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For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation?
Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with human society, Silvertown digs deeper, to show how cooperation is key to the cells forming our organs, to symbiosis between organisms, to genes that band together, to the dawn of life itself. Cooperation has enabled life to thrive and become complex. Without it, life would never have begun.
Part One: Groups
1:Topos and Narcos
2:A river of glowing light
3:From selfish genes to social beings
4:Big steak or big mistake?
Part Two: Individuals
5:Matryoshka
6:Odd couples
7:Phytosympathies
8:Good Companions
Part Three: Cells
9:A Brand-New Bag
10:Three-card trick
11:That green new thing
12:From solitude to solidarity
Part Four: Genes
13:Ordering the primordial soup
14:Peas and Justice
15:Naked selfishness
16:Coda: the cornucopia of cooperation
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For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation?
Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with human society, Silvertown digs deeper, to show how cooperation is key to the cells forming our organs, to symbiosis between organisms, to genes that band together, to the dawn of life itself. Cooperation has enabled life to thrive and become complex. Without it, life would never have begun.
