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

There are many instances in the world around us where evolution seems unable to organize cooperation. If cooperation is so good, why isn’t it universal? If cooperative organizations are better in evolutionary terms, if they are able to out-compete non-cooperators in evolutionary struggles, why are we surrounded by so many examples of animals that aren’t cooperating? If cooperation is so good, why is cooperation between animals so scarce? Why haven’t the benefits of cooperation already driven the evolution of cooperation among all humans? There is no controversy among evolutionists about the answer: Cooperation does not evolve easily: There is a fundamental barrier to the evolution of cooperation.

The most important thing that fosters collaboration – among the self-interested individuals – is the organizational structure itself. It could be one that fosters and rewards free-rider behavior. It could be one that could foster and reward individualist logic and competition inside the organization, predatory behavior towards those outside the community and exploitative economic practices. It could be one that could foster and reward collaboration and fairness inside the organization and predatory behavior towards those outside the community. Or it could be one that fosters and rewards collaboration, fairness and coherence inside the organization, collaboration, fairness and correlation outside the community and regenerative economic practices.

Certainly, the principles of organization that future human communities will choose will make a clear difference: A world of war or one of coherent collaboration? A world of planetary ecosystem destruction or a world of planetary ecosystem regeneration?

To choose a world of fair cooperation is, in fact, a conscious evolution process: it involves a change in the worldview and, therefore, in the principles we choose to base our life strategies and social organization. It means the evolution of a consciousness that allows us to choose and bring forth this kind of society.

Butterfly Communities can become a great social laboratory – where those engaged in it will have the chance to develop the necessary skills that could foster a higher level of collaboration. Butterfly Communities can become a social laboratory in which humanity can prototype a new way of human organization and a new legal paradigm that could allow the emergence of the much-needed mechanism that will search for social improvements. Butterfly Communities Open-Project aims to lay the basis for a commons-based global cooperation through finding better ways to intertwine the well-being of each individual with the well-being of local communities and the well-being of the whole body of Life.