Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

The ubiquity of cooperation among social species raises a ubiquitous problem. Sure, it’s great when everyone cooperates for the greater good, but it’s even better when everyone else does that while you mooch off them. This is the problem of cheating. A lioness conveniently lags behind the others in a dangerous hunt; a bat doesn’t feed the others’ kids but freeloads on their cooperation; a baboon stabs his coalitional partner in the back. Two separate colonies of genetically identical social amoebas merge to form a multicellular structure called a fruiting body, which consists of a stalk, which gives stability, and a cap. Only the amoebas in the cap reproduce, and cooperation consists of each colony equally sharing the bummer of being nonreproducing stalk cells; instead, different strains will try to cheat, exploiting the other colony by preferentially hogging seats on the cap. Even mitochondria and stretches of DNA cheat in cooperative ventures.[*],[15] And sure as the day is long, the ubiquity of cheating drove the evolution of countermeasures to detect and punish it. Chimps that fail to support an ally in a fight are pummeled afterward. Wrens that don’t feed the nestlings of the dominant breeding pair are attacked. Naked mole rat queens are aggressive toward workers that are slacking. In the mutualism where reefer fish are cleaned by wrasse fish that get to eat the parasites they harvest, some wrasses cheat to get an even better meal by taking a bite out of the reefer fi...