There's abundant evidence for these patterns, er not just in the wake of coverd 19, but also historically. Food sharing is a thing that we have always done as humans. But now it would seem so weird for me to go and leave food on my neighbour's doorstep. Once people can get control of their own finances, or they can smooth the troughs in their own food supply by themselves, then the prevalence of food sharing tends to drop.
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.