SuperCooperators
Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
by Martin Nowak
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Pub. Ed. $27.00
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SuperCooperators
Competition does not tell the whole story of biology. As Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield note in SuperCooperators, creatures of every persuasion and level of complexity cooperate to live. And just as some organisms form living colonies—superorganisms—to enhance their survival, it is only by “supercooperation” that we can ensure our own.
Nowak draws on his and others’ research in applied mathematics, in which cooperative strategies have been modeled on computers. These offer fresh perspectives on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic cooperation problem, and many more elaborate schemes. They also dovetail with findings about cooperation from the animal kingdom. For example, some bacteria hunt in groups, just as a pride of lions hunt together to corner an antelope; bees tirelessly harvest pollen for the good of the hive; and meerkats risk their lives to guard a communal nest.
The book synthesizes these findings to present five basic mechanism of cooperation. These are direct reciprocity (“I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine”); indirect reciprocity, in which my behavior toward you depends on what you have done for others; spatial selection, in which cooperators form networks with those individuals with whom they interact most frequently; multilevel selection, which describes how cooperation can take place among groups as well as among individuals; and kin selection, in which the bonds of family and common ancestry shape our cooperative strategies. “We are superCooperators,” the authors write, “the only species...that is able to draw on the support of all five mechanisms.” To survive we must exercise them to an unprecedented extent.
SuperCooperators presents the scientific case for why we must all hang together.
Hardcover : 352 pages
Publisher: Free Press ( March 22, 2011 )
Item #: 13-313341
ISBN: 9781439100189
Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 inches
Product Weight: 18.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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