Cultural Evolution May Be Blocking Ecological Solutions

Cultural evolution refers to the way humans create tools and social systems to adapt to and shape their environments. Find out how the tension between our cooperative and competitive natures may be preventing us from solving the ecological crisis humanity faces.

Like most boys, I played a lot of team sports growing up. It was mostly pickup games in the schoolyard or in the huge backyard our neighbours, the Findlays, had.

I also played organized softball in the summer. It always seemed to me that team sports involved a contradiction between coaching unity within our own group and encouraging rivalry with our opponents.

Now that I’m ostensibly an adult, I belong to a credit union, which is a cooperative financial institution that belongs to its depositors, or members. Even so, my credit union has to compete with privately-held commercial banks.

Tension Between Human Cooperation and Competition

Scholars from a range of disciplines have thought about this tension between cooperation and competition among humans. In his groundbreaking work The…