The question of cooperation has fascinated and perplexed philosophers, economists, psychologists, sociologists and biologists from Aristotle to Darwin. It continues to do so today. At the heart of the debate is the relationship between the individual and the group or society to which he or she belongs: why cooperate when we believe our individual interests would be better served by acting unilaterally? This paper takes a broad, multi-disciplinary approach to answering the question ‘why cooperate?’.

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A new generation of experiments might shore up the cosmic orthodoxy - or blow it out of the water. That unexpected alternative, some people go so far as to say, might be no bad thing at all.

IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, "I think". Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree.

What are the biggest gaps in evolutionary theory?

A small but growing coterie of evolutionary biologists argue that it leaves us blind to crucial evolutionary processes at higher scales - among groups, species and even whole ecosystem. If they are right, the popular view of evolution and the biological world needs a radical shake-up.

"It could be, Shipman suggests, that dogs represented even more than companionate technologies to Paleolithic man. It could be that their cooperative proximity brought about its own effects on human evolution -- in the same way that the domestication of cattle led to humans developing the ability to digest milk. Shipman points to the "cooperative eye hypothesis," which builds on the observation that, compared to other primates, humans have highly visible sclerae (whites of the eyes)."

In recent years, Trivers has been most comfortable living in a no-signals region where he could anonymously pursue his research agenda.

"For the last ten or fifteen years," he says, "I've been trying to understand situations in nature in which the genes within a single individual are in disagreement—or put differently, in which genes within an individual are selected in conflicting directions. It's an enormous topic, which 20 years ago looked like a shadow on the horizon, just as about a hundred years ago what later became relativity theory was just two little shadows on the horizon of physics, and blew up to become major developments. In genetics it's fair to say that about 20 years ago a cloud on the horizon was our knowledge that there were so-called selfish genetic elements in various species that propagated themselves at the expense of the larger organism. What was then just a cloud on the horizon is now a full-force storm with gale winds blowing."