“Cooperation has made the world, from the small to the truly magnificent!”
On the evolution of all life through cooperation and betrayal

Recently, we have faced several crises that we cannot respond to on our own.
The emergence of COVID-19 has brought us to an unprecedented pandemic, and we are experiencing the various consequences of human selfish behavior, such as climate change due to reckless development, and the destruction and extinction of habitats for plants and animals.


So are we truly "selfish" beings? Perhaps this is the most important question we have ever faced, or will ever face.
Nicola Raihany, a professor of biology at University College London (UCL) and a world-renowned evolutionary psychologist, points out in her first book, The Cooperation Gene, that the nature of humans, which has been misunderstood as selfish until now, is actually 'cooperation', and that cooperation is the force that made the birth and evolution of all life possible.


Nicola Reihani, who has conducted extensive and in-depth research across fields and species, including psychology and evolutionary biology, says that we humans, too, were able to exist through cooperation.
This is because humans are multicellular organisms made up of tens of trillions of cells working together.
He also explains that the various phenomena and groups that make up human society, such as the reason we live with our families, the existence of grandmothers, the causes of paranoia and jealousy, and the reasons we deceive one another, were possible because of cooperation.


From this perspective, "The Cooperation Gene" points out that cooperation is a part of human history and a factor that will have a significant impact on the future we will face.
To better understand the power of cooperation and its evolution, we will examine not only the history of human evolution but also the stories of other diverse social life forms on Earth.
Through this, we will learn more about ourselves and the other species that share this planet, and along the way, we will rediscover that cooperation is truly human nature and the true force that has driven all of our evolution and prosperity.

Our social nature, our human nature, has led us to a pandemic.
But the only way out of this is through sociality.
It's not clear when we'll get out of this crisis, but we do know how to get out of it.
To combat COVID-19, we must suppress our most basic instincts, the ones that whisper to us to socialize in times of crisis.
We must accept the constraints that govern where, with whom, and what we do.
Scientists must dedicate themselves to achieving the common goal of developing a vaccine, while essential workers must provide the critical services and supplies we need to survive.
Political leaders must be considerate not only of their constituents but also of people living in other countries and even beyond.
Yes, that's right.
We must cooperate with each other.

---From "Entering"

Describing genes as selfish does not mean that they contain traits such as immorality, cunning, and spitefulness that are considered characteristics of selfish humans.
Nor does it refer to genes associated with selfish traits that exist only in the bodies of extremely evil individuals.
All 26,000 genes in our bodies could be described as "selfish" genes, or, to put it mildly, "self-centered" genes.
This means that each gene has its own 'interests' that it considers most important.

---From "01_Chilling Eyes"

The most aggressive and invasive cancers arise from these diverse, mutually supportive communities of cells.
(…) If we look at cancer from this perspective, a more universal point becomes clear.
What is cooperation on one side is competition on the other.
Cancer cell colonies cooperate with each other in multicellular organisms, but this cooperation comes at a great cost to the host.
So a bitter and disappointing situation arises.
Even cancer that wins the battle ends up losing the war.
Most cancers are not contagious and have no way to leave the host body.
Even if you briefly hijack a ship to achieve your goal, if the ship sinks, you die along with it.

---From "03_The Enemy Within"

They say that conflicts arise everywhere in the process of parents caring for their young.
Even if a male and female raise their young together, they are tempted to invest slightly less than their partner, and to raise their young only twice while their partner raises them three times.
Experiments have shown that when a female geese trusts a male, she becomes more lazy and passes on more of the heavy lifting of childcare to him.
This female strategy leads to the very unfortunate result mentioned above, whereby offspring with both a mother and a father grow up to be more unhealthy than offspring with only a mother.
So how can we avoid this conflict? (…) Theorists predict that if one parent neglects childcare, the other parent will shoulder more of the burden rather than investing less than the other parent, making up for the shortfall.
The important point here is that even if that were the case, it would not completely fill the gap.

---From "05_The Ant and the Grasshopper"

Thanks to numerous long-term studies that have shed light on animal behavior, we now know a great deal about how baboons, meerkats, baboons, and other interesting species cooperate.
This valuable knowledge allows us to see how similar we are to other social animals and how diverse and complex cooperation can be.
Collaboration enables us to accomplish many different things.
As we saw in the case of the songbird, cooperation can help detect predators, protect the nest, and provide food and education for the chicks.
But sometimes cooperation changes the individual.
It causes irreversible and permanent changes in the entity to make it a better helper.

---From "07_The Teachings of the Araknorae Kkori Chire"

Why does a woman's fertility decline so dramatically in her late 30s? Why do they persist in infertility, even when their reproductive prospects seem to be at an impasse? To answer these questions, we need to examine menopause from an evolutionary perspective.
Then we can see that menopause is the product of an evolutionary battle between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law that has been going on for countless years.
(…) According to this data, when a mother-in-law gave birth to and raised a child at the same time as her daughter-in-law, both children had difficulty surviving.
The price of this simultaneous reproduction was enormous.
In cases where there was reproductive competition between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, less than half of the children survived to the age of 15.

---From "08_Long Live the Queen"

Cooperation creates not only a collection of individuals but also stable family groups in which some individuals help others reproduce and raise children.
But sometimes cooperation can hinder, rather than help, the evolution of larger, more complex groups.
Recall how cancer cells, as we saw in Part 1, work together to harm the host organism.
(…) Therefore, counterintuitively, it may be that hindering cooperation can actually stabilize society, especially when the benefits of such alliances are detrimental to the group as a whole.
This is a fundamental challenge that runs deep in cooperation.
And we humans are not immune to the influence of this challenge.
Cooperation is both essential to humanity's collective success and the greatest threat to that success.

---From "09_Bloody Battle for the Throne"

Even in the course of human evolution, a system of help and exchange based on needs was not unusual but commonplace.
Even today, such systems are common in many hunter-gatherer societies and many non-industrial societies.
This system does not replace the reciprocal sharing system, but coexists with it.
(…) In social interactions, not counting every penny from our colleagues is an unspoken message that says, 'We depend on each other.'
Interdependence means that your interests depend on the well-being of your colleagues, so interdependent colleagues don't have to calculate the cost-benefit ratio every time they interact.
The reason I feel bad for a friend who insists on buying me coffee today because I bought him coffee last week is because it sounds like he doesn't consider me an important friend, that he's putting a higher price on a cup of coffee than his own self-interest in my well-being.

---From "10_Betrayal or Cooperation"

We are not the only image-conscious species.
The blue-lined cleaner wrasse is also surprisingly similar to us here.
They try to look good to others.
As you know, there is a conflict of interest between the bluefin tuna and the customer fish.
The customer wants the cleaner wrasse to get rid of parasites, and the cleaner wrasse wants to eat the customer's mucus and scales.
Unlike humans, cleaner wrasses and customer fish can't sit down and have a conversation, and they can't leave reviews of poor service.
Yet, both sides manage to defuse the tension in surprisingly similar ways to our own.
---From "12_Precious Reputation"

We reflexively divide others into 'in-group' and 'out-group'.
However, the classification criteria are completely arbitrary (according to previous experiments, classifications were made based on criteria such as the color of the name tag and whether one liked Picasso or Monet).
Our tendency to be overly partial is a perverse consequence of our highly cooperative nature.
Early humans were increasingly able to overcome the challenges nature presented thanks to their collaborative efforts.
Food and water shortages, and the threat of dangerous predators were all mitigated through cooperation.
But that wind has made others emerge as the main threat.
The opponent in the fight was no longer nature.
It was us humans.

---From "15_The Two Faces of Cooperation"

We must harness these capabilities if we are to have any hope of solving the global problems facing us.
We need to create effective systems, such as rules, agreements, and incentives, that encourage long-term perspectives and cooperation rather than immediate selfish interests.
We know how to foresee better solutions.
I know how to draw a brighter world.
Know how to design social rules that encourage people to cooperate.
(…) No matter what anyone says, the key factor that led us to success is cooperation.

---From "18_Victims of Cooperation"