Collective Conscious

Why did evo­lu­tion give us sex­ual repro­duc­tion? Why does evo­lu­tion give us coop­er­a­tion? These ques­tions bug me today because the stan­dard expla­na­tions don’t make sense, don’t cover the whole ground in my mind.

Coop­er­a­tion first. It seems strange that we would, as highly evolved beings etc., be absolutely unable to act with ratio­nal self-​​interest in even the most basic of con­trolled set­tings. As a rule, we fail to take the lion’s share when it s ripe for grab­bing, we act out of spite even it means destroy­ing our own gains in the process, and just gen­er­ally fail to observe even the mot basic of the behav­ioral pre­scrip­tions from eco­nomic textbooks.

We, in short, coop­er­ate. By spite we rein­force ideas that oth­ers ought to be shar­ing well with us, and by shar­ing we avoid the guilt that comes from sac­ri­fic­ing these ideas on the altar of self-​​interest.

Nature knows some­thing we don’t: it knows that self-​​interest is inef­fi­cient. It knew that eco­nom­ics was wrong long before we did. It knows that we have got to work together, even when it means sac­ri­fice with­out rec­om­pense, and it seems to have taken upon itself the task of enforc­ing that coop­er­a­tion even she we our­selves are unable to.

Take sex­ual repro­duc­tion. It’s a process that requires a hell of a lot of coop­er­a­tion, but not for the obvi­ous rea­sons. Nature has, for its part, made pretty sure that in order to be liked well enough to be thought of as mat­ing mate­r­ial, one has to be, to name just a few: gen­er­ous, ami­able, com­pas­sion­ate, avail­able… You know the drill. These are self-​​sacrificing attrib­utes. You’re expected to put your part­ner equal to or ahead of yourself.

If nature thought that eco­nom­ics was right, it would let us love a lit­tle eas­ier. But we have a sex­ual repro­duc­tion mech­a­nism, and now there is a real, biological-​​evolutionary require­ment that peo­ple be gen­er­ally coop­er­a­tive. Sex­ual evo­lu­tion — and this is cru­cial — is biased towards coop­er­a­tion. Evo­lu­tion, in just about every func­tion­ing organ­ism in this planet, wants — needs — us to coop­er­ate, in irra­tional, sac­ri­fi­cial, and after all col­lec­tively (although not always mutu­ally) ben­e­fi­cial ways.