COOPERATION VERSUS COMPETITION: AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
Charles Darwin is credited for forming the idea of evolution. During his explorations around the world and his intimate observation of how animal and plant life evolved over time, he came to believe that everything followed one basic maxim: “the survival of the fittest.”
This theory states that organisms will inherently struggle against one another in competition for limited resources that make life possible. Following from this logic, only the strongest, most robust and most adapted species are thus able to survive the evolutionary struggle. The emergence of life, then, is based on competition alone and individualistic competitive drive is one of the most important and a necessary trait if a species wants to survive. In essence, this theory of evolution has also given justification to everything from capitalist economic theory to pathological ideas of Social Darwinism that believed that the dominance of the Caucasian race obeyed unchangeable physical laws.
But is it true? Is life simply the outcome of cutthroat competition? Elizabeth Sahtouris is an American evolutionary biologist that is most well known questioning some of Darwin´s most basic assumptions about the evolution of life. Sahtouris says that “Darwin was right about species competing for resources but he never saw beyond it as just one stage in the maturation cycle. Evolution proceeded when crises created by species forced them to go beyond “survival of the fittest” and find cooperative strategies for survival.”
The survival of the fittest competition, then, is but one stage of a larger evolutionary cycle. Sahtouris mentions the example of how the very first bacteria that began life over 4 billion years ago spent billions of years in the competitive stage of their evolution. This competitive drive allowed them to colonize large areas of the earth and advance life itself, but had they continued with their purely selfish and competitive drive, they would have eventually died out.
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