Collaboration and diversity essential 

By Dave Lehman, Connections Executive Editor and NSRF National Facilitator in Wisconsin

“Collaboration has been a recurring theme in science and technology in recent years. The life of the mind is increasingly transnational. It roams centers of excellence from every continent, linked by communications of great speed and breadth.” The spring 2013 issue of YES! magazine was devoted to the theme, “How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy.” In this issue, Eric Michael Johnson, graduate student in the history of science at the University of British Columbia,wrote about a “New Theory of Evolution: Survival of the Nicest.” Citing the recent extensive research of Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, Germany, Johnson developed a “comprehensive evolutionary theory of human cooperation.” Here is an account of human evolution which has predisposed us to work collaboratively, with cooperation favoring survival. (Also see Tomasello’s 2008 book, Why We Cooperate.) I would add that this is not a “new” theory of evolution, even in 2008, but goes back at least to the turn of the 19th century with the writings of Petr Kropotkin (Russian geographer, economist, activist, philologist, zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, writer and prominent anarchist) and his seminal book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Kropotkin’s work first appeared as a series of articles in the magazine, “The Nineteenth Century” in 1890, then as a book in 1902. In summary, drawing on an extensive analysis of animal behavior as well as human societies, the medieval cities, and modern villages, Kropotkin said, “In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support—not mutual struggle—has had the leading part.”