Supercooperators Quotes

“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”
― Martin Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“By the same token, if conscience and empathy were impediments to the advancement of self-interest, then we would have evolved to be amoral sociopaths.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Apart from a few viruses, all life on Earth now relies on DNA to hold the information that it needs to reproduce. But the most likely players in the first games of life were molecules of the related genetic material RNA, which is more flexible than DNA because it can both carry information down the generations and also catalyze—speed up—chemical reactions, a very handy feat. And RNA still carries out all kinds of critical roles in organisms that are described by DNA, including human beings.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“When looking at nature, you must always consider the detail and the whole.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Another marine example is the Portuguese man-of-war, which can measure more than 150 feet from its air bladder to the tips of its tentacles. Many think of it as a jellyfish, but in fact it is a siphonophore—a colony of minute individuals.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“If life is a robust phenomenon—and I think it is—then it has originated often in our universe. Similarly, if intelligent life is a robust phenomenon it has also been generated frequently. Why have we not had a chat with ET yet? I think encounters between independent oases of intelligent life are rare because intelligent life is so unstable. Being smart is a fleeting phenomenon. It is self-destructive. Why? Because intelligent life often fails to solve the biggest problem of all: the problem of cooperation.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Reward does more than make us work more effectively together—it stimulates creativity too. Reward, not necessity, is the true mother of invention.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“There are two basic kinds of punishment. In this chapter, I have focused on one of them: peer punishment, the kind used by the Mafia, or in instances when people take the law into their own hands.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Cooperation in about half of the participant pools remained at the initial level, and the higher the level of antisocial punishment in a participant pool, the lower was the rate of increase in cooperation. At best, “altruistic punishment” did not help people to cooperate very much. This seemed to me to capture something of the flavor of real life.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Punishers don’t win. Thus, when repetition is taken into account, punishment by people who like to take the law into their own hands is ineffective.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“If punishment is typically used in the context of repeated dealings where people know who has punished whom, then it is difficult to draw conclusions from an experiment where punishment occurs anonymously. If we want to understand human behavior and the interplay between cooperation and punishment, we need to study situations where the players encounter each other again and again.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“If I punish you for defecting during an earlier encounter with me, then it is direct reciprocity. If I punish you for defecting in games with other players, it is an example of indirect reciprocity. Second, the motivation of people who mete out costly punishment in real life is hardly ever “altruistic.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“migration undermines cooperation.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“In outline, it is easy to see how a spatial game could work along the same lines as the cellular automata. The game players are arranged on a chessboardlike array (it can be in three dimensions, of course, or even more). During each round, the player on a given square plays the game with its neighbors. After this, each square is occupied by its original owner or by one of the eight neighbors, depending on who won that round—in other words, who got the biggest payoff.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Sir Ronald Fisher went so far as to call him “a mathematician with an interest in biology.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Before this insight, one might have been tempted to think of evolution as a completely random walk across a fitness landscape, in other words a series of steps in multidimensional sequence space where no region is more likely to be explored than any other region. But it turns out that, due to the power of selection and quasispecies, there are biases in evolution’s walk through the genetic possibilities of life.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“We also know that evolution crafted all life on the planet with natural selection and that we can capture the way it works with mathematics, distilling its essence into the form of equations.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

“Living, breathing creatures did not require a life force, or vital essence, to evolve but an extraordinary level of cooperation between molecules.”
― M.A. Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed