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

The evolution has managed to harness the benefits of cooperation among humans at the level of human-scale communities. What we have to do now is to evolve a global cooperation of these human communities. We have to find better organizing principles (see holarchy) that could foster the cooperation within the organization and between them. For a global human civilization, we need to find a common worldview and a shared purpose.

The scientific perspective that perceives the Planet and the Universe as living systems has the power to become a shared worldview for all humanity. Already, this new perspective and its biological language start to change all our culture: the economy starts to be perceived as a living system too, as a cycle integrated into the Great Cycle of Life, as a metabolism; the buildings start to be perceived and design as living systems too; Biomimicry starts to inspire new technologies, new economic processes and new building materials that mimic Nature principles in their functioning. Not only the technological or economic realm is informed by the new scientific perspective, but the social, the educational and the political one too. We are hearing about “living organizations”, about “learning organizations”, about holons and holarchies, self-governance and self-determination, self-evaluation and self-motivation, about inter-dependence etc.

We also need a shared purpose as a global community. And what better common goal can we have than to co-create a fair human society, harmoniously integrated into the planetary ecosystem?

On this planet, evolution has produced cooperative organizations of molecular processes to form cells, cooperative organizations of cells to form multicellular organisms and cooperative organizations of organisms to form societies. Now we have to produce a global-scale cooperative organization of these human communities.

The level of collaboration at which the human species has evolved is the human-scale community. Looking at the spectacle of human civilization, it becomes clear that the evolution of a higher level of collaboration – a global one, but also fair and aligned with the life-sustaining planetary processes – has long since begun and is in full swing.

We have reached a “bifurcation point” where we either evolve or collapse. The evolution we are talking about can no longer be just a technological evolution, but must be a spiritual one – one that allows a higher level of integration and correlation of human diversity.

We understand that the Third Frontier – “conquer the world through economic expansion” – has exhausted its potential and we have a new Frontier to open. We have a clear evolutionary responsibility: to evolve a higher level of collaboration/integration than before – to face the challenges that lie ahead of us.

Although a global and fair human collaboration, synergistically integrated into the planetary ecosystem would bring huge benefits, these benefits cannot be harvested until we, as individuals, develop a level of consciousness capable to integrate all human diversity and correlate it harmoniously. Therefore, it remains a huge potential for cooperation between human organizations on a global scale. The potential for further beneficial cooperation will not be exhausted until all living processes are permanently organized into a single entity that is of the largest possible scale. The potential for increases in the scale of cooperation on this Planet is unlimited. There is a never-ending horizon of better and better unified cooperative organization, when the matter, energy and living processes of the Planet are managed into a superorganism of planetary scale.

This evolutionary sequence has all the features of a process that is fundamentally progressive. The potential for almost indefinite expansion in the scale of cooperative organization and the advantages this will bring provides a potential for evolutionary improvement that is ongoing. And each step in the sequence of improvements builds on and goes beyond the improvements made in the previous steps.