Between the growing environmental crisis, extreme economic inequality and global poverty, a long list of social needs that are unfunded, or underfunded, and, not least, the dysfunctional or corrupt political regimes in many countries, our species is in genuine peril. And it’s entirely a self-made crisis. Yet this is precisely why there is reason for hope.
Let’s begin at the beginning, perhaps 5-7 million years ago, when our earliest ape-like ancestors descended from the trees in East Africa and made the difficult and dangerous transition to living on the ground. As I show in my new book, Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind, there were three keys to our remote ancestors’ ultimate success: close cooperation, innovation, and synergy. In a very real sense, our species invented itself.
The earliest of our direct ancestors, the australopithecines, were small (about 3 feet tall) and slow-moving. They could not have survived the harsh physical challenges of living on the ground nor held their own against the many large predators in their environment – like the pack-hunting Palhyaena – without foraging together in cooperative groups and defending themselves collectively with the tools they invented for procuring food, and for self-defense (probably digging sticks that doubled as clubs, and perhaps thrown rocks). The result was a game-changing synergy – cooperative outcomes that could not otherwise have been achieved. (Synergy refers to the combined effects created by two or more parts, or individuals. The classic example is water, the joint product of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen.)
The rest of our multi-million-year evolution story has followed this same script. Cooperation and innovation have been the underlying themes, and the synergies that result (the “economic” benefits) are the reason why we cooperate. Thus, the emergence of the much larger, and bigger-brained Homo erectus, some 2 million years ago, was the product of a synergistic joint venture, namely, the hunting of big game
A Species in Peril:
What Evolution Can Teach Us About the Path Forward
by Peter A. Corning
Institute for the Study of Complex Systems