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Cooperation Versus Competition: An Evolutionary Perspective
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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Survival in Different Terms: A Healthy Ecosystem is Not Based on Survival of the Fittest
SURVIVAL IN DIFFERENT TERMS: A HEALTHY ECOSYSTEM IS NOT BASED ON SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Somewhere near the beginning of the course, caught in the midst of a closing summary, Lawton said something that really resonated with me: It’s not survival of the fittest but survival of the most cooperative. The idea seemed simple enough to me, not overly off-course to how I’ve come to approach design, but it was just a moment where I felt the need to explore that trail of thought. Then, I thought you, dear readers, might like to, too.
STRAIGHT TO THE GARDEN
Immediately with the notion of survival through cooperation, I’m taken to the garden and the notion of guilds, including the wildlife (or domestic animals) that function within them. I’ve never liked the survival of the fittest mentality, but it never occurred to me just how far away from it a permaculture garden is operating. It doesn’t take much investigating to realize success in the garden comes from cooperation much more than domination.
Guilds are, in essence, the opposite of survival of the fittest. The whole idea is to not compete but rather to thrive in cooperation, with root structures feeding form different sources on different dietary elements. Each plant in the combination is providing its own contributions that benefit the other plants. Animals come in and find comfortable habitats, often in rockeries or logs, under leaves or in the trees, that have been designed in for them specifically, and they feed on pests, turn the soil, fertilize, and contribute.
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