Compete or Cooperate? Part 2
Birds do it, bees do it, even Douglas firs and birch trees do it.
Life as a big cooperative
Many years back I collaborated with a UBC prof on illustrations for a forestry textbook. Among the cartoons was a depiction of trees competing for sunlight by growing higher and higher.
Over time this idea of winner-take-all in the forest canopy was recognized for what it was: somewhere between a partial truth and a caricature of reality. In 1997, UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard was part of a team of researchers who discovered that trees are interconnected through an underground web of mycorrhizal fungi. She found that trees communicate through this network by exchanging carbon, nutrients and water (confounding long-held beliefs in forestry science that all trees compete for sunlight and resources).
Simard identified “Mother Trees,” the largest trees in the forest which act as central hubs for immense underground fungal networks. Young trees and seedlings are supported by the Mother tree by ferrying the nutrients to them that they need for growth.
By using carbon isotopes to trace the sharing of nutrients between trees, Simard made an astounding discovery about two particular species. Through the underground network, Douglas firs share excess sugars with leafless birches in the spring and fall, and in exchange the birches provide the Douglas firs with sugars in the summer.
Amazing.
The findings of Simard’s team took root everywhere from university botany departments to the making of the 2011 film Avatar. All of this would have pleased the 19th century Russian nobleman Peter Kropotkin, who insisted that life isn’t defined solely by ceaseless struggle within and between species. The evidence supporting Kropotkin’s thesis of organic cooperation - both interspecific and intraspecific - is now substantial and occasionally even charming.
The many scientific examples of mutualism and symbiosis are too numerous to touch on here, other than a few prominent examples from the very beginnings of life. Billions of years ago, a range of cells began to set up shop inside early species of bacteria. In time they evolved into “organelles,” part of the machinery of modern animal cells: the nucleus, mitochondria, and centrioles. Another variety of cell began to live in association with organisms capable of photosynthesis, which led to plant cells containing their light-munching chloroplasts.
This kind of micro-cooperation by symbionts persists to this day. Some 40 species of bacteria and one-celled creatures live in the guts of termites. These symbionts break down the cellulose of wood, which the termite cannot digest itself. It’s an internal community that has coevolved with termite species, with a mutual payoff for all players.
As biologist Betsey Dyer put it in Discover magazine, “symbioses are the rule rather than the exception; organisms are always associated with other organisms.” Without a substantial level of collaboration between and within species, from the micro to the macro, life would not likely have evolved much past simple self-replicating strands of DNA.
There’s no denying that most animals are locked in predator/prey relationships, and that existence is a struggle from the amoebae on up. As the mythologist Joseph Campbell once remarked, “life feeds on life,” a realization - along with personal mortality - that he believed came to scar evolving human consciousness, though there is a bigger picture to soften the existential necessity:
“Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.”
Evolution’s Pink Patriarchal Penis Person Peak
While today’s neoDarwinism – the “grand synthesis” of Mendelian genetics and natural selection – is moving away from the monolithic notion of “nature red in tooth and claw,” the dog-eat-dog idea still persists within some academic circles. It’s even unintentionally endorsed in standard college biology texts that minimize the recent findings on parasitism, mutualism and symbiosis. Given this intellectual inertia, the generalization of hardcore competition from nature to human culture – and spun as the machinery of civilized advance – continues to persist in the popular imagination.
Thanks to the philosophy of social Darwinism, white, well-bred intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century had discovered that evolution had peaked, by happy coincidence, with themselves. Darwin himself qualified his own thoughts on the struggle to survive to acknowledge the role of cooperation. Unfortunately, we’ve largely inherited our ideas on competition by extrapolating from animal survival in the wild, with poverty seen as the inevitable, if unfortunate, corollary of a universal law in which the weak are winnowed out by the powerful.
By this logic, the rich and powerful are justified in grabbing what resources they can, while duking it out among themselves. This spectral notion has haunted everything from business management theory to classical economic thinking. It has both endorsed and trivialized the coercive character of capital-driven power relations.
The Russian anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin wrote of the mindset of his British colleagues in his 1902 magnum opus, Mutual Aid:
“They came to conceive of the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another’s blood. They made modern literature resound with the war cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it were the last word of modern biology. They raised the pitiless struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination.”
His critique still stands, in a world where leaders of state and industry wrap the naked exercise of power in a thin veil of pseudo-scientific platitudes. Unregulated competition is pitched as an axiomatic good, and that all manner of abuses of power (corporate, political, or personal) are no more than accidental departures from an upward path toward universal good.
We can leave this on the doorstep of Darwin’s interpreters, but not the man himself. In Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man, the word “love” appears dozens of times - not just in the author’s reference to humans, but to animals as well. (Sorry for failed promise of a smackdown between Kropotkin and Darwin. I’m a shitty fight promoter.)
Messing with the Nash Equilibrium
Social Darwinism took some interesting turns over time. Consider the ideas of the Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash, portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind. Nash was one of the leading thinkers in “game theory,” the mathematical field that defined US strategic thinking during the Cold War. In his work at the think tank RAND Corporation, Nash assumed that human behaviour mirrored the zero-sum games of US-Soviet nuclear brinksmanship.
The mathematician based his theories on a hypothetical human being who sits alone in a room and tries to reconstruct the thinking of an unseen, hostile opponent bent on their destruction. We constantly assess others for possible moves against us, insisted Nash, who - perhaps not surprisingly - suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
When one of Nash’s uglier games, “the prisoner’s dilemma,” was tested on the secretaries at RAND Corporation, the results went sideways. Instead of betraying one another, they independently chose to trust and cooperate. Such selfless acts threw a monkey wrench into the “Nash equilibrium.”
Classical economics is also thrown by the unwelcome truths of altruism. In theory, human beings are “rational utility maximizers,” that is, free agents acting out of pure self-interest. This mindset turns human beings into cardboard cutouts, with only superficial resemblance to real people like Nash’s secretaries. But why muss up tidy, clockwork theories with messy, organic facts? Why examine the evidence that animals and even plants can be naturally cooperative, much less human beings?
Actually, it’s not all that easy to disentangle cooperation from competition in either the natural world, or in human relations. Today we have an economy - an ogilopoly, actually - ruled by commercial giants like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Walmart, General Electric, Lockheed and others. The big players don’t so much compete with each other as prevent smaller players from presenting a threat to their shared domination. Needless to say, this cooperative arrangement doesn’t hold for the worker bees of these giant operations, and all the corporate “team-building exercises” in the world present zero threat to a rigidly hierarchical business structure. (Actually the drone analogy is a bit off, as the beehive is the classic setting for interspecific benefit, not the Amazon warehouse.)
If there’s an upside here, it’s that blind competition has lost a fair bit of cachet over the past decade. For me, this is summed up in the decline of particular expression I’ve always hated but was pitched as a character strength in Hollywood films, business profiles, and everyday conversation: killer instinct. I haven’t heard it mentioned in some years, and Google Books’ Ngram Viewer reveals that while still in circulation, it’s on the decline:
The Russian Legacy
Back to Kropotkin. Though disappointed by the failure of the 1905 revolution, the Russian scholar returned to Russia in his final years, and died on 1921 in the city of Dmitrov. To this day he remains a figure of ambiguous merit, given his refusal to disavow violence for achieving political aims.
Regardless, Kropotkin’s findings were and are momentous. He held that when hostile circumstances press upon the community, animal or human, they seem to strengthen the communal bonds of cooperation. In our high-speed world of surveillance capitalism - with perpetual lockdowns under the pretext of a global health emergency - it’s a message that bears repeating. On the local and global scale, true grassroots cooperation is the only alternative to mutual extermination, and toward a more subtle and complex level of organization. The choice is between fear and love - and “a world in peace or a world in pieces.”
(Revised and expanded version of an article originally in Common Ground)
Social Darwinism will be replaced by Kropotkin Collectivism, hopefully. The lines between self and non self will blur and it will be with great pleasure many of us will exit the Age of Narcissism and Capitalist excess.
Thanks for this. Thought I would have to wait a week for part two, but here it is. Simard and Paul Stamets are both worthy of a read, and we may have already touched on Solnit. My folks had a copy of Mutual Aid in the bookcase that I eventually got around to reading in 1970, grist for much reflection and, later (Reagan, Thatcher obligent) dismay. Also, this record came home with my Dad one evening in 1959: <https://youtu.be/TIoBrob3bjI>