SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

I read a lot, but I rarely suggest books to people I am acquainted with (you know, people get sick of that sort of thing); however, since I finished reading this book, I can honestly say that this is the one volume I have actually recommended to my friends and family. This book covers a crucial aspect of our modern life and is far-and-away one of the most indispensable pieces of scientific writing I have read to date. For example, take this quote from the Preface: "Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation. The biggest issues of all - saving the planet and maximizing the collective lifetime of the species Homo sapiens - cannot be solved by technology alone. They require novel ways for us to work in harmony. If we are to continue to thrive, we have but one option. We now have to manage the planet as a whole. If we are to win the struggle for existence, and avoid a precipitous fall, there's no choice but to harness this extraordinary creative force. We now have to refine and to extend our ability to cooperate. We must become familiar with the science of cooperation. Now, more than ever, the world needs SuperCooperators." One reviewer called Martin Nowak a virtuoso, this is most certainly true, and it may even be an understatement. It would seem that Dr. Nowak has his hands in nearly every discipline and knows nearly everyone who is anyone in the scientific community. Furthermore, whether he's discussing Game Theory, Evolutionary Biology, Mathematics, Multi-Level Selection, Language, the Tragedy of the Commons, Networks, or Evolutionary Graph Theory, the writing is always vigorous, entertaining, and accessible. In essence, you could probably spend countless days reading works like: Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution , Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions , A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save it , Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos , Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition , Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality , The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture (Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication) , or Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization , (like I have done) or, you could save yourself some time and read this one book. Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield have written an absolutely incredible book. I really can't recommend this book enough. Here is just one quote, of many, which I found to be sublime: "The story of humanity is one that rests on the never-ending creative tension between the dark pursuit of selfish short-term interests and the shining example of striving toward collective long-term goals. I believe we now understand how defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma can be trumped by cooperation. And, just as [Gustav] Mahler ends on an upbeat note, so I believe the emphasis on cooperation puts a more optimistic sheen on life than the traditional take on Darwin, which condemns all life to a protracted and bloody struggle for survival and reproduction. Mutation and natural selection are not enough in themselves to understand life. You need cooperation too. Cooperation was the principle architect of 4 billion years of evolution. Cooperation built the first bacterial cells, then higher cells, then complex multicellular life and insect superorganisms. Finally cooperation constructed humanity." The chapters are: 0) The Prisoner's Dilemma, 1) Direct Reciprocity - Tit for Tat, 2) Indirect Reciprocity - Power of Reputation, 3) Spatial Games - Chessboard of Life, 4) Group Selection - Tribal Wars, 5) Kin Selection - Nepotism, 6) Prelife, 7) Society of Cells, 8) The Lord of the Ants, 9) The Gift of Gab, 10) Public Goods, 11) Punish and Perish, 12) How Many Friends Are Too Many?, 13) Game, Set, and Match, and 14) Crescendo of Cooperation. There are a couple of books I would also encourage the interested reader to pursue after reading this book, Peter Corning's: The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice and Chris Martenson's: The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment )

I enjoyed reading the book and its many ideas regarding the evolution of cooperation. I'm a bit of a Rip Van Winkle. Nearly four decades ago I had courses that assigned George Williams book, Adaptation and Natural Selection, and William D. Hamilton's classic articles. I thought that issues were pretty well settled. I recall reading J.D. Wilson's book on group selection. Intuition (not always reliable) tells me yes, it can happen, but do you really expect to find clear examples of it out there in nature? There's a political scientist, Peter Corning, who has written his entire career about what he calls the "synergy" hypothesis; I think it's a better word since it doesn't carry a lot of baggage that the word cooperation does. Those who read Nowak should also read Corning's books. Political scientists deal with power--the capacity to get others to do things that they would not otherwise do. It's sources are four: authority, coercion, persuasion, and inducements. The "games" that should be of most interest to political scientists are asymmetric. I'd like to see more research of the kind that Nowak and his team have done on asymmetric games. Policy analysts are only now starting to apply evolutionary principles to the design of public policy in ways that support, as Pinker called it, the "better angels of our nature." The book is definitely worth reading. Are the arguments right? Readers will have to sift through the evidence and decide on their own.

Martin Nowak is perhaps the most distinguished mathematical biologist currently alive. His scientific credentials make my favorite science writer, Richard Dawkins (Nowak's former colleague at Oxford), look like an amateur bird watcher. Unlike Dawkins, his writing is not great. Nowak's first language isn't English, and a coauthor helped make the book more readable. Yet the incredible scope of ideas toured through in SuperCooperators more than compensates for the paisley prose, and there are some entertaining narrative gems mixed in, too. It's hard to imagine that someone could make mathematical models with even a little resemblance to cancer, the origin of life, global politics, friendship, the evolution of language, and cycles of human history. Some of the simplifications are a stretch (a few test the limits of credulity), yielding several conclusions that can seem over-reaching and under-grounded, but the reader is free to draw her own conclusions. As a final criticism, at more than a few points the primary author's voice seems a bit smug and self-congratulatory. Despite all this, I find myself talking about the ideas presented in this book on an almost daily basis, talking to friends and strangers alike--it's full of brilliantly illuminating fuel for thought. The scope of Nowak's research is fantastically ambitious, and recent work by him and numerous others ushers in a new paradigm within biology: cooperation as the unifying principle for increasing adaptive complexity. SuperCooperators provides tantalizing glimpses into this advancing discipline, into the driving force behind step functions of increased order, and into the history and future of life and civilization. Despite my reservations about the writing, I feel compelled to give it 5 stars on intellectual breadth and novelty. Expert readers will find it a quick and engaging tour, but will need to refer to the original articles for more rigor. General audience readers will find this book largely accessible, sometimes a pleasure to read (though occasionally cringe-worthy), and entirely a pleasure to think about!

The only reason I gave this book three stars is that as a non-expert I am in no position to evaluate the arguments of Nowak and his scientific critcs. However, I have some fatherly advice for his reviewers on Amazon. 1) Some reviewers have criticized the autobiographical fluff in this book--Nowak's strolls through the Wienerwald in Austria with his beloved mentor and all that. Now I agree that I likewise prefer to cut through all the autobiographical fluff to get to the scientific meat. However, the fluff by Nowak and his ghostwriter Highfield is quite forgivable because their publisher probably would not have it any other way. In their book Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner (2003-09-17) , Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato bluntly stated that the proper way to write a popular book on a scientific or technical topic is for the author to tell an autobiographical story of how she came by the scientific meat piece by piece in the first place. The autobiographical material determines the outline of the book, the technical stuff has to be shoehorned into that procrustean outline--and any technical material that does not fit into the autobiographical outline ends up on the cutting-room floor. Rabiner and Fortunato sternly warn aspiring authors that publishers won't even touch a popular book on technical topics written any other way because it won't sell. Their advice to people who have a message to get out to the world but are impatient with the human interest stuff is that they had better just resign themselves to putting their material on their personal website. As for me, I agree with Nowak's Amazon critics that the human interest stuff gets in the way of the good stuff--but I can easily forgive and empathize with Nowak and Highfield. 2) This second point is the mirror image of the previous one. I have read the reviews of critics who complain that _SuperCooperators_ makes claims without proper mathematical support. Their error lies in forgetting that popular science books ought to be treated by a more lenient standard than technical ones. If you want all of Nowak's technical material, you should read his book Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life or his journal article in _Nature_ along with Corina Tarnita and E. O. Wilson. In his popular science book A Brief History of Time , Professor Steven Hawking confided that his publisher advised him that every mathematical equation would cut the sales of his book in half. He proceeded to give us just one equation, E = mc2, and he begged his readers' indulgence. I'm sure Nowak and Highfield were told the same by their publisher, and their publisher would not have it any other way. 3) And now some fatherly advice to a wider range of Nowak's critics, his scientific critics all over cyberspace. On the one hand, I admit that scientists and scholars need to have a thick skin because their peers will rightly challenge their work to death. Scientists scrutinize one another's work to death, and this purging process prunes away the rubbish while preserving the good stuff. Science could not advance any other way without this pruning process. However, scientists can disagree without being as disagreeable as so many of them are. Scientists like Gould, Lewontin, Coyne, and Myers have often been harsher than they have to be to make their point--and Nowak's scientific critics have been no less uncharitable. I don't expect Nowak's critics to pull their punches on technical issues: by all means, punch away! Even so, let us temper justice with mercy and criticism with professionalism! Dr. Martin A. Nowak, I have no idea whether your ideas are sense or nonsense. Only time will tell. But at least I try to be fair, and I hope your critics will do the same.

This book is even more crucial now than when it was written in 2011, at which time the author was explicit about the relevance of his work to climate change. We all should know that we have the technical knowledge to cope with climate change, but it has long seemed to me that we humans don't seem to have the social capacity to implement that knowledge, namely, the level of global (or even national) cooperation required. Nowak makes a compelling argument that we do have the knowledge about what it takes to foster cooperation, robust knowledge from evolutionary history and recent social science that he elucidates. Ironically, it will take extraordinary cooperation to put that knowledge to use. Usefully, he points out how venerable religious wisdom converges with contemporary science. Of course, as with all other forms of culture, religion is subject to the destructive forces that undermine cooperation, including the paradoxical combination of cooperation in the service of social destruction. Nowak closes the book with a commentary on hope which, in my understanding, lies in tolerating the uncertainty between presumption and despair while working to bring about the hoped-for outcome even when odds are slim--banking on possibility if not probability: "Today we face a stark choice: we can either move up to the next stage of evolutionary complexity, or we can go into decline, even become extinct" (pp. 280-281). If not here on earth, he sees "hope for life...across the universe...[where] a higher level of selection will operate" (p. 284). Accordingly, while we humans are super-cooperators, we have not yet reached the level of cooperation required to prevent our extinction. His concluding two lines: "Success depends on all of us. Over to you" (p. 284).

Martin Nowak demonstrates in a variety of ways the patterns of cooperative behavior in nature in general and Homo sapiens in particular. The data reveal that groups of individuals who cooperate with each other are more successful in survival and thus in natural selection than groups consisting of competitors. Humans have evolved in such a way as to foster our ability to cooperate, which is one of the reasons that we are so successful as a species. My communicating my opinion of his work to other potential readers is an example of this cooperative instinct and our ability to cooperate very effectively through language. On the other hand groups always have cheaters who try to profit from the group effort without contributing to it. Cooperation in groups changes in cycles: it increases to the point that cheaters can do so with relative ease but others find out about it. Language is a major tool for rooting out cheaters. After a while the cooperative behavior in the group disintegrates and the group has to start all over again. Nowak ends the book with an enigmatic chapter that suggests that humanity can transcend this vicious cycle through the victory of altruistic love.

I picked-up this book following a rather positive and good book review in the German version of the financial times. I will spare you the details of the topic as these are nicely described by other readers (and I've not finished reading the book yet). But essentially it describes how cooperating is a good thing (particularly if everybody in a society participates) and how things can go wrong if there just a few bad apples (defectors, cheats) that take advantage of everybody elses generosity. Good stuff. What makes the book absolutely unreadable is the arrogance and self-centerdness of the author. First off, there are two authors yet there is always just the word "I"...."I came up with this...", "I published in Science Journal..." and in so many words this guy things he is the the greatest scientist the world has ever seen. Please bow to him now! It is incredibly irritating. I write this as being a person in science and the one thing you realize is that the more you know the more humble you become because the world is an incredibly complex place. Math is great (I use it everyday), but honestly it becomes really painful to read over and over again how the authors mathematical models are able to predict everything...they can't, they don't, they never will. Whenever people say how great they are, particularly in science, you immediately become suspicious. Because truly outstanding people NEVER self-glorify. Never. Because if you do, you are not great. This "guy" is clearly not great. His ego is soooo large than I'm surprised he has been allowed to even be at the various Institutions he constantly keeps mentioning. If there ever was a person that likes to name drop, he is it. Maybe he should move to the tabloid world? So all in all, a great topic but an irritatingly arrogant author--he does not deserve your money. Read-up on the topic somewhere else.

I have not read the whole book yet. But very much recommend it as a well developed hypothesis about how somewhere lies a brighter instinct for collective survival. That of Collaboration and Synergy. Also, an entertaining intro into Game Theory, through multi perspective perceptions that create the bases for a notion of hope, within parameters of ying and yang social reality.