Across dozens of fields, scientists like Grunbaum are making exciting new discoveries about the nature of cooperation — progress enabled, they say, by new observational and computational technologies. “We are much more able to, for example, take video of a large collection of organisms and quantify their movements using a computer,” says Grunbaum. “Twenty years ago, we would have had to do that by hand, which is agonizing.”
This has resulted in a small but vibrant renaissance in the science of cooperation, which reveals that cooperation is not unique to humans. It’s not even unique to animals. Cooperation is part of nature, down to the cellular level. The reason why is simple, according to evolutionary biologists: Cooperation is one of the most important and beneficial behaviors on Earth. We literally would not be here without it.
Humans, plants, and animals are made up of cells that learned to cooperate long ago. Together they formed multicellular organisms, increasing each individual cell’s chances of replication and survival in the process.