Conference - Cooperation as a pillar of biological evolution
This conference will address the role of cooperation as an essential component in the process of biological and cultural evolution, combining the perspectives of game theory, chemistry, molecular biology, cell biology and social psychology.
Darwinian evolution is based on natural selection of random variants, better adapted to their environment and whose adaptive traits are heritable. While classical darwinism stresses the importance on individual variability, more and more evidence suggests that cooperative behaviour seems to be crucial for the process of evolution, allowing it to continue towards ever-greater complexity.
Increasingly, cooperation is found to be an important factor in key phases of evolution, starting already very basic levels - including the very origin of life itself - with the step from chemistry to biology through “cooperation” of biomolecules. The passage from prokaryotic life towards eukaryotic life as well as the passage from unicellularity towards multicellularity seems impossible to understand without cooperation of the lower level organisms. Also at higher levels of complexity cooperation plays an important role in evolution; the human ability to cooperate even with abstract, anonymous persons at large distances allows the kind of large-scale cooperation seen uniquely in humans, taking the process of natural evolution to the process of cultural evolution.
In order to increase our understanding of the relationship between evolution and cooperation, six world-renowned experts studying different aspects of this relationship will be gathered in Strasbourg to share and discuss their insights and to jointly reflect on possible implications.
Organisers: Prof. Sylviane Muller (IBMC, USIAS) and Dr. Johan Hoebeke (CNRS).
