologist E. O. Wilson, an expert in sociobiology, the initial motivation to form new groups, and thus new forms of cooperation, is the protection of shared resources like food and territory. When competition produces diminishing results, the answer is cooperation. Humanity is currently grappling with this very problem. According to Sahtouris, humanity is undergoing the same maturation cycle that bacteria and single-cell organisms have gone through during earlier major transitions in evolution.
Most of the existential problems we face–species extinction, climate change, war, famine etc.–have to do with the way we use our resources. The difference here is that instead of the threat coming from outside, it is now coming from within the group. The next layer of cooperation we create has to find a way to protect the shared resources of this planet. This means that it is now our turn to switch from our youthful competitive phase to the mature, cooperative phase of development. The scale this cooperation has to take must now span the globe.
Highly respected evolutionary scientists are now seriously talking about a cooperative superorganism that could span the globe. In his book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson sees cooperation on a global scale as the logical destination of evolution. They call this future the Omega Point. If alpha is the beginning of life, omega is the convergence toward a cooperative singularity.
Just to be clear, the global cooperation proposed here doesn’t mean or require the establishment of a world government or anything of the sort. The large-scale cooperation simply means a shared set of rules and practical tools that people can voluntarily use to solve the recurring problems we all face in our day-to-day lives.
The transition from single-cell to multicellular organisms represents another major transition in evolution. Creating a team conferred them a competitive advantage against single-celled organisms. To create a stable new entity, most cells had to learn to suppress their natural urge to reproduce and delegate the task only to the gonads. If the cells weren’t able to cooperate in this way, they would keep replicating individually, causing cancer.
According to evolution biologist Elisabeth Sahtouris, major transitions in evolution are driven by the maturation cycle. In the youthful phase of the maturation cycle, an organism competes for territory and resources with other organisms. When most of the resources are claimed, and there is no more territory to expand into, the cost of the zero-sum competition grows so high that switching to a more mature win-win strategy of cooperation becomes a sensible approach to increase one’s reproductive success
.
Being a eukaryotic cell in a world that had been dominated by simple prokaryotes for two billion years offered a selective advantage. This started a new competitive phase in which these single-celled organisms could again compete for the same territory and resources where simple bacteria had reached a stalemate. A billion years later, when the single-cell organisms again encountered the physical limits of the planet, competition again became too costly, and it became time to switch from the youthful phase of the maturation cycle to the mature phase. This is when the multicellular organism was born.
In every major evolutionary transition, an organism takes a step up in complexity. Multicellular species, such as us humans, contain at least three different layers of cooperation. The added complexity increased the reproductive success of the genes they carried, which allowed these more complex organisms to take over the planet.
Individual multicellular animals would again receive a benefit from forming herds, groups and communities. Eusocial animals such as ants and humans have been the most successful and widespread animals on the planet. Humanity has, in fact, become so successful that, as a species, we have now reached the physical carrying capacity of the planet.
Now, major transitions in evolution are not just limited to biological evolution. Human culture has also gone through major transitions. Since spoken language revolutionized how humans cooperate compared with all other animals, Maynard Smith considers it a major evolutionary transition. The same goes for the invention of written language, which enabled cooperation on an even larger scale. This allowed language to be preserved and transported through time and distance, and made the first civilizations and empires possible.
Digitalization has now ushered us into the middle of a third, uniquely human, major evolutionary transition offering tremendous cooperative potential on a global scale. The physical infrastructure of this major evolutionary transition is already in place, and the communication lines are open. What is still missing, however, is the new cooperative logic that will unite this global community into a more complex social organism.
Articulating this cooperative logic is the purpose of this book.
Until we have settled on this logic, the major evolutionary transition is not complete, and we continue to follow the cooperative logic of the previous transition. The problem is that by continuing to follow this obsolete logic, we are unable to suppress the disruptive influence of bad-faith actors. This creates a cascade of wicked problems that now threaten our very existence.
According to biologist E. O. Wilson, an expert in sociobiology, the initial motivation to form new groups, and thus new forms of cooperation, is the protection of shared resources like food and territory. When competition produces diminishing results, the answer is cooperation. Humanity is currently grappling with this very problem. According to Sahtouris, humanity is undergoing the same maturation cycle that bacteria and single-cell organisms have gone through during earlier major transitions in evolution.
Most of the existential problems we face–species extinction, climate change, war, famine etc.–have to do with the way we use our resources. The difference here is that instead of the threat coming from outside, it is now coming from within the group. The next layer of cooperation we create has to find a way to protect the shared resources of this planet. This means that it is now our turn to switch from our youthful competitive phase to the mature, cooperative phase of development. The scale this cooperation has to take must now span the globe.
Highly respected evolutionary scientists are now seriously talking about a cooperative superorganism that could span the globe. In his book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson sees cooperation on a global scale as the logical destination of evolution. They call this future the Omega Point. If alpha is the beginning of life, omega is the convergence toward a cooperative singularity.
Just to be clear, the global cooperation proposed here doesn’t mean or require the establishment of a world government or anything of the sort. The large-scale cooperation simply means a shared set of rules and practical tools that people can voluntarily use to solve the recurring problems we all face in our day-to-day lives.
