Coopting cooperation.

A recent NY Times article collects a wide range of interesting facts about cooperation, but having read many articles by journalist Nicholas Wade I am dismayed about the incorrect impressions it conveys. I have not read Michael Tomasello’s new book Why We Cooperate, cited throughout, but anyone who has read more than one of Frans de Waal’s books knows that cooperation is definitely not what distinguishes humans from animals. Some of the ways that we cooperate are more elaborate, but anyone who asserts that “shared intentionality” makes us different from chimps must be unaware of de Waal’s seminal study Chimpanzee Politics written more than 25 years ago.

As for the strength of the urge to cooperate, it does not correlate with a species’ intelligence, and is not a measure, as this article implies, to infer that one species is superior to another. To give just one example, the highest level of cooperation measured in one classic experimental design came from a species known for its murderous inclinations: the spotted hyena. Hyenas are the only mammals that are both matriarchal and regularly murder adults of their own kind. In cooperation, they blow chimpanzees off the chart. Does that make them a better example of our nature? (Some have speculated that this hyena study was suppressed for 15 years because it upended the notion that cooperation tracked with intelligence and evolutionary sophistication.)