Super Cooperators is a book about a mathematician who develops a mathematical model to describe how cooperation might evolve out of the conditions of classical Darwinian natural selection. It’s a fascinating topic described in a somewhat cloying manner. The results are fascinating: I was particularly surprised to learn about the evolutionary model of cooperative and anti-cooperative generational “waves” described in his genetic programming experiment in the first chapter, and intrigued by some of the results in graph theory as well.

Aside from that - this book is about a mathematician, not the math, which I found a little annoying and perhaps even condescending; there are a solid several paragraphs lamenting the tautological nature of “the Price equation”, but not a single formula to indicate what that equation actually is!

There is no doubt that Nowak’s scholarship on this topic is impressive, but I was surprised to see how little attention he gave to actual modern-day social regimes, especially in the form of corporate or governmental power. Indeed, he describes such “cooperative” endeavors as buying a cup of coffee as though they were the result of dozens of different people with various roles (coffee farmer, distributor, barista, customer, etc.) each playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma and evolving into a natural state of a global coffee network. That is laughably simplistic: a whole series of complex power structures in government and commerce are also responsible, and there is no small amount of coercion in this “cooperative” network. It’s only natural to have less to say about topics (like public and private power structures) which your scholarship doesn’t cover, of course, but then - Nowak has written a popular book aimed at a mass audience, and a bit of curiosity about the wider world wouldn’t hurt all that much. This study of cooperation is fascinating and illuminating in many ways - but it’s not the whole story. Indeed you can see this shortcoming in the chapter on global warming, in which Nowak’s insights on reputation - while genuinely useful - are put to such foolish ends as suggesting that global warming can be solved by shaming polluters and yet-more-greenwashing! Setting aside the research on how effective these kinds of practices actually are - somewhat, but not overwhelmingly so - it’s clear that such weak forces will not be enough to actually save us from global warming, and that some degree of global market-making will be required. Anyone who lives in Boston today, as Nowak does, should know that the Tragedy of the Commons actually was averted here; our Commons is in fine shape despite heavy usage. The reason is that we have a government which regulates and maintains it actively. More broadly, it is indeed possible to have a complex cooperative endeavor spanning millions of people - it’s called government; it may not be all that easy to develop an evolutionary model of such a thing.

In a similar vein, I was surprised to see just how badly he wanted to explain everything with evolution. There is no doubt that providing a plausible mathematical explanation for the evolution of cooperation is an important and impressive feat - but that doesn’t mean that such an explanation is the only possible one to describe cooperation. That is a wider critique that I think biologists in general don’t take to heart often enough, and it leads to such flatly silly episodes as Nowak’s exposition on a gene that causes someone to jump in a river to rescue a drowning stranger. There is no “rescue a drowning stranger” gene, and to constrain one’s thinking about such complex behavior is foolish. There are myriad cultural forces at work in such a scenario and, while Nowak has demonstrated how cultural forces can be examined from within an evolutionary framework, that is clearly not the only way to analyze cultural forces. As entire armies of graduate students in the humanities could testify, I’m sure.

Despite my misgivings, I do think that this field of study is genuinely useful and fascinating. The fact that cooperation is the product of natural forces is a sort of theoretical blow to social Darwinism, free-market zealotry and libertarianism - but of course who are we kidding, it’s like the 10,000th in a long line of theoretical and empirical blows to those failed zombie ideologies. What is I think much more interesting is the dynamic model of cooperation, and Nowak’s description of the genetic algorithms in chapter 1, as well as his insights into the power of reputation. Those strike me as insights which have predictive powers in the world of public policy, and I think that seeing those insights applied could be quite satisfying.