Being “co-operative breeders” is how humans have survived, says evolutionary biologist Nichola Raihani.
In her new book The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Saved the World, she writes that co-operation is a way that individuals compete to improve their position in the world.
Raihani, a professor in evolution and behaviour at the University College London, has been studying co-operation in species for nearly two decades.
Prof Nichola Raihani Photo: supplied
Inherently, co-operation is a form of competition in entities, even genes and cells, Raihani tells Kim Hill.
“To give just one example, something like nepotism or corruption or bribery, those kinds of things aren’t things we typically think of as being examples of co-operation but you can see all those things as forms co-operation that are happening at a very local scale.
“There’s always this tension between co-operation and competition really and who’s benefiting from this co-operation is really the big question.”
At all levels of life, we can see instances of subgroups co-operating to the disadvantage of the larger community, Raihani says.
“We even see examples of that happening inside our own bodies. So sometimes the cells inside our bodies, some of them will join forces and start co-operating with one another against the interests of the host organism.
“When that happens, we call the disease that results cancer.”
Her own mother, to whom she has dedicated the book, died from cancer in 2020.
“My mum had a very aggressive form of breast cancer that most likely was lots of different types of cancers that were all working together to hijack her body and her body’s resource supply systems.
“Often those cancers are highly co-operative inside the person who is suffering.”
One the most extreme and poignant examples of co-operation in the natural world that she has learned about is the act of self-sacrifice in some Brazilian ants.
“There’s a species of ant called forelius pusillus and it’s an ant that lives in very hot, dry regions in Brazil.
“During the day, they’re at the surface, they’re foraging and at night, they return to the nest and everybody scurries back down the little tunnel.
“But a few individuals ... in these societies stay at the surface and they wait for everybody else to go into the nest before they then get busy dragging and carrying grains of sand and other debris to completely seal the nest’s entrance … in doing that they sealed their own fate, because the ants left at surface can’t survive overnight above ground.”
But Raihani notes this behaviour is probably largely innate for the ants, unlike humans, whose sophisticated cognitive mechanism drives co-operation.
We’re also unique among species in the way we work together to raise offspring, which makes us “co-operative breeders”, she says.
That makes the Western ideal of a nuclear family “evolutionary unusual”, Raihani says.
It “might be why we often find modern parenting quite difficult because we didn’t evolve to parent in these isolated units; we evolved to need and expect help in raising our young”.
But the more autonomous we become, and the less we rely on each other, then the less co-operative we are, she says.
“There’s a concept in evolutionary biology called material security and essentially that’s just a fancy way of saying, how able are you to meet your basic needs by yourself.
“When material security is decreased or when it’s low, people are much more interdependent … and they do generate these local highly interdependent social networks that are very, very co-operative.
“We saw that happen actually in the wake of coronavirus, when all of us had a shock to material security … in London at the time, there was real germination of hyperlocal co-operation in the form of neighbourhood groups and sort of local neighbourhood initiatives.”
She expresses cautious optimism for the future about how we, as a co-operative species, can deal with huge issues like global warming.
“I think as a species we’ve shown we are able to tackle problems on this kind of large scale before … but there are also lots of cases where we famously failed to co-operate as well. So I think while I would say we can tackle global public goods problems, things like climate change and pandemics, I don’t think it’s a given that we necessarily will.”
These dilemmas tend to be easier to deal with when there’s an identifiable target, she says.
“Something like a virus is probably a bit more difficult, and then something like climate change like you said which is like this sort of nebulous non-entity in some way is even more difficult for us to gear our psychology towards dealing with.
“Having said that… I think there’s still room for optimism, so I think one thing that say the pandemic has shown is that lots of people are really willing to accept major constraints on their lifestyle and their behaviour in the service of a greater good.
“I think the other thing which it showed us which is going to be really important for dealing with something like climate change is just how quickly some tipping points in behaviour can be achieved when the situation demands it.
“I think when there is a real sense of urgency, we can rise to the occasion if we collectively want to.”
