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Why has cooperation, not competition, always been the key to the evolution of complexity? MARTIN NOWAK is a Mathematical Biologist, Game Theorist; Professor of Biology and Mathematics, Director, Center for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University; Coauthor (with Roger Highfield), SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Martin Nowak's Edge Bio Page In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature".  In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations. For publication schedule and details, go to Edge Master Class 2011: The Science of Human Nature.

Transcript of fabulous presentation on the evolution of cooperation with great Q&A at the end.

Robert Axelrod Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan, AnnArbor. Dr. Axelrod is a member of the American National Academy of Sciencesand the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His honors include a MacArthurFoundation Fellowship for the period 1987 through 1992. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoistswithout central authority? This question has intrigued people for a longtime. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to lookafter themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperationdoes occur and that our civilization is based upon it

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfish motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.

In the pages that follow we advance two propositions. First, people cooperate not only for self-interested reasons but because they are genuinely concerned about the well being of others, care about social norms, and wish to act ethically. People punish those who exploit the cooperation of others for the same reasons. Contributing to the success of a joint project for the benefit of one's group, even at a personal cost, evokes feelings of satisfaction, pride, even elation. Failing to do so is often a source of shame or guilt. Second, we came to have these "moral sentiments" because our ancestors lived in environments, both natural and socially constructed, in which groups of individuals who are predisposed to cooperate and uphold ethical norms tended to survive and expand relative to other groups, thereby proliferating these pro-social motivations. The first proposition concerns proximate motivations for prosocial behavior, the second addresses the distant evolutionary origins and ongoing perpetuation of these cooperative dispositions.

Innate human propensities for cooperation with strangers, shaped during the Pleistocene in response to rapidly changing environments, could have provided highly adaptive social instincts that more recently coevolved with cultural institutions; although the biological capacity for primate sociality evolved genetically, the authors propose that channeling of tribal instincts via symbol systems has involved a cultural transmission and selection that continues the evolution of cooperative human capacities at a cultural rather than genetic level - and pace.

Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being honoured lead to greater cooperation? We test this hypothesis with anonymous six-player public goods experiments, an experimental paradigm used to investigate problems related to overusing common resources. We instructed the players that the two individuals who were least generous after 10 rounds would be exposed to the group. As the natural antithesis, we also test the effects of honour by revealing the identities of the two players who were most generous. The non-monetary, reputational effects induced by shame and honour each led to approximately 50 per cent higher donations to the public good when compared with the control, demonstrating that both shame and honour can drive cooperation and can help alleviate the tragedy of the commons.

Some of the biggest changes sweeping the technology world today are new forms of network and computer-enabled cooperation. It was easy enough to see this pattern in open source software development or Wikipedia, a bit more challenging to see how it powered Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon, but it gets really interesting when you are able to see how new kinds of man-machine symbiosis and networked cooperation are at the heart of projects like the Google self-driving car, the reinvention of retail by Apple and Square, transportation services from RelayRides to Uber, and even in new models for networked government.

Roland's summary of our second live session about The Evolution of Cooperation.

Here's a quit extensive synthesis of  "The Penguin and the Leviathan," in my opinion a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in improving and transforming our economic and political institutions.   Human motivation is a subject that 'makes me tick'. I really enjoyed reading "The Penguin and the Leviathan", not only because it paints a much nicer picture of "human nature" than the one used by the free marketeers, but also because it gives a glimpse of a future, higher form of society that will be much more based on human cooperation. I think it is important to see that the seeds of this future society are very much present today.

Week 2, #COOPLIT Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, visits the RSA to investigate our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

Mentioned by Howard Rheingold who said: Wilson is controversial, but the rarity of what he calls "eusocial" species and the coincidence of the advent of hunting-gathering in cooperative groups with the acceleration of human cognitive, cultural, and social capabilities supports his hypothesis: "The riddle of the human species."

kin selection and it means the gene will spread.

90 minute video

[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis-this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

Canadian site encouraging aiding and abetting cooperation towards desired changes at a community level.

Haidt's book which can help foster empathy and cooperation within a divided polity through understanding.

"Oblique Strategies" - deck of cards of ways to cooperate to move forward through a dilemma - originally concocted by Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno in 1975 for music composition work.

Doc by Howard et al.

recommended by Amy Scatliff ; she said: Also, on this thread Gilly Salmon's model came up - http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/5stage.shtml. I'd like to link that to Gregor, what you've posted on socializing through cooperative board games. I'd love to keep the conversation going on how to scale social interaction between learners by using real world simulations and games (in my case I'm usually thinking of learners 18+) as a way to train in the skills necessary to navigate micro-interactions--is that the word that's been used?--within social dilemmas. I like to see how games can relate as closely as possible to the real-life situations being navigated.

Recommendation from David Watkins: I find Bloom to be a fascinating individual with incredible scope. I find myself both drawn and repelled by his ideas. I find his website fascinating. The only book of his that I've read is "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century." I've linked it here to Amazon; he also has a section on his website. It fits very well with the material that we've covered in this course. It is about the evolution of cooperation and identifies an emerging Global Brain that is in many ways similar to Gaia. It might even lead to a global culture, beyond Us and Them, at least in some sense.