So What Does It All Mean?: The Secrets of Life: From Big Bang to Trump

By SS O'Connor

Why are humans neither 'good' nor 'bad'? How can so much chaos and confusion in the world actually lead to order? Why are we so often wrong when we're asked if the world's getting better?
In this, the last book in The Secrets of Life quartet, SS O'Connor pulls together the threads of genetic and cultural evolution, and then adds to these the conclusions of evolutionary game theory. As he does this, he ends with an intertwined narrative that explains why so many of the phenomena of our existence may not be the mysteries we think they are, but could in fact have the same underlying logic to them.
By examining the great currents at work in our collective story, the role that competition and cooperation have always played in the development of the world, and why each behavioural strategy is rational in what it's attempting to achieve, the book shows that the same cycles of collaboration and destruction have been present since time began.
But while the success of these strategies may ebb and flow, it is their interaction that results in the balance and order we see around us. This current is also the consistent vector of our human history.
Although we may have animal origins, and are also driven by the same need to respond to the profound Laws of Thermodynamics, we have developed our culture to the point where we can now choose to overrule so many of the instructions of our genes.
Why do we do this? What are the problems that arise from our free will? How have we come to realise that self-interest is quite different from selfishness? Why have we become obsessed with the need for fairness and trust in our societies?
And how have these forces resulted in us making the world a better place? Few of us believe this can be the case. But as the evidence of our progress becomes ever clearer, the series concludes by showing us why we are often wrong in our view of each other, and why we're so frequently mistaken in our pessimism about the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otium Press
• Release date: May 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839786167

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First published in Great Britain by Otium Press 2023

www.otiumpress.com

Text copyright: © SS O’Connor 2023

The moral right of the author has been asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-7391559-3-3

eBook ISBN 978-1-8397861-6-7

The author gratefully acknowledges the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book where needed. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.

The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of these books.

Cover and end papers: Details from Black Mimosa by Bruce McLean.

Copyright, the artist. Published by CCA Galleries, London and printed by Coriander Studios. Reproduced by kind permission of Bruce McLean and the CCA Galleries, September, 2022

Book design and art direction: Ash Gibson

Photo editor: Cat Costelloe

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For Wilf and Clemmie, Lolly, Arthur, George and Huxley, Bub and Sabbie.

The future

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: So, what does it all add up to? And what might it mean?

Chapter Two: Well, what about us humans? Are we really so special… or are we simply a slightly extended version of everything else?

Chapter Three: If we’re still looking to pin down the reasons we’re so different from other organisms, perhaps we should take another look at our cultural evolution? What were the factors that had the greatest influence on our development?

Chapter Four: Do game theory’s results suggest how to win in life? Are there guidelines for doing this? Or do we all know what we should be doing… but would just rather not?

Chapter Five: If we’re such geniuses, then why are we so gloomy? And if our decision-making processes are so clever - then why aren’t we more certain about ourselves? More to the point, why do we so frequently feel as if we’re coming apart?

Chapter Six: Do the conflicting forces at work in us mean that humans are incapable of objective analysis? Or can game theory show us whether we’re acting in our best interests… or not?

Chapter Seven: The big lesson from the evolutionary process has always been that cooperation is the strongest force in life - and the explanation for the diversity, variety and safety nets that are so necessary for existence. This is also true in us humans. But what does it all mean for society?

Chapter Eight: If we’re so endlessly cynical about our fellow man - and society - then how does this outlook fit in with game theory’s core message that cooperation is bound to evolve? It’s obvious that we all want to win - but is this really the way to do it?

Chapter Nine: If symbioses and associations lead to order, then surely the best societies will be those with the most cooperative people in them? But does this mean that as long as we get rid of the defector types, we can move on to Utopia? There don’t seem to be many examples of this happening - but why not?

Chapter Ten: If the argument is that evolution’s direction of travel has always been towards increasing levels of complexity and cooperation - and that this includes our cultural development - then why haven’t these forces led humans to make the world a better place? Instead of this, don’t we seem to be getting into an ever deeper mess?

Chapter Eleven: Well, OK, maybe a few of the facts are encouraging… but haven’t the improvements all come from the rich countries bullying and exploiting the poorer ones into doing things their way?

Chapter Twelve: All right… maybe the world is becoming more equal, incomes are up, birth rates are down, democracies have increased, despots are declining, people are healthier, they live longer, their children don’t die as much, women’s rights are progressively recognised and food security has improved. But isn’t everything else terrible?

Chapter Thirteen: OK, maybe some of the world’s greatest ills are indeed being tackled… but aren’t we destroying our poor planet in the meantime?

Chapter Fourteen: Although Ostrom-style cooperation is clearly kicking in, and collective actions are now trying to save the environment… have we left it all too late? Or could human ingenuity yet save the day?

Chapter Fifteen: What’s the real scale of the environmental problems? How bad is it - and aren’t there things we can do to suck up the emissions and reduce the damage? And what about the world’s wildlife - is it true that we’re witnessing another mass extinction?

Chapter Sixteen: If these books have been arguing that cooperation evolves naturally in human societies, then how is it that there seems to be so much anger and violence around these days?

Chapter Seventeen: If our lives really have been getting so much better, easier and more secure… then why do we seem so miserable? In fact, why aren’t we all a little happier?

Chapter Eighteen: And so, pulling everything together, is it now possible to see a direction in our evolutionary journey? Is there a logic that links the story of how life came to be on earth… and how we humans have come to prosper? If there really is, can it be summarised - even dumbed down?

Chapter Nineteen: OK, if this long story truly hangs together… then is it possible to stick one’s neck out and suggest where the world is going?

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Introduction

These books started (what seems like a million years ago) with the simple observation that if every organism that had ever lived was descended from our Luca - the Last Universal Common Ancestor - then looking at what lay behind the decisions that had led to the success or failure of different things might well tell us how life worked. If success could be defined as being one of the life forms that survived, then beating the appalling odds against existence had to represent the ultimate achievement of the evolutionary process.

While each organism had developed to be different, and everything was dedicated to its job of staying out of trouble long enough to reproduce, it was nevertheless obvious that we were all in the great game together. Everything in life shared the same biochemistry, we all had the same genetic mechanisms, and we had roughly the same physical kit. Yes we may have ended up looking and behaving in wildly different ways, and have settled on our individual survival strategies and phenotypic qualities, but it was also clear that everything was somehow moving in the same general direction, and was following the same rule book.

It was also obvious that we’d all arrived at our places in the great superstew of life through the extraordinary mechanism of mutations, a dice throwing trick that would decide whether we’d be better fitted to what was around us than other species - particularly to environmental conditions - or not, in which case, the sad ending was generally extinction.

Behind this astonishing circus was the genius of the gene, and the way it both maintained replication and yet allowed errors to occur in the reproductive process. By doing this, the genetic cascade was helping each and every one of its vehicles find its place in the sun, until it was of no further use to it, at which point it was unceremoniously dumped.

And then we humans had come along, and from that point on there was a whole new game. Not only did our cultural evolution lead to our giant intelligence, languages, transactional skills and abilities to use outsourced tools… but it also allowed us to alter what was around us. We could now control our environments, direct what would win and lose, and have dominion over the other species on the planet. What a responsibility.

We found we could survive in different habitats and conditions. We became increasingly nimble in the ways we would spot and avoid danger, and we developed the most extraordinary instincts for assessing whether we could trust others in our world. And as game theory was later to show, we became brilliant at working out who would help us - and who wouldn’t.

As in the natural world, we came to recognise that creating symbioses between us could lead to efficiencies and cultural breakthroughs. Each of the parties involved could benefit. In fact we also found that working with others might suit us so much that we’d accept a smaller share of the gains that arose from the relationship - just as long as we were getting enough of whatever it was that we wanted. ‘Don’t be envious’ Robert Axelrod had concluded from his famous competition, and throughout our history many of us have plainly been ready to follow his advice.

We even began to do much of the gene’s work. We developed our own mutations - not genetic ones it’s true - but nonetheless intelligent changes that would influence our survival chances. And we found we could do this without waiting for the painfully slow mechanism of genes being passed down through vertical transmissions.

Ironically, we even discovered that we were able to imitate the gene’s actions to the extent that we frequently think we can live without its instructions, and shrug off how it’s trying to direct us. We now, for instance, will sometimes reject our families rather than favouring them through kin selection, we repeatedly ignore the compulsion to reproduce, we can be attracted to our own sex rather than the opposite, we slow down the ageing process, we manage to defeat many of the death mechanisms that were meant to clear out the old layers that get in the way of innovation, and we control our environment with artificial means of changing its produce and climate. We no longer need to wait for mutations to do these things. We can even now artificially edit the very genes themselves.

Yet two things still run counter to much of this astonishing success.

First, we seem to shy away from recognising our achievements. We refuse to acknowledge when we’re well off, and prefer instead to employ pessimism as our default attitude, rather than being curious or open-minded about how we’re actually doing. ‘Cooperation evolves’ may have been the one line encapsulation of game theory, yet when we look at each other it seems we see little to please us - or even admit to the wish to collaborate.

Why’s that? Why are we so quick to flick away the reasons that have made us the successes we are, and instead condemn our fellow man to endless suspicion and disdain? Yes, of course we’ve all had bad experiences - but why does every research study seem to reinforce how convinced we are of our vileness? If that’s not true, then why do we persist with our constant negativity?

And, secondly, it’s baffling how blind we are to our potential as a species. Why, for example, are we happier to use imperfect information to weigh up our decisions and chances, rather than putting a bit of effort into seeing a more balanced picture? Why don’t we embrace a little of the optimism of people like Robert Axelrod and Elinor Ostrom? Or realise that Adam Smith was right when he said that humans have a deep concern for one another’s well-being? This might be born of self-interest, he concluded, but so what?

Why don’t we see the progress we’re making? Is it because we’re terrified that we’d descend into complacency rather than fixing where we’re going wrong?

You’d think we’d be enthusiastic at seeing the way our moral behaviour can grow, but instead of this we become more and more convinced that we’re condemned to perdition. Why’s that?

Although we’d hate to admit it, we’re far better off than we might imagine. And while the future will be even better - it seems to me that we could well speed things up if we were rather more aware of why we’re winning.

And, if so, I’d love to think this book might help.

SS O’Connor

Somerset, June 2022

CHAPTER ONE

So, what does it all add up to? And what might it mean?

What was it the Guru said?

‘Life is like an ocean. The waves may be the bit we can see… but don’t look at them to tell you how life works. Understand what’s happening beneath the surface instead - and examine the currents down there. Realise why they exist and where they’ve taken us.’

The Seeker remembered well how the old boy had made so much sense as he’d outlined his analogy. But he also recalled how the swaddled figure had finished by pointing at him with such insistence, and how his voice had become shriller as he’d asked: ‘… but why does nothing in life ever last forever? Why does nothing ever win?’

The Guru’s insight was that the waves might entrance us with their prancing beauty, but that they’re also confusing and unpredictable. Sometimes they’ll appear seductively limpid, sometimes they’ll kill us with their power. Life, too, can appear equally baffling. It’s so multi-layered in the ways it operates, and there’s such a mystifying array of different formats and behaviours.

Can we really make any sense of all the contrasting strategies that have led things to arrive at what they’ve become: their scale, their habitats, their ways of moving - to say nothing of the different approaches they’ve come up with to solving their energy and breeding needs?

Where to begin? Well, in a sense, everything we can see in life is the result of things coming together for their own ends. We gloomy humans may think that existence is just a continuous struggle, embarrassingly crude in its dependence on being ‘red in tooth and claw’, but when one looks more closely at the arc that evolution has followed, it’s impossible not to arrive at quite the opposite conclusion.

And this is because it’s clear that cooperation that has been the constructive force at the heart of every life form, encouraging things to combine with others to create new opportunities, to find efficiencies, overcome evolutionary roadblocks, and help it meet the underlying imperative of holding back entropy.

As for ourselves, what can we conclude other than that we, too, are the product of the same forces. After all, we’re based on the cooperation of the two prokaryotic participants that created our cells, built by the cooperation of our 230 different specialised cells as they all came together to construct our bodies, kept alive by the cooperation that we know succeeds in our daily lives, and are even benefitting from the way that collaboration evolves to make our societies ever more moral and efficient.

If that’s the case, then why is there so much aggression and violence in life? How does the idea of collaboration fit in with organisms when they’re plainly such ruthless killing and eating machines? And if not that, then what about all those weird behavioural choices that different life forms adopted as they decided how they could best get along with what was around them.

Yet in spite of the apparent mayhem, we’re left with the inescapable conclusion that everything in life has somehow managed to arrive at its niche in the biosphere. And the result of this gigantic set of arrangements is that organisms ultimately coexist in the great dance of Nature, rather than just annihilating each other. How are we ever expected to pick a path through that?

And aren’t humans just the icing on the cake? Some people argue that we must be like everything else because we’re all descended from the same start point - the Luca of our heritage, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Not only that, but we were sent on the path of our more recent evolution by the same breakthrough moment when eukaryotic cells began specialising their functions.

Does this make us any easier to understand? If we have an animal heritage, then why are there such fickle shifts in our behaviour? Why are we capable of so much selfishness and cynicism - and why do we have such a boundless capacity for falsehoods and cruelty, as well as an appalling record of untrustworthiness? And what about all the hideous lying and pretending we so often use… the constant misleading and bluffing, the way we mess people about? And yet at the same time, the endless pleading to be better understood and believed?

The very same people who can lie and complain so profusely, even to be horribly savage, are also capable of genuine sympathy and sacrifice, of moral certainties and unselfishness, courage, kindness and a deep concern for the welfare of others. The Spanish writer Jorge Semprun, for instance, summed it up when he saw humanity stripped to its bare bones in Buchenwald. He would later describe what he made of us in his autobiographical book, The Cattle Truck: ‘In the camps, man becomes that animal capable of stealing a mate’s bread, of propelling him toward death. But in the camps man also becomes that invincible being capable of sharing his last cigarette butt, his last piece of bread, his last breath, to sustain his fellow man.’

So, what’s going on? How do we make sense of it all? Thousands of years of philosophy and religious reasoning has tried to do this by looking at the capricious waves of existence, and yet there’s never been a moment where everyone smiles as the cosmic penny drops and we all say ‘… ah, yes, that’s it.’

In fact, the only time we’ve ever seemed to get near to agreeing is when some grotesque Big Man forces everyone to see things his way. When that happens, we delude each other that he’s come up with the answers, but accepting what he says is usually just the price of staying alive. In spite of knowing this, it’s disappointing how many of us still prefer to be told what to do and think - rather than considering for ourselves how things might work.

So, have the evolutionary theorists and mathematicians, the anthropologists, biologists and game theorists now managed to discern any intelligible direction and patterns in the currents of life’s ocean?

Many people would claim they have - and that they’ve seen through the confusion and complexities of the waves to detect clarity beneath the surface. The reason for thinking like this goes right back to a recognition of the forces that made us what we are. They begin by asserting that if our Universe began with Big Bang, then for ten billion years or so there was no chance of biological life until ways were found around the physical laws that the moment of creation had laid down. These, they say, demanded that if life was ever to emerge it would have to find answers to things like the crushing weight of gravity, the interplay of magnetic forces, the climatic and physical variations on our planet and, most particularly, to the demands of the immutable Laws of Thermodynamics.

All energy is finite, says the 1st Law, and if living things were ever to be viable then they’d have to find ways of sourcing it. Some organisms would eventually manage to soak up energy directly from the Sun. Some astonishing microbes could even suck it up from natural gases; but virtually everything in life was going to have to grab it from something else. If an organism found a way of winning by doing this - then where it took it from was almost certainly going to be the loser.

The 2nd Law presented even more of a problem. Everything falls apart, it says - no process is ever wholly efficient, and a constant increase in entropic loss is an ironclad certainty. Now the currents become more evident. Competition for energy is the response to the 1st Law, and cooperation to the 2nd. But why does cooperation win? It’s because the only way to create vital energy savings is by getting things to work together - and then having them share in the gains.

And so, ever since our mysterious Luca somehow flickered into action, every life form that’s ever existed has employed the same two strategies of zero sum conflict and non-zero sum collaboration to meet the demands of these profound laws. It lies at the base of every decision that an organism ever makes, and every interaction it has with another living thing. Should they fight, ignore, eat, destroy or enter into some kind of mutually beneficial venture? What are they trying to achieve by doing any of these things? The answer is simple… to survive long enough to reproduce, and so bring about the next generation. That’s all. That’s what they’re programmed to do.

In fact, even before biological life began, inanimate elements found they could also achieve efficiencies through being collaborative - and combining their capabilities. This is what led atoms, molecules and compounds to become increasingly complex as they specialised and exchanged their properties. In acting like this, they overcame their own limitations, and as they did so, the planet was built. Needless to say, it all took unimaginable timescales, but bit by bit conditions pushed forward, and the many mistakes along the way were overcome.

Eventually, somehow, a self-replicating mechanism arose that meant that a living thing could pass itself on - and cellular life then embarked on finding ways of prospering by exploiting what it could find to help it.

For billions of years there were only the most basic of microbial organisms. Yet, behind them then, every bit as much as there is today, the incredible action of the gene was the replicating mechanism that directed these tiny vehicles to carry it around. With painstaking slowness, minor reproduction errors led these little partners to create adaptations; and as mutations spread out, the resulting prokaryotes came to colonise a vast array of environments.

‘I was struck by how different everything seemed with microbes in mind.’

Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes

Gradually these early organisms also found ways of working together. By combining their assets, they somehow discovered that there were energy gains to be made when they didn’t do everything for themselves. The fact that 1+1 could make 3 meant that the benefits of cooperation began to take life forward.

Every life form was making choices as it interacted with what it found around it. And by working together, things began to overcome evolutionary roadblocks by creating ever greater diversity and security. Those that had the most innovative techniques often did better than others. Their ‘fitness’ increased because they’d succeed in getting more genes out than the competition, and the ones that became the most adapted then flourished and refined their survival mechanisms.

The way the gains that arose from these synergies were ‘split’ between the participants defined their relationships. Yes, their motivation may have been based on non-zero cooperation - but the outcomes of these ‘partnerships’ could still remain laden with tensions and wariness.

‘Cooperation evolves, not because it’s nice but because it confers a survival advantage.’

Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

In driving these changes, the gene has sometimes been described as ‘selfish’, because it appears to put the preservation of life ahead of any ‘concern’ for the fate of the organisms that carry it around. Yet that is its job.

And the way the gene does this is to continuously produce living things that are fit for purpose, and are therefore best equipped to produce the next generation. In doing so, its actions generate such a diversity of organisms that there’s always the chance of something arising that will meet the demands of a constantly changing environment. And, of course, these things will be responding to the challenges that come from the surrounding life forms which are, like themselves, also endlessly mutating.

If the gene is said to be selfish in having no loyalty to a species, then this is simply a human interpretation of a biological necessity. It’s a two-way deal though. As the gene does its job, so life continues, and since living things are the beneficiaries of the process, then it might be more accurate to infer that the gene’s function is profoundly unselfish. By constantly improving the vehicles that it depends on, its actions are helping them to arrive at the best ways of improving both their stability and safety.

‘Since genes have neither a self nor the emotions to make them selfish, one would think this phrase is just a metaphor. True, but when repeated often enough, metaphors tend to assume an aura of literal truth.’

Frans de Waal. Good Natured. The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Animals

Does life have a ‘purpose’ - or ‘meaning’ - in this relationship? In the way that we always imagine our human existence does? Well, if one views the gene’s role as presiding over a process where the sole objective is to ensure that something continues to preserve life, then such a conclusion has to be unlikely. Yes, everything is fighting the entropic certainty of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics but, no, other organisms don’t have our sense of destiny, or belief that we can make a contribution to the world.

Humans may think they’re different, but we only arrived after 99.995% of the time there’d been life on earth, and it’s our cultural evolution that’s given us the capacity for rich (although sometimes painful) introspection and questioning.

Is anything else ‘sentient’ like us, though, capable of wondering why things happen, of reflecting on their actions, or imagining what the future will bring? Scientists very much doubt it. The human race may have been subject to exactly the same evolutionary forces that built everything else, but we seem to have repurposed these drives to fit with our own landscapes of social fairness and morality. Compared to our high aims and values, the gene just is - simply a mechanism programmed to make sure that the whole circus of life is constantly increasing its security. This is the process that means it’s giving itself the best chance of becoming immortal… and so preserving life.

‘If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology

As for what got us to where we are, John Maynard Smith and his later collaborator, Eors Szathmary, tracked the sweep of evolutionary progress - currents the Guru would have called them - in their great 1992 book, Major Transitions in Evolution. In this they describe how it’s possible to see the same propulsive energy at work behind the strategies of competition and cooperation as they’ve interacted throughout the world’s entire history. And it was from the resulting interplay of these different behavioural strategies that vehicles would make the decisions that led to them either having a future - or of coming to an end.

Consider again that 99.9% of all species have become extinct. Surely, you’d think, this bald statistic makes the evolutionary process look extraordinarily wasteful? Yet from the profligate scattering of this shotgun approach have emerged organisms of ever greater complexity, of ever increasing variety and diversity, of ever improved security, and of ever more brilliantly creative ways of finding synergistic gains.

The early transitions required many early evolutionary hurdles to be confronted and cleared. First, the working together trick meant that independent replicating molecules could form themselves into chromosomes, then RNA somehow progressed to DNA and, from there, mutations led to progressively more complicated organisms.

Alongside this, the vector of life was moving towards increasingly sophisticated symbioses. Two single-celled life forms somehow combined to create a third, and the colossal leap forward to the eukaryotic cell was underway. Nature, as ever, kept the old models working, never rejecting anything that had proven its place in the biosphere. As Martin Nowak was to propose in describing his ‘Win Stay, Lose Shift’ strategy… if something’s still succeeding, then why chuck it away?

In time, another massive evolutionary threshold was crossed when sexual reproduction was added to the tried and tested method of asexual, clonal splitting. The result of this transition turned the trickle of adaptations into a torrent. And the more this onward rush led to new species and new types of organisms, the more were the opportunities for failure or success. Everything was increasingly being forced to deal with what was around it, and as different life forms collided, so they had to ‘decide’ whether they’d fight and possibly win, be overrun and fail, or somehow coexist by entering into ecological associations. If things took this last choice, they might then go on to produce further, even more intricate solutions.

Non-zero collaborative unions mushroomed. The evolutionary process found that by combining specialist functions, there could be mutual benefits to the contributors. The gains that mattered most came from energy savings and the improvements to their joint defence mechanisms. Increasing the diversity of species, the gene ‘learnt’ from success, led to ways of hedging its bets, because it was now coming up with vehicles that could survive in wildly differing conditions.

In doing this, the genetic process was buying more tickets in more lotteries, and therefore standing more chances of winning. All this added up to the likelihood that things would be making the right evolutionary decisions and therefore succeeding in life.

How was the gene achieving this? It was using a system that allowed mistakes to occur during reproduction. And it was out of these potential calamities that variations could be unleashed, something that eventually could lead to the creation of entirely new species.

When Darwin and Wallace saw through to the effects of this process, they had no idea of how, or why, it was happening. The end result might have been evident to them, but they had no way of knowing what the mechanisms were that lay behind it. Instead, they came to their conclusions without any understanding of the gene, nor of the role that replicating molecules played in natural selection. In fact, it wasn’t until Gregor Mendel’s work with peas was rediscovered, four decades after their theories were first published, that the mathematical certainties of the gene’s inheritance cascade allowed scientists to see how the different bits of the answer fitted together.

Because evolution had led to the creation of ever more complex organisms, it had always been assumed that the way life forms arose had to be unfathomably complicated. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that among the most shocking aspects of what Darwin and Wallace had to say was that the underlying survival mechanism was astonishingly simple: ‘… multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die’ was all Darwin needed to summarise it. Whatever managed to get the most genes out into the gene pool won the race; if not, then it was out of business.

This ‘adapt or die’ axiom became the key insight of Darwinism - a straightforward binary choice that would forever confront every living thing in a world in which the underlying requirement was to survive and reproduce. Yet even though the process of adaptation would always be painfully slow - because changes only passed vertically from parent to offspring - the extraordinary, random approach of mutations somehow worked.

‘No competition, no evolution by natural selection’

Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

But the fly in the ointment for people as they tried to understand the struggle for existence was to be all those strange organisms that acted altruistically - because doing this never appeared to be in their best interests. If something diminished its own fitness by being sacrificial, then surely its ‘caring’ genes would be lost to the gene pool? Wasn’t this counterproductive? Yet those species that did so were plainly able to flourish - and were even among the most successful. It made no sense.

This insight was to remain an inconvenient truth for Darwinists until Bill Hamilton and other brilliantly original biologists realised that instead of genes being lost to subsequent generations, the altruistic behavioural strategies - and particularly sterile organisms that otherwise slaved for the good of the colony - were actually getting more genes through to the gene pool than other methods. This was because reproduction was being outsourced to the altruists’ relations.

From this breakthrough it was a short intellectual step to the realisation that when organisms appeared to be acting for the good of others, they were actually acting for the good of their own genes. The ultimate aim wasn’t the survival of the vehicle, or even that of their group or species; but only that the gene continued to keep itself safe and could therefore ensure it could create new vehicles that would carry it on.

So many mysteries were resolved when this deep secret was revealed. Among other things, it became obvious why the gene would allow so many things to die. Deaths and extinctions needn’t be the end, but instead could be promising openings when seen from the gene’s-eye point of view. With the disappearance of individuals and species would come opportunities for mutations, for novelty and variety - and some of these innovations could be just what was needed to meet the demands of a constantly changing environment.

What was the result of this realisation? It was to see that our human perspective of the world might be misplaced. We tend to regard life as precious, even sacred, and people talk passionately about the importance of ‘my life’ or the need to respect ‘other people’s lives’. But the truth is, that to understand its secrets, one has to accept that everything in life is really what it’s always been… life.

Perhaps the greatest of the insights that now emerged was that while the need for energy transference explained the ‘kill or be killed’ stuff for individual organisms, it was non-zero, altruistic behavioural strategies that were contributing to the whole business of keeping life healthy, in a state of constant renewal… and balanced.

Just like Darwin’s conclusion about adapting or dying, so everything from the most basic of single-celled creatures to complicated beings like us humans, were now seen to be arriving at their survival choices by making repeated decisions about how to behave.

And all these decisions revolved around the same choice over whether they would try to win by beating the competition, and therefore seeing other things lose… or to win by cooperating, so that everything could combine their specialisms and therefore win as a team. It didn’t really matter if this would involve some pushing and shoving over who did best out of the deal... there would still be a net gain and benefits for both parties.

How strange this appears when it’s put in such an unadorned way as this. Yet can there be any other explanation for the trillions and trillions of decisions that the moving parts of life make as they interact with what’s around them? By extension, as Maynard Smith was to highlight, these interactions led to evolutionary transmissions as the resulting symbioses created ever more complicated life forms to arise over colossal time frames. Maybe that’s so, and yet, at the heart of each of these astonishing biological step changes there were, and remain, the same mechanisms and the same choices.

Is this as baffling as it appears to be? Can the source of the wildly complex picture of life really be reduced down to just a continuous series of such fundamental, binary choices?

Yet is this conclusion really any more astonishing than the recognition that even the greatest of our human masterpieces can be reduced in exactly the same way? The transmission of masterworks like Citizen Kane or a Beethoven Mass can all be boiled down to the similarly binary choice of the 0 or 1 notation that is digital information, a system made possible by the unreal processes of advanced computing power. Like the beauty of Nature, these examples of creativity may be sublime, yet they’re also dependent on their mathematical elements.

Is this as straightforward as it appears to be? After all, don’t even the most fleeting glimpses of life leave us breathless at how complicated it can all be? That’s true, yet just as Darwin saw through to the simplicity of the way natural selection works, so too can the trillions of decisions that decide the existence and future prospects of life forms be reduced down to the similar idea that organisms are constantly choosing between a zero sum or a non-zero strategy. It is the interplay between the two that explains the behaviour of all living things.

These interactions have been going on between molecules, cells, and every other life form since time began. And the logic behind the way they behave is always game theoretic, and follows the same strict rules of engagement. And what’s behind this maelstrom of choices? What is the motivation? It is nothing less than the compulsion that all organisms have to get as many genes and offspring out into the world as possible. In other words, to win.

‘This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.’

Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology

The action of these unions, associations and symbioses are what create ecological niches. But these aren’t like seats on the Tube, where someone gets off and a newcomer plonks themselves down in the empty place. Instead, they arise as organisms interact and refine themselves over gigantic time periods to arrive at their mutual benefits. Niches are biological inventions.

And this means that when one looks at things like the astounding biochemistry of DNA, or the intricacies of multi-stage life cycles, the horrific actions of parasites like the Emerald Cockroach Wasp, the strange ritualised theatre of so many animal conflicts, Hamiltonian Spite, or of any one of the millions of instances of coexistence in life, then there can only really be one great conclusion to what’s going on: if it works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t, then change. Win Stay, Lose Shift. And, if something has to change, then do it as quickly as possible… adapt or die.

If an organism chooses to ‘stay’, then the only reason must be that it has found a strategy to arrive at an Evolutionary Stable State - an ESS - and that it’s created a safe niche for itself. If it no longer has this security, then an adaptation is needed. These niches define where things end up on the Behavioural Spectrum of life. From the brutality of parasitoid arrangements at one pole, right through to the apparently altruistic sacrifices of eusocial insects at the other, everything, everywhere is trying to find a place where it can be secure in its stable state, somewhere that it can stick with.

The resulting success is then baked into its genes, and the message is passed down to its offspring. On and on, through the vertical transfer of genetic information, the same instructions are handed over. And so the organism stays the same, resisting or adapting itself to any innovations that may arise from mutations or other forces, until its circumstances change and the survival strategy no longer works. It’s at this point that it either finds a way of transforming itself through a chance genetic change which might provide the right adaptation to remain a viable life form… or off it goes to extinction.

Game theory has now exposed how this works. Its lessons may be best illustrated in the ways we humans respond because we have the intelligence to weigh up the factors needed to make our choices. Decisions in the natural world, however, are mutational, not sentient, and they’re taken blind and not planned. Nonetheless, every organism is following exactly the same logical processes as we do, and every decision always stems either from something choosing a zero sum approach that involves competitive action, or a non-zero, collaborative one.

Both of these are understandable strategies - but both can now be seen to have weaknesses. Zero sum might beat the competition, but it leaves the organism open to exposure and the punishment that comes from having other things trying to avoid it. Persist with this approach for too long and they’ll end up with reduced fitness, or possibly even with the slow march to ‘evolutionary suicide’. Sure, the zero sum strategy gets points in the short term, but the vehicle is likely to suffer in the long. In this sense, choosing solely to employ this strategy might satisfy the 1st Law of Thermodynamics because it takes precious energy from something else - but it doesn’t solve the existential consequences that are inherent in the 2nd.

Non-zero behaviour is equally understandable. It’s at the beating heart of all evolutionary transitions, because cooperation overcomes entropic forces through combining separate strengths into a greater whole. This is the process that creates energy savings, and once established the parties then settle down to symbiotically play Always Cooperate.

But it’s this very harmony that leaves the strategy open to exploitation. By relying on trust in its mechanism, rather than suspicion and defensive tactics, it allows parasites and biological cheats to come along and exploit what’s been built. When this happens, the grabbers might benefit, but they’re not contributing. Energy is then needed to reduce them from becoming too widespread. If this doesn’t happen and defectors become overly numerous, they run the risk of bringing the whole house of cards crashing down.

‘But presumably ‘trust’ isn’t a big problem among cells. Right? Wrong in a certain sense at least. Biological evolution, like cultural evolution, creates opportunities for cheaters - pirates and scoundrels who would parasitically subvert the greater good if left to their own devices. So, natural selection designs technologies of ‘trust’ - anti-cheating mechanisms.’

Robert Wright, Nonzero

This division between competitive and collaborative strategies has been present from the moment that life first began. We humans have come to label the two forces as good or bad, or positive or negative, or even selfish or unselfish. But these moralistic descriptions of ours can now be seen to be invalid in the face of the entire sweep of evolutionary history.

Each strategy is simply a different way of winning: both of them are based on self-interest, but each is in constant interplay with the other. As Axelrod and Nowak both illustrated,