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

Past evolution has tailored our emotions, motivations and values so that we find security and satisfaction in behaviors and actions that would have produced success in the past, not those that will produce success in the future. We “feel secure” doing things that have proven successful in our species’ biological and social history, regardless of their possible success in the future. Our old set of emotions and motivations is driving us to choose actions that have proven successful in our species past, but not for future success. This is an important barrier to human further evolution.

It is one thing for an organism to know what it has to do for future evolutionary success and it is entirely another thing to want to do something about it. Much harder for an entire society. It is clear that the awareness of our longer-term interests is not automatically motivating us to do what is necessary to serve those interests.

We are evolving much faster our technology than our physiology. We are progressing much faster in the social realm than in the biological one. Our emotions and instincts are still those of those who lived in human-scale communities, while we live in cities of millions of people and in a global economy. That is why Butterfly Communities Open-Project consciously proposes to start from here – from where we are already evolved to live collaboratively and fairly – from human-scale communities and, using all our new knowledge, awareness and communication technology, to start to build a global holarchic architecture of human-scale communities.

The difficulty in finding the motivation to choose what it takes for future evolutionary success is even greater when you live in a capitalistic society like ours: Although I am aware that war, competition and consumerist mentality cannot be the solution to overcome the civil and ecological crisis we are in; although I am aware that we have to become a sustainable and peaceful society – what can I do as an individual alone?

How can we build a fair and regenerative society, when the first step toward building it seems to be a loss in evolutionary terms?…

This is the great barrier that the vast majority of people (who have understood that collaboration and sustainability are the only successful strategies for a better future) are facing: how to move forward, how to take their next step in life?

Although people everywhere seek to take this step forward, the political and economic system – based on a legal and financial system that promotes competition, exploitation of nature and individualism – does not help our evolution towards collaboration and regeneration of the planetary ecosystem. And yet, we must find a solution!

Butterfly Communities Open-Project is such an emerging solution. It offers an extremely important thing: it helps those who are aware of their evolutionary responsibility to take their step forward not individually but accompanied by others, creating together a community. Butterfly Communities will prove to be a success in evolutionary terms for those who have had the courage to step forward in this direction.