What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Failure Modes on the Way to Global Cooperation
By Joao Fabiano and Diego Caleiro (UC Berkeley, Biological Anthropology)
From single-celled to pluricellular to multicellular organisms or from hunter-gatherers to the EU, the history of evolutionary forces that resulted in human society is a history where cooperation has emerged at increasingly large scales. The major life transitions and, once human, the major cultural transitions have rearranged the fitness landscape of evolving entities in ways that increased the size of the largest existing coalitions. Notwithstanding, it seems that freewheeling evolution will not lead to satisfactory levels of global human cooperation in time to prevent severe risks. Nor it will lead to the preservation of human values in the long run; humans, human values, and human cooperation are in no way the end-point of evolutionary processes. Read More »What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Failure Modes on the Way to Global Cooperation