B/C>K : Cooperation and Evolution

What does psychiatry have to do with evolution?

Or, the other way around, what does evolution have to do with psychiatry?

Granted, the connection is not direct. On the other hand, the mood disorders I treat are intimately embedded deeply in the way we interact with one another, our social context. Some theorists have speculated that both depression and mania are some form of our social hierarchy system gone awry.

Dedicated readers of my website know that I have been writing there about evolution in several contexts. I am interested in good science, and it is nearly impossible to do good science without ending up looking at evolutionary principles, if you are dealing with living creatures.

In any case, I am most interested in the evolution of cooperation, particularly since at this stage in human history we had better figure out how to be much better at it, or we are all cooked, so to speak.

Therefore, anyone who is paying attention to world affairs like the warming of our planet might be quite interested to know that cooperation is under good scientific study from an evolutionary point of view, with a recent result that makes sense intuitively as well as fitting very well with the research in this area so far. A nice summary article about this appeared in the New York Times recently; linked below.

The "bottom line" of that article is this (e.g. if you are not registered and so cannot read it there): from a research point of view, the likelihood of cooperation seems to be reducible to an equation B/C>K , where (B) represents the benefits of cooperation, (C) represents the costs, and (K) represents the size of the population involved, which you can think of as how many neighbors are around. In other words, the benefits must be greater than the costs, but that ratio must be particularly large if there are many individuals involved. In a small group, cooperation is more likely.

This research has also shown that a person's reputation strongly affects how they interact with others, how much people will cooperate with them or not. You can imagine that reputation quickly comes to substitute for direct personal experience with an individual, when the size of the group goes up.

As one of my friends says, "science is the rigorous demonstration of the obvious". On the other hand, perhaps this equation (from Dr. Nowak at Harvard) also helps make it more obvious what must now happen to avoid the incredible social disasters that face us as the planet warms. Because K, in this case, is so large, B will have to be much greater than C. We are going to need a culture that places cooperative behavior at the very pinnacle of social respect.

If we were to expect our public systems -- our political system, for example -- to use available science to insure that our safety and that of our children will not decrease rapidly in the face of global changes, then we should expect those systems to incorporate this simple equation into their planning processes.

I know, that is sort of a joke. What politicians do you know that focus on long-term risks and safety for all humanity? What political system do you know that rewards cooperative behavior far more than "personal freedom"? Perhaps worse yet, what corporations do you know that focus on their long-term success, not their short-term return to stockholders?

Ah, here is one, perhaps: organized religion, at least some forms of it. Okay, okay, there are many exceptions and many egregious examples of the opposite, of greed and personal interest and narrow-mindedness and all that, in nearly any religion. But most religions include some form of group cooperation, at least within their own particular group. They focus on taking care of one another, looking after those who are suffering or struggling, and seeing that the group as a whole prospers in the long run (in the past this often included making many more members by having many children, the foolishness of which in our current circumstances has yet to become incorporated in religious culture, unfortunately).

What an odd pairing, religion and evolutionary science. But here is one realm in which they both seem to agree without any hesitation or qualification: cooperation is at the very core of being human.

Dr. Phelps

link to NY Times article

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