Introduction to Cooperation Studies (3)

The online course on cooperation studies that I've taught 8 times over the past 10 years started with cooperative arrangements in biology, then moved on, respectively, to the biological and cultural evolution of cooperation, social dilemmas, institutions for collective action, and technologies of cooperation. In this post I want to introduce several fundamental texts related to cooperation in biology. You can access the recording of the first live audio-video collaborative session if you want to see my slide show (and my framing of co-learning via social media) You can also view my previous posts, Intro 1 and Intro 2.

One of my co-learners, Roland LeGrand, a Belgian journalist, made excellent notes of my first live session.

Although there are many more texts in the syllabus about this aspect of cooperation, the most fundamental are about symbiosis, biological synergies, and cooperative arrangements in evolution.

Lynn Margulis and endosymbiosis:

Lynn Margulis was a young biologist when she presented evidence that eukaryotic cells -- cells with nuclei -- must have started out as symbiotes. In other words, very early in evolution, a single-celled organism without a nucleus merged with another organism to create a cooperative ("symbiotic") relationship that continues to this day. The mitochondria, the organelles that provide the energy for animal cells the way chloroplasts provide energy for plant cells, are passed along only through the maternal line. Because evolutionary dogma was fixated on competition, the notion that a cooperative arrangement was important at the very beginning of life on Earth, challenged the established paradigm. Her first paper was rejected by a couple dozen scientific journals before it was published. It turns out that cooperative arrangements, from mutually beneficial symbiosis to parasitism that benefits only one partner and sometimes kills the host, is important up and down the evolutionary ladder.

A quick summary of Margulis on endosymbiosis 

As above, so below: the worldview of Lynn Margulis 

As part of the work on cooperationcommons that I did with Institute for the Future, we provided summaries of key texts, such as Peter Corning's Nature's Magic, about the synergies between organisms that provide benefits to the contributing organisms many times greater than those conferred by individual capabilities alone.

Darwin was not blind to the complementary relationship of cooperation and competition, but Darwin's defenders in the 19th century became fixated on competition, "survival of the fittest," and "nature, red in tooth and claw." Frank Ryan's "Darwin's Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection" sets the stage for the next module in my course, about the biological and cultural evolution of cooperation.

Introduction to Cooperation Studies (4)