WestView

Science from Away: Cooperation

February 2010

By Mark M. Green

Our bodies work using principles of cooperativity. How else could the trillions of cells we are made of work together for a common purpose to keep us alive and keep us on our chosen path? Much of the organic matter of which we are made comes in the form of polymers: proteins, DNA, RNA, starch, for some examples. Polymers are an ideal form of matter demonstrating the principles of cooperation—many units strung together have to act together. Nature’s polymers are often helical, that is, coiled, like the old fashioned shock absorbers every car used to have. Shock absorbers work by cooperation—every turn of the helix contributes to softening the blow of the bump in the road. To accomplish this task the coil has to be entirely right- or entirely left-handed. Then all the turns can work together. Nature’s polymers are also entirely of a single handedness. The helical portion of all proteins is right-handed as is the double helix of DNA. That means if you look along the length of the coil, the turns will twist to the right.

In the 1950s DuPont realized it was going to lose the enormous amount of money the company made from nylon 6,6. The patent ran out and nylon was increasingly being manufactured in Asia. DuPont invented a new polymer that made a great fiber, but unfortunately for DuPont, the polymer fell apart at temperatures used for washing clothes. Even if the polymer was rejected for commerce, I loved it because it resembled natural polymers in being helical, while it was different from natural polymers in not being able to tell left from right. We discovered in our experiments that we could make the polymer overwhelmingly of the units that were confused about left and right (we called these units soldiers) but place among them, here and there, a very few units that preferred to be of one twist sense, left for example (we called these units sergeants). You can imagine what happened. If the sergeants liked a left-handed twist, the whole polymer went left-handed. Now that’s cooperation. I remember my sergeant loudly yelling when I was a soldier. We all jumped to obey.

We got a different result when we made the polymer of mixed sergeants, some favoring a twist to the left and others right. We randomly mixed the conflicted sergeants among each other and among the soldiers. If there were a few more of one kind of sergeant than the other, then the whole polymer obeyed the sergeants in the majority. As in an ideal democracy, the minority went along with the desire of the majority. That’s cooperation. But there was a big difference from the sergeants and soldiers experiment. The louder the arguing sergeants “yelled” for control of the helical sense, the less control the majority sergeant had. Intense conflict reduces cooperation, like what could happen in any marriage and is happening now in the United States Congress.

Darwin was perplexed by the cooperative activities he saw in nature and especially in social insects. Worker bees’ labor does not lead to their own reproduction. Worker ants have no offspring and instead feed their queen’s offspring. At first Darwin thought that cooperative behavior might be fatal to his theory of natural selection, which saw individual competition as a driving force for evolution, for “survival of the fittest.” But later Darwin conjectured that cooperation among individuals in a group could lead to enhanced survival of the group and this could be a factor working against competition among individuals in the group.

Darwin’s idea about cooperation in groups is seen in military activities, which would be impossible without cooperation. Many soldiers firing their weapons in concert demonstrate the concept of Gestalt; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Soldiers working together are a far more powerful force than the individual soldiers fighting independently of each other. All military training enhances cooperative behavior among the soldiers: whc.net/rjones/USN/USN_team.html

Families, extended families, clans and tribes and even nations where the individuals share some portion of a genetic heritage offer one reason for cooperation—so that their shared DNA will survive even if individuals don’t survive or have offspring. But even in the absence of shared DNA, cooperation has value. Science has come up with mathematical models supporting the value of cooperation and its role in the evolution of complex organisms and complex societies in all forms of life reaching an apex in humans. Biology now sees “natural cooperation” besides “natural selection” as a pillar of evolution.

Cooperation leads to amplification of the force necessary for survival. This was so clear to the ancient Chinese that they did not have separate words for cooperation and amplification, rather using a single symbol representing the idea that a large number of small forces yield a large force. The Japanese use this symbol today. Life and its evolution demand cooperation.

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