Competition and cooperation are both ubiquitous in biology

Competition and cooperation are both ubiquitous in biology. I don’t just mean at the level of organisms – we’re all familiar with the ways that organisms compete with each other (the “Darwinian struggle for survival” where only the fittest survive), and also with the ways they cooperate (ants form colonies, birds form flocks, fish form schools). What was surprising to me is that competition and cooperation occur within individual organisms as well. Cooperation within the organism is pretty easy to see. The whole body can be viewed as a chaotic jumble of overlapping, cooperative processes. The cells of your nervous system are constantly in communication, computing transformations of sensory input and inner thought that are still far beyond our understanding. The cells of a developing embryo morph from generalized stem cells into specialized tissues depending on where exactly in the body they are. And your immune system coordinates to identify the shape of foreign pathogens and then unle

Competition and cooperation are both ubiquitous in biology. I don’t just mean at the level of organisms – we’re all familiar with the ways that organisms compete with each other (the “Darwinian struggle for survival” where only the fittest survive), and also with the ways they cooperate (ants form colonies, birds form flocks, fish form schools). What was surprising to me is that competition and cooperation occur within individual organisms as well. Cooperation within the organism is pretty easy to see. The whole body can be viewed as a chaotic jumble of overlapping, cooperative processes. The