Co-operating is a clever idea

Working cooperatively led to bigger brain. Learning to work in teams may explain why humans evolved a bigger brain, according to a new study.

Working with others helped humans to survive, but they had to develop brains big enough to cope with all the social complexities

"We cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals quite frequently, and that requires cognitive abilities to keep track of who is doing what to you and change your behaviour accordingly," co-author Luke McNally of Dublin's Trinity College said. McNally pointed out, though, that cooperation has a calculating side. We do it out of reciprocity. "If you cooperate and I cheat, then next time we interact you could decide: 'Oh well, he cheated last time, so I won't cooperate with him.' So basically you have to cooperate in order to receive cooperation in the future." McNally said teamwork and bigger brainpower fed off each other. "Transitions to cooperative, complex societies can drive the evolution of a bigger brain," he said. "Once greater levels of intelligence started to evolve, you saw cooperation going much higher."

Commenting on the paper, Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, said the findings were a valuable add to understanding brain evolution. But he said there were physiological limits to cooperation. Man would need a "house-sized brain" to take cooperation to a perfect level on a planet filled with humans. "Our current brain size limits the community size that we can manage - that we feel we belong to," he said. Our comfortable "personal social network" is limited to about 150, and boosting that to 500 would require a doubling of the size of the brain. "In order to create greater social integration, greater social cohesion even on the size of France, never mind the size of the EU, never mind the planet, we probably have to find other ways of doing it" than wait for evolution, said Dunbar.

SOYMB can only say that the next step is to be found in social evolution - the introduction of socialism. Socialists see people as the product of history. So we would point to our ability to change, to transcend the limitations of our organism, to manufacture our social conditions rather than to be the product of original conditions; a potential yet to be fully realised, and which will be fully realised by transcending the conditions of our history that have led us so far from the ape to capitalist society.