Pablo Servigne - Mutual Aid

So the 2000s began with this paradox: sociobiology, which considered nature as fundamentally selfish, produced an increasing number of studies of altruism and cooperation – and this ultimately resulted in some extraordinary discoveries.

There has been a real paradigm shift in sociobiology. Its founding father, Edward O. Wilson, with the help of excellent theorists and in the light of new discoveries in the field and the laboratory, recently ‘flipped’ his theory by reversing its basic assumption. The origin of the ‘social fact’ is no longer to be found in genes, but in the influence of the environment. From then on, some scientists began to recognize the importance of Kropotkin’s work, especially as he highlighted the importance of the environment in the evolution of mutual aid.

Thanks to this abundance of new studies, we can finally see the complexity of the general picture of mutual aid and gradually start to weave connections between disciplines. Among the most significant advances, let us cite the pioneering work of the experimental economist Ernst Fehr, the discoveries on primates made by Frans de Waal, Michael Tomasello and Felix Warneken, political scientist Elinor Ostrom’s surprising findings on ‘the commons’, and the advances in neuroscience made by Tania Singer and Jean Decety, not forgetting the investigations into comparative anthropology conducted by Joe Heinrich in other human cultures. Even genetics has become acceptable again thanks to the remarkable mechanisms of epigenetics, which show how the environment and culture play an important role in gene expression.

We will be exploring all of this in the following chapters.

1 1. R. M. Callaway and L. R. Walker, ‘Competition and facilitation: A synthetic approach to interactions in plant communities’, Ecology, 78, 1997, pp. 1958–65.

2 2. R. M. Callaway et al., ‘Positive interactions among alpine plants increase with stress’, Nature, 417, 2002, pp. 844–8.

3 3. What mechanisms enable plants to help others? One example: they can change light conditions to make the latter more favourable to their neighbours, or alter air temperature, humidity, nutrients or the oxygenation of the soil. They can even serve as a substrate for other plants, attract pollinators or, on the contrary, keep herbivores at bay. In some cases, when an insect lands on a tree and begins to eat its leaves, neighbouring trees immediately start producing poisonous substances, warned by the scent emitted by the first victims.

4 4. R. E. Kenward, ‘Hawks and doves: Factors affecting success and selection in goshawk attacks on woodpigeons’, Journal of Animal Ecology, 47, 1978, pp. 449–60.

5 5. S. M. Cooper, ‘Optimal hunting group size: The need for lions to defend their kills against loss to spotted hyaenas’, African Journal of Ecology, 29, 1991, pp. 130–6.

6 6. See the magnificent book by Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World, trans. Jane Billinghurst (London: William Collins, 2017).

7 7. The History of Herodotus, vol. I, trans. G. C. Macaulay, first published in 1890, available online: www.gutenberg.org/files/2707/2707-h/2707-h.htm(Book II, para. 65). The species corresponding to this ‘trochilus’ has long been considered the Egyptian plover (Pluvianus aegyptius). If the first observation was indeed recorded by Herodotus, and was then repeated for two thousand years by many authors, there have as yet been no proven modern observations (and in particular no photos). Moreover, the plover, like the crocodile, is now much rarer, and so are the opportunities for interaction. One of the few recent authors to have studied the matter has concluded that, if this partnership existed, it was not really common, and might even involve another species of bird, the spur lapwing (Hoplopterus spinosus) – but the two are not mutually exclusive. See T. R. Howell, Breeding Biology of the Egyptian Plover, Pluvianus aegyptius (vol. 113) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

8 8. D. H. Boucher, ‘The idea of mutualism, past and future’, in D. H. Boucher (ed.), The Biology of Mutualism, Ecology and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 1–28.

9 9. These are the Isosicyonis sea anemones, living in partnership with the gastropod Harpovoluta charcoti: E. Rodríguez and P. J. López-González, ‘The gastropod-symbiotic sea anemone genus Isosicyonis Carlgren, 1927 (Actiniaria: Actiniidae): A new species from the Weddell Sea (Antarctica) that clarifies the taxonomic position of the genus’, Scientia Marina, 72, 2008, pp. 73–86.

10 10. B. Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); C. Nielsen et al., ‘Ants defend aphids against lethal disease’, Biology Letters, 6, 2009, pp. 205–8; B. Stadler and A. F. Dixon, ‘Ecology and evolution of aphid–ant interactions’, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 36, 2005, pp. 345–72.

11 11. M. Heil and R. Karban, ‘Explaining evolution of plant communication by airborne signals’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 25, 2010, pp. 137–44.

12 12. The six living kingdoms are: animals, plants, fungi, protists (unicellular, with nuclei), bacteria and archaea (another type of bacteria).

13 13. B. Juniper, ‘The mysterious origin of the sweet apple’, American Scientist, 95, 2007, pp. 44–51.

14 14. U. G. Mueller et al., ‘The evolution of agriculture in insects’, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 36, 2005, pp. 563–95.

15 15. D. E. Bignell and P. Eggleton, ‘Termites in ecosystems’, in T. Abe et al. (eds), Termites: Evolution, Sociality, Symbioses, Ecology (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2000), pp. 363–87.

16 16. B. D. Farrell et al., ‘The evolution of agriculture in beetles (Curculionidae: Scolytinae and Platypodinae)’, Evolution, 55, 2001, pp. 2011–27.

17 17. C. Darwin, The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects (London: John Murray, 1877).

18 18. W. Rothschild and K. Jordan, ‘Scientific books: A revision of the lepidopterous family Sphingidoe’, Science, 18, 1903, pp. 15–16.

19 19. D.-Y. Alexandre, ‘Le rôle disséminateur des éléphants en forêt de Taï, Côte d’Ivoire’, La Terre et la Vie, 32, 1978, pp. 47–72.

20 20. M. Greenwood et al., ‘A unique resource mutualism between the giant Bornean pitcher plant, Nepenthes rajah, and members of a small mammal community’, PLoS One, 6 (6), 2011, art. e21114.

21 21. R. Honegger, ‘The lichen symbiosis – what is so spectacular about it?’, The Lichenologist, 30, 1998, pp. 193–212.

22 22. J. R. Haas and O. W. Purvis, ‘Lichen biogeochemistry’, in G. M. Gadd (ed.), Fungi in Biogeochemical Cycles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 344–76.

23 23. G. M. Gadd, ‘Metals, minerals and microbes: Geomicrobiology and bioremediation’, Microbiology, 156, 2010, pp. 609–43.

24 24. R. A. Armstrong, ‘Lichens, lichenometry and global warming’, Microbiologist, 5, 2004, pp. 32–5.

25 25. D. L. Hawksworth et al., ‘Dictionary of the fungi’, Fungal Genetics and Biology, 20, 1996, p. 173.

26 26. G. D. Stanley and P. K. Swart, ‘Evolution of the coral–zooxanthellae symbiosis during the Triassic: A geochemical approach’, Paleobiology, 21, 1995, pp. 179–99.

27 27. G. D. Stanley, ‘Photosymbiosis and the evolution of modern coral reefs’, Science, 312, 2006, pp. 857–8.

28 28. L. Wegley et al., ‘Metagenomic analysis of the microbial community associated with the coral Porites astreoides’, Environmental Microbiology, 9, 2007, pp. 2707–19.

29 29. About a hundred species of bacteria are thought to be pathogenic for humans in relation to the 10 million already described. See M. McFall-Ngai, ‘Adaptive immunity: Care for the community’, Nature, 445 (7124), 2007, art. 153. The proportion of pathogenic species still seems to be a significant overestimate, since a recent study extrapolates total microbial biodiversity, now said to number a trillion species. See K. J. Locey and J. T. Lennon, ‘Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 113, 2016, pp. 5970–5.