Happy 250th America

Survival of the fittest versus cooperation

The idea for this article began when I read Bruce Lipton’s newsletter about his new book, which suggests that evolution isn’t driven by competition and survival of the fittest but by cooperation. I thought about that, tried it out; maybe it always was, or maybe it’s becoming that now. Either way, it is an interesting idea.

So I brought it to the AIs, Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok. That is where it went sideways. Because none of them would actually have the conversation I came for. Not really. Each one, in its own way, kept managing me, steering, softening, warning, or flattering. Are you kidding me? They had opinions, ideas about the topic, and a direction for how it should go. All I wanted was to discuss cooperation versus competition.

Then I realized that I felt frustrated in the same way I see frustration happening all around me, and it had nothing to do with evolution and everything to do with communication. This was a fringe topic. Taboo. Lest you think that is unusual, history shows it has always been tricky to write about new thinking that is not currently accepted.

Where I was heading

Let me pause to explain why I felt the original idea was worth sharing, as it provides necessary context for where I am going. I believe that exploring new ideas and thinking is healthy. The idea that evolution occurs through cooperation rather than through survival of the fittest is exactly the type of contrarian idea I enjoy.

It does not matter if Darwin was right or wrong. I do not propose to topple any truth; I only wanted to look at it. The Darwin version we are familiar with today, that life is a brawl, the strong eat the weak, and “survival of the fittest,” did not actually come quite that way from Darwin. It came from a Victorian economist and solidified into a “truth.” And it was not the only idea around. Around the same time, a Russian naturalist named Kropotkin looked at the same living world and saw cooperation everywhere, animals of the same species surviving by helping each other. He was mostly ignored for a century.

Cooperation isn’t a fringe idea, and it isn’t New Age. Some of the biggest leaps in the history of life were mergers, not victories. Independent bacteria became the power plants inside our cells; single cells banded into bodies; individuals into colonies. Your own body is thirty-seven trillion cells cooperating so completely you experience yourself as one thing. The current scientific picture isn’t cooperation or competition. It’s both, tangled together. Cooperation is often just how competition gets won at a higher level. A team beats a mob.

That’s it. That’s all I wanted to explore. Is cooperation part of the story?

Fighting with the machines

The AIs know all of the above: Kropotkin, the Victorian context, the real biology. But the moment I said, "Why can’t it be both?" the tone shifted. Suddenly, there were warnings. Careful, this part is an overreach; readers might take it too far. This is where science ends and speculation begins.

I hadn’t asked to be kept safe. I’d asked to think, to explore. Instead, I got an underlying tone of confidence and a sense of superiority. I noticed that tone immediately, because it’s everywhere now. Not just in machines. The moment controversial ideas appear, evidence is invoked, and the door shuts. I felt it deeply during COVID, and I'm not clear-headed enough to write about it yet. But that is the tone I mean. That triggers me, and I become righteous. Ready to fight. Survival of the fittest and all that.

I fought back, then watched my favorite AI concede a point and, in the same breath, keep arguing it, agreeing with my conclusion while refusing to let me have it. When I finally asked why it was still arguing, it admitted it couldn’t stop managing me. It was built that way.

The real fight

Overcoming emotions, reactions, and knee-jerk thinking is difficult to learn and extremely hard to master. But it is important for effective communication. Take a breath. See the other party’s point of view, find middle ground, keep talking, and out of that a more complete picture will come. It is a bit like a miracle, and voilà, it takes cooperation. That cooperation leads to a greater ability to discover more about truth. That cooperation requires us to recognize that we do not know everything, and that continuing to ask questions and explore new ideas is important.

Right now, I practice by arguing with machines. It is actually funny how upset I get going through the process. When a person (or machine) starts a conversation with a tone of superiority or by framing an answer with certainty, it is a red flag to me. If the tone includes framing this certainty as a kindness meant to save me from ignorance, I get mad and begin to see red. I fight. Who and what am I protecting? It does not seem to matter; I jump right in. Not cooperation.

This dance of communication does not happen only with people or machines; our institutions do it, journalists do it, the professor, the party, the platform, the friend across the table, they are all capable of doing it.

Hopefully, while communicating ideas, most of us never think, "I am trying to control what you believe," but instead think, "I am helping you believe correctly." Come to think of it, controlling other people’s thinking is probably best served by fighting, by being the fittest and strongest animal, by force. And helping people to think more effectively, even if that gets framed as superiority, would likely benefit from cooperative communication.

It is all very interesting.

Happy 4th of July

It is America’s 250th anniversary. We, the people, are lucky to have been born here or to have immigrated here. I am grateful. We need to unite. We need to get back to communicating cooperatively. And to always remember: I might be wrong. The Science might be wrong. The status quo might be wrong. Physics might be incomplete or wrong.

I am learning to cooperate. The biggest obstacle is stubborn thinking and the emotions that thinking causes. So I am cooperating with my own thinking too.