Crossing scales, crossing disciplines: collective motion and collective action in the Global Commons†

Two conflicting tendencies can be seen throughout the biological world: individuality and collective behaviour. Natural selection operates on differences among individuals, rewarding those who perform better. Nonetheless, even within this milieu, cooperation arises, and the repeated emergence of multicellularity is the most striking example. The same tendencies are played out at higher levels, as individuals cooperate in groups, which compete with other such groups. Many of our environmental and other global problems can be traced to such conflicts, and to the unwillingness of individual agents to take account of the greater good. One of the great challenges in achieving sustainability will be in understanding the basis of cooperation, and in taking multicellularity to yet a higher level, finding the pathways to the level of cooperation that is the only hope for the preservation of the planet.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

• Publication date

  2010-01-12

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Philosophy, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rstb.2009.0197PMID 20008381PMCID 2842704
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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