Yeso: My book is about how social life evolves and how co operation evolves on this earth. And it takes an explicitly darwinian perspective to try to address this puzzling question of why we ever see costly helping behavior in nature, he says. Yeso: Once you have some of these survival machines that team up, that form teams, there's no rational alternative than to join a team yourself. If you're a lone entity and you're competing against teams of those survival machines, you just can't compete.
Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material, to nation states. But given what we know about the mechanisms of evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin? A biologist by training, Nichola Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior — teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice — most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive and so successful.