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

Cooperation among humans has expanded considerably in scale over the past 70,000 years. Initially, cooperation existed only within small family groups. Since then, the cooperative organization has progressively expanded in scale to produce multi-family bands, tribes, agricultural communities, cities, empires, nation-states, and now some forms of economic and social organization that span the globe.

Modern human societies can adapt and evolve continuously through internal processes during their life. Therefore, the ability of human cooperative organizations to harness the benefits of cooperation can be greatly improved. Current human societies are obviously not an endpoint of evolution. Guided by awareness of evolution’s arrow, we will evolve toward cooperative organizations of a larger scale and greater evolvability.

We are consciously evolving toward a unified planetary organization that will manage synergistically the matter, energy and living processes of the planet. These improvements would produce benefits for all humanity by suppressing conflict and other damaging competition within the society, and by efficiently organizing cooperation to serve the needs of all its citizens.

However, until humans will choose to consciously pursue future evolutionary success, the society would continue to serve only the pre-existing biological and cultural needs of its members. Therefore, our immense technological potential – that could intelligently manage matter, energy and life on a planetary scale – will be used to serve the divergent goals of the people, goals established by a shortsighted level of consciousness. The enormous power of our emerging technologies will be used merely to satisfy obsolete desires and values that conflict with our future evolutionary needs. This would all change once humanity will orient its evolution toward a higher (Yellow-Turquoise) level of consciousness. Then, the society as a whole would organize itself to reward cooperative (fair) and regenerative endeavors.

Individuals who use the direction of evolution to guide their actions get a clear answer to one of the most central questions of human existence: “What should I do with my life?” They open themselves to conscious evolution. They will decide to contribute to the formation of a cooperative and regenerative planetary society. They are aware that their actions are contributing to the next great step in the evolution of life on Earth.

One of the most important steps in the evolution of life on any planet is the emergence of organisms who are conscious of the direction of evolution and who use this to guide their own conscious evolution.