The Evolution of Cooperation

"We can explain living systems scientifically very well, but what about human beings? What about the mind? I don’t think we have any ideas in science really how to attack this problem. Because, even defining what the mind or consciousness is, this is still completely open, and in science we have to have a good definition. So now we are not talking about biology any more; we are really talking about sociology. Can we explain interactions between human beings, between societies, with a similar logic to what we used to explain biology for example? The book that made a huge difference there and generated a whole field in sociology and economics is called The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. It’s also a popular book with no equations, but basically the point he is making is that you can use exactly the same mathematics we use in physics and in biology to start to attack more complicated things like this cooperation issue. If you link it back to The Selfish Gene, which claims that underlying human behaviour is this selfishness of genes in some sense, then, of course, any cooperative behaviour becomes a mystery. Why do we ever actually cooperate with each other? Why do we have this built in? And why do societies or tribes cooperate with other tribes and other societies? Axelrod really tries to explain this in this book, which generated this whole field of taking the game theory of mathematics and trying to apply it to the social context to understand conflict and cooperation and so on. I think that even if you have an underlying selfish tendency, then cooperation can evolve simply because you’re forced to interact with someone else over and over again. If you interact with someone just once, then there is no incentive to cooperate. But if you know that you’ll be interacting with a person over and over again, where you can check and verify what the other person is doing, and, crucially, if you don’t know how long this interaction will last, then somehow mathematics would suggest that it’s better for you to switch to cooperation rather than to continue to be selfish. He goes through lots of computer simulations and also experiments with people and some animal species to show that cooperation can evolve. So in a way it’s a very optimistic book in that sense: even though we know the first instinct is to protect your own interest, somehow it seems that evolution would really favour cooperation. Right. The point is that we’re really at the very beginning of trying to apply the same logic to complex systems, and maybe ultimately it’s impossible to fully grasp and explain and predict them. But somehow books like this made me feel a bit more encouraged that this might be possible. This interview was first published in 2010."