Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  Finally, echoing both Allee and Margulis, primatologists and ecologists have argued recently that competition between humans led in a recursive fashion to cooperation. Specifically, in this theory human cooperation arose through selection for more cooperative individuals. Groups in conflicts that had more of these individuals did better in conflicts, gained more resources and access to reproductive females, and therefore mated more and enriched—through some combination of genetic dispositions toward cooperation and societal reinforcement of cooperation—the population in cooperative individuals.24 Theoretical models based on social network theory have also shown how cooperation at larger scales can arise from small-scale competitions and conflicts among individuals.25 In modeling terms, cooperation acts as an “attractor” to which the whole system of interacting individuals settles into under most realistic simulations.

  These theoretical musings on how we became a cooperative species are supported by the indelible imprints of past cooperative behavior on modern humans. There is experimental evidence that centers of the brain associated with rewards get active when humans enforce behavior that increases group cohesion,26 and studies on twins reveal that at least some of our altruistic disposition toward promoting fairness is genetically inherited.27

  Clearly, human scientists can use their own complex minds to come up with all sorts of theories about human cooperation. They have even devised experimental tests of cooperation in the realm of game theory, where human research subjects are given a hypothetical situation in which they must make a decision that will have costs and benefits for themselves and for other people playing the game. They might have to decide whether to turn in a fellow “criminal” or remain silent and receive a bigger punishment, or they might be asked how much of a pool of prize money to give to the other subject under the condition that if the other subject doesn’t agree to the division, both parties will get nothing.28

  These simplistic sounding games, which are designed to study incredibly complex human behaviors, are simple for a reason. They attempt to peel back layers of societal veneer and idiosyncratic individual experiences by putting people in a very sparse world without economic inequalities, political parties, and religions, to get at the unadulterated roots of human cooperative behavior. Despite their simplicity, they often reveal fascinating and sometimes unexpected behaviors. Nonetheless, taken together over decades of game research, they reveal something we already know well: humans are complicated. There is no one answer about cooperation that comes out of game theory, but rather a wide range of human behavior gets revealed as the rules of the game are changed by different researchers. People may be less inclined to cooperate in one-time games but become highly cooperative when there is the possibility for the other side to retaliate for a punitive decision. People playing in teams make different decisions than people playing alone. People playing face-to-face games cooperate more than those playing over computer, and people who are just shown the image of a relative or merely a picture of a human eye cooperate more than those who are given no hints that they are playing against a fellow human being.29

  None of the extensive research so far unequivocally answers the question of whether there are truly selfless acts in nature or just an endless series of I.O.U.s. In the end, the question is less relevant than the fact that cooperation unequivocally exists in nature, that it is not only compatible with competition but perhaps dependent on competition, and that cooperation takes a lot of different and sometimes surprising forms.

  THE MOST UNLIKELY FORMS OF COOPERATIVE SYMBIOSIS

  What all this does tell us about survival in society is that we have vastly underutilized the lessons of symbiosis and cooperation. This is important because when we look at security situations in society, we tend to be overwhelmed by seemingly intractable conflicts—Israelis versus Palestinians, radical Muslims versus the West, Red Sox versus Yankees fans—where cooperation seems impossible.

  But nature reveals the power of symbiosis best when we see it occur between species that at first glance would seem to have no business at all in cooperating, such as large predatory fish and the much smaller fish that clean their teeth or hitch a ride on them. In society, as in nature, mutualistic symbiotic partnerships between the most unlikely of collaborators are developing and ameliorating potential security crises around the globe. My colleague Terence Taylor, for example, has helped incubate symbiotic partnerships between Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians,30 as well as practitioners from six traditionally hostile countries on the Mekong River, all working together to identify and neutralize disease outbreaks on whatever side of borders they occur.

  Several features of these cooperative networks should be recognized. First, the networks have demonstrated success even beyond the feat of getting members of mutually hostile nations to work with one another. Network practitioners were quietly allowed into notoriously restricted Myanmar to do their work days, not weeks, after the catastrophic cyclone there. The Middle East consortium was ramping up responses to H1N1 “swine flu” days before the World Health Organization began to increase its alarm.31 They have also resulted in professional benefits for their participants. Members of the Middle East consortium collaborated on the first scientific paper jointly authored by an Israeli and Palestinian since World War II.32 Their success, like a properly functioning evolutionary feedback cycle, has encouraged further success. Large corporations such as IBM have been impressed by these networks and have contributed vital database technology. Better still, new consortia are being replicated, for example in southern Africa, based on the successful performance of the original Middle East consortium.

  Second, these networks weren’t mandated by high levels of government or through international treaties but have emerged from the ground up as local, adaptive responses to a real need to protect regional food supplies and human health from pathogens that know no borders. Health practitioners and health ministers, not prime ministers and heads of UN programs, envisioned, created, and continue to operate these networks. They are, in fact, excellent examples of how decentralized organizations can be more effective and adaptable than better-resourced and more powerful centralized governments. Indeed, while governments often put up metaphorical and real walls between one another, decentralized organizations help facilitate mutualistic symbiosis.

  Third, the networks were not designed to tackle the much larger and complex issues of creating peace between their member states, though they very well may be an opening to further peace agreements. Symbioses in nature never solve all of an organism’s security problems, but where new symbioses develop, they arise to solve the most immediate challenges. It may be that later, these relatively limited acts of symbiosis build into amazing outcomes that no one could have predicted.

  Finally, the networks call to mind the necessity of symbiosis. In nature there are “facultative” symbioses, which provide certain benefits to organisms but are not absolutely necessary for the survival of one or both of the organisms. The symbiotic zooxanthellae algae that give sea anemones their bright colors are a good example. When placed in the shade under a dock or in an aquarium tank, such as a sorry looking West Coast anemone I saw in the New England Aquarium once, the sunlight-using algae leave or are expelled from their anemone host, which continues to live, pale and bleached, but otherwise just fine, without the algae. But there are also “obligate” symbioses, where the organisms will die without their symbiotic partner. These are especially apparent in harsh climates. When biologists first explored the deepest parts of the oceans, far from the sunlight that jump-starts nearly all biological interactions on Earth, they were awed to find rich thriving ecological communities built around spectacular colonies of large tubeworms. The worms had no mouths or guts but were well populated by obligate symbiotic bacteria that fix hydrogen sulfide into food for them. As the consortia in the Middle East and the Mekong continue to work together, they are rapidly evolving to become obligate symbionts. The networks greatly expand the capaci
ty of any individual member state, giving them a built-in impetus to continue—without the network, each individual state would not only be powerless over outbreaks in neighboring states but would also be much less capable of tackling diseases within its own borders. Thus, they create a web of interdependence, like the bacteria in ocean sediments and the cleaner wrasses on the coral reef—and this in turn transforms a small effort to cross physical and ideological borders into a self-sustaining and mutually beneficial partnership.

  A recent updating of the “mutually assured destruction” doctrine for an era of asymmetric threats incorporates the idea of obligate symbiosis. In this approach, called “mutually assured support,” alliances between nations are predicated on the assurance of support—through resources, public signals of support, and punishment of defectors—in the case of attack by any nation or regime against one of the alliance members.33 In this way, members of the alliance are assured a better capability to survive and respond to an attack than they could on their own. This symbiosis is mutually reinforcing because the benefits would only accrue to nations or regimes that did not attack other alliance members.

  Cooperation does not always arise out of conflict, but when it does, it is often in cases where a biological need trumps ideological differences behind the conflict. Sometimes these can be fairly mundane—German and British troops in World War I occasionally held unofficial cease-fires to retrieve wounded and dead soldiers in the no-man’s land between trenches.34 Like the disease surveillance networks, these cooperative agreements were not sanctioned by the soldiers’ respective governments and were looked down upon by the commanding officers; rather, they were self-organized between enlisted men from the respective warring sides.

  Conflict-borne cooperation can stretch from a single front to an entire war. In 1995 former president Jimmy Carter helped negotiate a two-month cease-fire in the ongoing civil war in the Sudan so that medical teams treating guinea worm outbreaks could do their work.35 This window of opportunity was essential in getting a foothold on what was a growing problem in Africa. Now Guinea worm treatment has so greatly reduced the caseload in Africa that it may soon become one of the few public health examples of successful eradication.

  Symbiosis is a powerful tool, but it is not infallible, in part because the benefits are so context dependent. Hydroids living on hermit crab shells are usually beneficial because they keep off other things that might foul and damage the shell. However, in some areas, a parasitic worm seems to prefer hermit crab shells with hydroids, and the worm weakens the crab’s shell enough to make it vulnerable to crushing predation from blue crabs.36 So, a relationship that works in one area may not work in another. Symbiotic relationships between local leaders and U.S. forces worked extremely well in Iraq but have had at best a mixed record in Afghanistan, where U.S. forces worked to create similar symbiotic partnerships even before IEDs became a major threat. In some cases local leaders made symbiotic partnerships with both U.S. forces and their enemies, and IED attacks against U.S. forces steadily increased from nearly nonexistent to become responsible for almost half of all combat deaths there.

  Although Allee and Margulis saw the creative and transformative nature of cooperation, there is a more dour utilitarian view of mutualism that dominates among experimental biologists. They note that mutualism gives rise to cheaters; that mutualism is not always cooperative, with one side getting much more out of the relationship than the other; that mutualisms have hidden costs and must be maintained by brute coercion. There is certainly evidence to support this line of thinking, from the animal kingdom to kingdoms of humans. For instance, a textbook case of mutualism is the Rhizobium bacteria that live in the roots of legume plants such as alfalfa and soybeans. The bacteria “fix” nitrogen into a form that the plant can use nutritionally, and in exchange the plant provides a safe home and oxygen from photosynthesis for the bacteria. But a clever experiment, in which nitrogen was replaced with argon—which allowed the bacteria to live but did not provide fixed nitrogen to the host plant—revealed that the plant will punish the bacteria by withholding oxygen if the bacteria fail to give the plant its fix of fixed nitrogen.37

  Yet the view that mutualism is just a market transaction may belie accounting errors on the balance sheet of benefits and costs to the organism in a mutualistic relationship. Like a management consultant swooping in to analyze and “right size” a company, or a war correspondent embedded for a couple of weeks in a decade-long war, the biologist taking a few months or even years to study a mutualism that has been going on for millennia may miss key benefits that accrue through sustained cooperative relationships.

  Warder Allee spent much of his life trying to discover the new thing that appeared when species or individuals cooperate, that thing by which species in groups did better than organisms alone. For example, in the goldfish exposed to toxins, that thing was found to be a slimy chemical that the fish only secreted in groups, which seemed to buffer the toxic effect. These little mechanisms cannot be predicted by looking at solitary individuals, nor can they in a sense be accounted for by merely summing the balance sheets of each individual in a mutualism. They are what researchers of complex systems call emergent properties. Allee never discovered all the emergent properties supporting the cooperative relationships he studied, but contemporary scientists are finding surprising emergent properties wherever they look at symbiotic systems—the peace that reigns on a reef stationed by cleaner fish, the rich soil provided by the algal-fungal-bacterial threesome that makes up lichens, and the joint publication of epidemiological research by Israelis and Palestinians.

  Even the biologists who take the “free market” approach to mutualism and cooperation acknowledge they have an unanswered conundrum.38 If mutualism is just about using another being to maximize your economic return, it should not be evolutionarily stable—it’s a race to the bottom for which one partner can extract more and give less to the other partner until there’s no reason at all to cooperate. Indeed, biologists have invoked Garret Hardin’s famous Tragedy of the Commons construct to describe the ability for one party to exploit mutualisms. In Hardin’s view, common property, such as grazing land on an old English “commons,” or fish in the sea, is subject to overexploitation if everyone acts in their own self-interest and takes what they can from the common resource without regard for others.

  So the conundrum is, if mutualism is so unstable, why is it so common in nature? Darwin took painstaking care to formulate his argument that unstable, intermediate evolutionary forms don’t stick around long enough to make an impression on the fossil record that we can find today. In fact, this was one of the most important arguments in the development of his theory of natural selection. But mutualisms past and present are abundantly available for study, not something you’d expect from an unstable relationship.

  Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her work on how people in society solve common property exploitation problems, may be informative for figuring out why cooperation in nature, and in human affairs, is more common than mere free-market accounting would suggest. In Ostrom’s more subtle accounting, humans can create all sorts of formal and informal rules that keep them from over-exploiting common property. These include ways of controlling access to the property. A fishing cooperative I’ve worked with in Baja California, Mexico, does this by only giving the oldest men in the village access to fish abalone—the highest value and easiest-to-catch seafood that is also the most in danger of being overexploited. Younger members of the co-op have access to successively less valuable resources.

  In Ostrom’s view, using graduated systems of punishment, starting with largely symbolic gestures, is another way to induce cooperation. In a Mexican fishing village in the Gulf of California that has managed to control overexploitation of resources, fishermen who are caught poaching face serially increasing punishments, starting with the embarrassment of having their fiberglass panga boat taken during the night and pu
t up on cinderblocks in the middle of town.39

  The fact that contemporary researchers with multi-million-dollar molecular labs, Nobel Prizes, and appointments to elite scientific societies have discovered actions and rules in nature and society that turn conflict into cooperation is important to our study of security, but it should not eclipse the contributions of an old natural historian who used little more than his keen observational sense to confirm his belief that cooperation is the strongest organizing force in the social lives of all animals, including humans. As this naturalist, Warder Allee, wrote, “We should not overlook the existence of strong, competitive, egoistic drives among all animals, ourselves included. These must be duly considered in any workable plan for a world order. Our job is to keep them in their true place, somewhat subservient to the even more fundamental cooperative, altruistic forces of human nature. They should not again be allowed to steal the international show.”40 In other words, moving beyond conflict may be in part facilitating pathways for our natural cooperative tendencies to take their course.

  Here we come to a conundrum. Throughout the book, I’ve discussed a number of different powerful ways—from decentralized organization to symbiosis—that organisms can become adaptable to change. But we well know that forces of nature can overwhelm almost any system, no matter how adaptable. The dinosaurs spent far more time on Earth than we humans have, but they were wiped out in a virtual instant when a large impact caused fires and scattered ash and dust across the globe, causing a rapid global cooling that cold-blooded reptiles couldn’t cope with. These overwhelming forces of nature, expressed in rare and unexpected events, are what make the evening news headlines: “Mother nature takes her revenge!” “Nature’s fury unleashed!” and the like. But that power of nature can also keep us secure. It often comes down to fighting fire with fire, or, more precisely, fighting microbes with microbes, and fighting tropical storms with wetlands. The next chapter focuses on the existing systems of immunity and ecology that keep us secure when we don’t do a thing to help them—especially when we don’t do a thing to help them. Their power is readily available to us, usually free of charge, provided we don’t inadvertently weaken it as we rush to create our own “intelligently designed” security systems.