COVID-19: As Ever, the Human Advantage Is Cooperation

Nurse treats COVID-19 patient

Source: US Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Sara Eshleman / Public Domain, Wikimedia commons

Most organisms that have ever existed, and still the large majority of the organisms that exist today, consist of a single cell, or even a strand of RNA or DNA lacking the full suite of features that mark a cell, e.g. viruses. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux explains in The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains, a first step on the path towards complex organisms was the symbiosis among specialized organelles within cells, including mitochondria, nuclei, and cell walls. It took about three billion years for evolution to hit on the innovation of multicellular organisms with specialized cells and body parts.

Multicellular organisms represented a massive evolutionary leap because the vast majority of the cells that ally themselves into a single organism have to forfeit the potential to pass their genes on to future generations. That violates the “prime directive” animating all prior life forms. As with a beehive or ant colony in which the vast majority of the individuals toil away to help the queen to reproduce, the cells of multicellular plants and animals forego reproduction, leaving only specialized germ cells to strive for the immortality of a line of independently living offspring. Coaxing most of the cells emerging from a cell division process to take a developmental pathway towards cell line extinction required mechanisms for getting a group of cells to cooperate for the good of the whole, including defenses against defectors like cancers.

Although multicellularity, and later the vertebrate body plan, were huge leaps beyond the simple life forms of the early earth, nature took cooperating for the good of the group to a new level when it hit on the innovation of our own Homo genus. Bees, ants, and wasps exhibit an extraordinary level of cooperation among individual organisms, called eusociality, but their cooperation is supported from an evolutionary standpoint by the fact that each member of the colony shares almost all the same genes, not so far from the genetic uniformity marking the cells of an organism. In our species and its immediate ancestors, the risk that came with getting down from the thinning tree canopy of eastern Africa meant that group cooperation was essential for survival. Our ancestors lacked the protections from predators afforded by exceptionally powerful musculature, massive size, sharp claws, or long, sharp canine teeth. Sociality was the human niche, say evolutionary theorists—but such cooperation had to exist among individuals who were not nearly so genetically close as the cells of a multicellular body or the bees of a beehive.

Human sociality evolved by strengthening the pre-existing instincts and dispositions of other social mammals, including primates, and doing it by adapting our cognitive and emotional capacities and dispositions, as discussed extensively by authors like E. O. Wilson or Michael Tomasello. As Wilson argues, the earth’s environment has been gradually, and of late ever more rapidly, sculpted by humans, due to the advantage of human sociality. The current “Anthropocene” era, the effects of which on earth’s species diversity Wilson frequently laments, has resulted from a “social conquest of earth” by our species.

As one who spends much of his time trying to understand the nature and evolution of human cooperation, a thought that arises frequently during the COVID-19 crisis is the sense in which we’re witnessing a battle between what might be nature’s premier experiment with cooperation, complexity, and cognition—ourselves—and its essential opposite, an exemplar of parasitism, simplicity, and mindlessness. Here we are, beset by uncountable numbers of sub-microscopic, self-replicating coils of RNA and protein, which have no idea what havoc they’re wreaking on us. They have no ideas, period. In contrast, we’re "the ape that understands the universe" (in Stewart-Williams’s phrase). We’ve developed calculus, can detect sub-atomic particles, and can propel mechanical probes beyond the boundary of our solar system. Can a mindless viral nemesis still gain the upper hand on us, at this stage in our evolution? Was the idea of large, complex, multicellular organisms, creatures that can fashion more and more accurate accounts of the universe in which they evolved, an evolutionary error?

Possibly yes. There’s reason for optimism about our species surviving the current pandemic, but we’d do well to be humbled and to recognize that our penchant for wondering how much further humans will have progressed by 2120 or 2520 might well be presumptuous, as we can never tell what nature might throw at us next.

But there’s no reason to write ourselves off yet. It’s not just that nature’s experiment with cognition and self-awareness was a really cool idea, but also that we still have our best weapon at hand. That best weapon is our built-in inclination to deploy our intelligence by working together, cooperatively, and standing on the shoulders of similarly engaged forerunners like van Leeuwenhoek, Hook, Darwin, Pasteur, Watson, and Crick. With COVID-19, we may be approaching half a million deaths among our 7.8 billion species-mates, and losing even one human life is like losing a world (to paraphrase the Talmud). But with teamwork, we might come out of this a stronger species, better prepared to face the future medical challenges that will doubtless confront us down the line.

Almost three years ago, in a world now difficult to remember, the Harvard cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker published the book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, in which he argued that, despite all the bad news that dominates the daily headlines, there’s never been a better time to be human: People are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives than at any time in history thanks to the flourishing of the Enlightenment-era values of science, reason, humanism, and progress. An enthusiastic Bill Gates gushed: “The world is getting better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Enlightenment Now is not only the best book Pinker’s ever written. It’s my new favorite book of all time.”

Hindsight leads us to wonder whether Pinker should not at least have included the boilerplate warning: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Still, the tribulations of 2020 have given us the opportunity to roll up our sleeves again and inject still more energy into the project of improving our world, and we can draw hope from the gains that intelligence and cooperation have brought us so far. Our losses are tragic, the callousness and hostility to science of leaders foolishly foisted on our country by a misguided minority of voters operating under our undemocratic electoral college system cost us many thousands of lives, and the endemic injustice of our social and economic structures has been laid bare. But we did not, as a society, agree to simply let the virus take an even larger fraction of our population without mounting a fight, and hundreds of thousands have been sacrificing to help the sick, erect the logistics for the ongoing battle, and seek an effective vaccine and treatment. As the end of 2020 approaches, we find ourselves both at the peak of the pandemic, and at the beginning of a decisive battle against it to be waged with vaccines produced in record time using state-of-the-art methods that were unavailable as recently as a decade ago. We complex, minded humans and our simple, mindless nemeses will finish fighting out this round and we'll hopefully learn as much as possible from this encounter, because many more surely await us, and nature's little experiment with a hyper-complex and potentially hyper-cooperative community of thinking and caring organisms is worth preserving for as long as possible on this amazing petri dish we call Earth.