Science: Evolution by Cooperation

Cooperation has been a more important evolutionary jorce in the development of man than has the bitter competitive struggle for existence. So asserted a learned U.S. biologist last week in an attack on those who use the doctrine of evolution to justify totalitarian brutality and aggression. The attacker was Zoologist Alfred Edwards Emerson of the University of Chicago; his audience was the holiday meeting—in Dallas—of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Though evolutionists have long since modified and refined Darwin's theory that biological development is the result of natural selection, particularly of ceaseless strife and ruthless elimination of the unfit, Darwinism has been called in as scientific justification for the Marxist class struggle, the worst abuses of laissez-faire capitalism, the growth of militarism and competitive nationalism.

Since Darwin's time violence has sometimes been justified by aggressors and even accepted by their victims as biologically natural, i.e., just and not answerable to unscientific moral scruples. A climax in the misuse of Darwinian ideology was reached by the totalitarians who declared that it justified 1) deliberate brutality, 2) adoption of violence as the final arbiter in the relations among men, classes, states.

Said Professor Emerson taking this argument apart:

"Competition plays a tremendously important part in evolution but the survival of the fittest does not always mean the survival of the strong, the predators, the parasites or even the adequately defended organisms." Sheer struggle tends to be supplanted by cooperation, Emerson observed, in each evolutionary step upward from the single cell to the many-celled organism to the family to societies.

"The naked cell lived in less optimal conditions than did the cell in a group. Through division of labor and coordination between cells, the external environment of the single-celled organism became the internal environment of the multicellular organism."

Next came the rise of the family as a biological unit. Natural selection no longer worked on the individual organism alone. "The population was the unit of selection, much as the population of cells composing the multicellular organism was selected as a coordinated unit.

"But the end was not reached in family organization. More complex units could more thoroughly control the external environmental fluctuations." Guided by similar fundamental evolutionary forces, man and insects developed social systems, even though as organisms they were of widely divergent stocks. And societies, like family groups, further tend to supersede the individual as the unit of selection.

"It is our hope that the discovery . . . of the mechanisms and details of cooperative social organization will ultimately enable mankind to evolve beyond this present phase with its inefficiency and misery."

Some other events of the meeting: