The “COOPERATION” Category is devoted to show that the evolution of Life on Earth has a direction. This direction is toward increasing the scale of cooperation among living processes. Also, the direction of evolution is toward increasing the adaptability of individuals and communities to better face the challenges of Life. The Butterfly-Community Open-Project is aiming to be the humanity step further in its evolution.

This article is compiled using texts from John Stewart’s book, Evolution’s Arrow

From the deep social and ecological crises we are now facing, we have a long way to go before we can achieve a fair global society, harmoniously integrated into the planetary ecosystem. Though everyone could easily envision the huge benefits of human fairness and collaboration on planetary scale, the barriers against this cooperation seem insurmountable.

So, almost everyone tends to look at individualistic life strategies as the only better ones. But a closer look at how Life has evolved on this Planet – as John Stewart has already proven in his book, “Evolution Arrow” – shows that Life has managed until now to overcome a lot of barriers to cooperation, creating collaborative organizations over wider and wider scale and increasingly adaptable. They emerged, survived, thrived and inherit the Earth because they have proved more competitive in evolutionary terms than single individuals, than non-cooperators. The next key milestone in Life evolution toward even larger-scale cooperation is our challenge and our responsibility!

We have all the reasons to believe that Life will find its way further, as it has found its way so far. Please, continue to read our articles from Cooperation, Conscious Evolution and Life Intelligence Categories to understand how Life has found its way so far and how we can become Life’s step further in its evolution. In order to keep a logical order, in accordance with the development of the ideas, I will mark the articles, beyond their title, with numbers that will suggest the order of their reading.

The title of my first article in “Cooperation” Category is a paraphrase of Jesus’ word, “The meek shall inherit the Earth”: The cooperators will inherit the Earth. This is a scientific fact: the cooperators will inherit the Earth. I found John Stewart’s book “Evolution’s Arrow: the direction of evolution and the future of humanity” extremely insightful for this idea.

“The emergence of organisms who are conscious of the direction of evolution is one of the most important steps in the evolution of Life on any planet. Once organisms discover the direction of evolution, they can use it to guide their own evolution. If they know where evolution is going, they can work out what will produce success in the future, and use this to plan how they will evolve.” (John Stewart)

“Living beings can evolve without having any knowledge of the direction of evolution. The diversity and complexity of Life on Earth is testimony to that. Organisms can try to deal with the future by blindly making changes to themselves or their offspring and seeing how the changes work out in practice. But this takes a lot of costly trial-and-error, particularly when the future is complex or changes rapidly. It will not be a winning strategy for organisms whose competitors can predict future events and use this to evolve more effectively. The alternative is for organisms to guide their evolution by forming a picture of how evolution is likely to unfold in the future. They can try to find trends and patterns in this evolution that might impact on their future chances of survival. They can then use these patterns to see how they must change themselves and the way they are organized in order to continue to be successful.” (John Stewart)

The real challenge that lays before us is the personal evolution toward a higher level of consciousness – one which will lead to self-evolving human beings and a conscious design of our future civilization (conscious evolution). To continue to thrive on this Planet, we have to design a human society capable to integrate our human divergent/biased interests in a fairer way and redesign our obsolete economic system to become regenerative toward planetary ecosystems.

As individuals, we have to take further our “heroic journey” and “cross our first threshold” from individualistic life-strategies to collaborative ones. But this step is a social and economic suicide, if we are going to take it alone, in the midst of our individualistic/capitalistic society. This “seemingly impossible step to take” is part of the barrier against cooperation that I was speaking about. Always, before reaching a new milestone in its evolution toward even larger scale of cooperative organizations, Life had to find a way around those seemingly insurmountable barriers against cooperation.

Now, it is our turn to find a way out!

It is much easier to take this step toward cooperative and fair behavior/strategy not alone, but with others. That is why I propose the Butterfly Communities Open-Project – a social environment where we can take this conscious evolutionary step further together.

Whatever the challenges of the future, cooperators will have a clear evolutionary advantage compared to non-cooperators. In the new VUCA world, we will have to survive and thrive in new ways, different from those that have been successful so far. As a multicellular organism is smarter and has better capacities to deal with its environment than a cell alone, as an ant-hill is smarter and has better capacities to deal with its environment than an ant alone, Butterfly Communities will be smarter and better equipped to deal with future challenges than a single individual. As the “Evolution Arrow” clearly shows, the cooperators will inherit the Earth!