Tumors are a form of cell-level selfishness that all organisms must do their darnedest to suppress. The scientific consensus has shifted so much that Richard Dawkins, in the 30th-anniversary edition of “The Selfish Gene,” wrote that he could just as accurately have called his book “The Cooperative Gene.” Perhaps decades of our economic and political lives would have been much less harmful if he had.Ī very instructive case of how greed is not good, of self-interest run amok, is cancer. Microbes collaborate extensively, for instance in providing biochemical “public goods,” which are predictably protected by coop-cop policies that prevent exploitative free or cheap riding (although we should bear in mind that this is an anthropomorphic analogy, since none of the microbial players has a mind or intentions). Indeed, as David Haskell, a biologist and writer, notes, a tree is “a community of cells” from many species: “fungus, bacteria, protist, alga, nematode and plant.” And often “the smallest viable genetic unit … the networked community.”Īmazingly, you don’t even need a brain to reap the benefits of being ruthlessly cooperative. And cross-species collaborations abound (symbiosis isn’t rare - it’s the rule). Every multi-cellular organism is a collaborative “ society of cells.” Group-living species form varying degrees of super-organisms where survival is influenced by the fitness of group mates (social groups become a looser, but often no less necessary, form of extended survival vehicle). Every complex cell is powered by cooperation (their power plant subcomponents, chloroplasts or mitochondria, result from symbiosis). We might call this “coop-cop policing.”Įvery so-called selfish gene also cooperates with the other genes in its genome - the gene team that collectively builds and (co)operates their “survival vehicle” (a.k.a. Life necessarily operates a Russian doll-like nested hierarchy of cooperation, where selfishness-suppressing enforcement operates at every level. And billions of years of R&D have taught biology which tricks work. Only certain kinds of self-organizing complex systems enable collectively beneficial results. In biology, they’re routinely collectively ruinous. This isn’t about deviations from “rationality” or “market failures.” No matter how perfectly rational imaginary market participants are in responding to fully loaded local incentives, the systemic effects of self-organization are often far from benign. These evolutionary lessons aren’t related to the two main flavors of critiques of economics that typically command attention. The authors present abundant “evidence that enforcement shapes cooperation across all levels of biology.” Enforcement is defined as “action that evolves … to reduce selfish behavior within a cooperative alliance.” Adding to copious real-world cases, modeling shows that whenever “new selfish elements are introduced to a population, the evolution of suppression is often rapid.” Otherwise, gains from selfishness get ruinously risky. The paper examines a “central puzzle”: “Why does evolution favor investment in cooperation rather than self-serving rebellion that would undermine a particular genome, organism or society?” Surely a topic of central concern to economists also. There’s no real argument about the fact that “the evolution of cooperation is central to all living things.” That’s the first line of a Nature Ecology & Evolution paper by the biologists Nicholas Davies, Kevin Foster and Arvid Ågren, and it expresses an utterly uncontroversial view among biologists. Biologists, unlike many economists, grasp when the “greed is good” ethos gets deadly. Nevertheless, economic ideas rule our lives, so it’s critical we apply Leslie Orgel’s second law (“evolution is cleverer than you”) specifically to economics.įor instance, it may surprise many non-biologists to learn that evolution isn’t only about red-in-tooth-and-claw competitive selfishness - it’s also “ruthlessly cooperative.” And protecting life-supporting cooperation requires suppressing certain kinds of selfishness. Unfortunately, economics hasn’t kept up with what natural scientists have discovered about life’s organizing secrets. Both involve “invisible hand” magic - intricate, unplanned, “self-organizing” systems. Jag Bhalla is an entrepreneur and writer.Įconomics and evolution are basically in the same business: Both are all about productivity selection, though one has been at it for billions of years longer than the other.
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