What makes life on earth so extravagantly bountiful, when it could have been like Mars, all barren and dull? Everywhere you look, there is a breathtaking complexity that seemingly defies human comprehension, from the way a single gene becomes a whole genome, to a single cell organism, visible only under a microscope, becoming animals the size of whales. And of course, there’s us, endowed with the intelligence that has enable us to build communities, societies and civilizations.

This prompts the big question: what are life’s secret organizing principles? Are the social and organization principles that govern the evolution of single and multi-cellular organisms the same as those that are govern the making of human societies? Read on if you are curious to know the answer.

Let’s first play a guessing game. Read the following passage of a character in nature describing herself, then guess who or what this character is. Here goes:

“I’m probably what you’d call a maternal type. I like having babies, and I’ve probably already had too much this year – at least, that’s what my children tell me. But I seem to be pretty good at it. I love them all equally, obviously. It’s hard work, though, especially since their father didn’t stick around. But I can’t see my babies surviving unless I get some help – all these mouths to feed, no time to clear up the place. So, I said to my oldest the other day. ‘How’s about it, kid? Fancy helping your old ma out around the place a bit? Here’s the deal: you go find some food while I squeeze out a few more siblings for you. Remember, I’m doing this for you – all your brothers and sisters I’m making – it will pay off in the long run. One day, one of them will be like me, a mother – imagine that! And you’ll still be reaping the benefits from her, too, long after you and I are gone. This way, you don’t ever have to worry about sex, men, or any of their sperm stuff. Your old ma has got everything you need, right here. All you have to do is feed us and clear out the mess. Think you can do that, kid?’”

Who am I?

Answer: I am an insect becoming a society. If I nest alone, I must leave the nest to find food, which means leaving my young unprotected. If some of my grown-up children can help me find food, I can stay home to look after the babies, their siblings. And this means more of their genes are passed on, through their siblings.

With a little tweaking of the details in this story, I could equally be talking about genes becoming a genome, or a single-cell organism becoming a multi-cellular eukaryote, like whales, like us. In short, nature’s secret organizing principle here is cooperation, and it is this that shapes all levels of biological complexity. And I mean all, including the unseen and unsung growth and development of trillions of cells inside our body. Here are a few concrete examples of cellular cooperation:

• Production of ‘Public Goods’: Cells often produce substances that benefit the entire population, such as enzymes, extracellular matrix, and signaling molecules.
  
• Spatial Clustering: Cooperation is favored when cells are physically close to their relatives, allowing them to share benefits, such as in clonal patches or biofilms.
  
• Quorum Sensing: Cells release signaling molecules to communicate and detect the population density, ensuring that costly cooperative behaviors (like producing public goods) are initiated only when enough cells are present to make them beneficial.
  
• Reciprocal Interactions: Cooperation is stabilized when cells recognize and directly interact with other cooperators, reducing the risk of being exploited by “defectors” or “cheaters”.
  
• “Walk Away” Strategy: In some cases, cells can leave groups where the burden of non-cooperative “cheater” cells becomes too high, ensuring that cooperative groups remain stable. 

As alluded earlier, insects exhibit complex, often altruistic, cooperation, especially in social species like ants, bees, wasps, and termites. A colony of ants for example act like it is a single “superorganism” where thousands or millions of sterile workers operate for the colony’s survival by performing locally-driven tasks such as the orderly transport of food items, and nest building.

Cooperation is nature’s elegant solution to harnessing otherwise individualistic behaviors for the greater good. Although we have understood this principle for almost half a century, it’s only recently that we realized that the evolution of cooperation explains not just insect societies but also those of other animals, including us. It is a much overlooked topic, one whose beauty and explanatory power stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the most elegant theories in physics.

Further Study

Readers who are keen to explore deeper into this topic can read Andrew Bourke’s influential book, Principles of Social Evolution (2011). Bourke, a former professor of social biology at the University of East Anglia, provides a useful synthesis of theory and empirical evidence to show that nature has invented common principles of cooperation at each step in the evolution of life that cut across all levels of biological complexity. It is persuasive book that will excite anyone, from student to the scientifically curious.