Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and The Rise of Humankind

by Peter A. Corning

"Nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy." Peter Corning's new book is being hailed as a major contribution to what is perhaps the greatest shift in our understanding of evolution since The Origin of Species . It's a tour de force that takes us on a synergy-guided tour of the history of life. As Corning puts it, "life on Earth has been a synergistic phenomenon from the get go." Corning also shows how synergy has been a key to human evolution, including the rise of complex modern societies. "Cooperation may have been the vehicle, but synergy was the driver." As we now face a tipping point and another major transition in evolution, Corning offers us a synergy-based road-map to the future. "One of the great take-home lessons from the epic of evolution is that cooperation produces synergy, and synergy is the way forward. The arc of evolution bends toward synergy."
Undergraduate, graduate students and the general public interested in general science, general life sciences, evolutionary biology, human biology/anthropology/primatology, and public policy.

304 pages, Hardcover

Published February 9, 2018

About the author

Peter Andrew Corning (born 1935) is an American biologist, consultant, and complex systems scientist, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems, in Friday Harbor, Washington, and is known especially for his work on the causal role of synergy in evolution.

Reviews

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of insight on how synergy happens as an art. The art of evolution.
Joint environmental conditioning.
Collective intelligence.
Augmentation or facilitation.
Threshold effects.
Functional complementarities.
Teamwork.
Scale.
Convergent historical effects.
Behavioural pacemakers. (Niche construction theory.)
Social triangulation.
Midwifery <=> bipedalism.

[Danny Barulli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Corning presents a theory for evolution that is different than classical neo-Darwinism which is natural selection and random mutation that explains the development of all living species via common descent. The key aspect of synergism that counters natural selection has to do with "survival of the fittest" or competition. It was not competition that has influences evolution but cooperation. Synergism counters the popular notion by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins the selfish gene which undermines any success for life to flourish.

Corning presents numerous examples how cooperation among the simplest forms of life to modern human behavior explains how all life evolved. This concept is not new for Corning. He developed in an earlier book, The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution, in 1983 where advantages are gained when there is cooperation among various living organisms. It is clear that we do clear symbiotic relationships with living organisms. The most basic one that I can think of is bacteria with larger life forms.

My biggest concern with the development of this concept how living organisms get to a state of cooperation or why cooperation is necessarily applied in the propagation of anything that is new. There are numerous complexities in the world that I humbly conclude synergism does not explain.