Evolution of Cooperation: Two for One?

How can cooperation thrive in a selfish world? Recent evolution experiments show how bacteria themselves can generate conditions that make cooperation a winning strategy. At least in the short term. Cooperation is ubiquitous at many levels of biological organization. Genes within a cell cooperate to replicate in a coordinated manner; cells within multicellular organisms act together to build a functioning soma; animals within social groups cooperate to forage and reproduce. Although cooperation is pervasive, it is not trivial to understand how it evolves. Many cooperative acts are evolutionarily derived characters, and thus we have to understand how a cooperator produced by spontaneous mutation could spread in an ancestral population of non-cooperating individuals. Recen