Patterns of Human Cooperation
Required disclosure: links provided to books mentioned below will take you to the Amazon website and, if you buy something there, I may eventually receive a small pittance as a result.
In a previous post I talked about human history being best understood as a progressive spiral made up of four intertwining strands, with the third of those strands consisting of our increasing ability to cooperate with each other. This post is the first of several in which I’ll elaborate on my understanding of this element of our human history.
As humans it can be fairly said that our superpower is the ability to work cooperatively with others of our species.
As Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari says in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow:
To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability — rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness — explains our mastery of planet Earth.
And evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson points out something similar in his recent book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution:
Our ancestors found ways to suppress disruptive competition among individuals within groups, so that between-group selection became the…
