Question: Do you want to find the rules of cooperative behaviour of all species or just for one kind of animals. Because it's vary to summarise the general rules of cooperative

Freya Harrison answered on 15 Mar 2010:

Hiya, thanks for your question – I think it’s a really good one. There are some general rules that we can apply to cooperation in any type of animal – for instance, population structure (how close the individuals of a species live to one another, how often and how far they move about) affects cooperation and will probably affect all types of animal and all types of cooperation. That’s kind of a global set of rules – population structure will affect birds in the same way as it affects bacteria, in the same way as it affects humans.

But it is very important to think about the specifics of the question. For instance, we know that if individuals can build up a public reputation so that other individuals know how they have behaved in the past – did they cooperate or not? – then this can be a force that maintains cooperation over the generations. But this can only happen in animals where individuals interact with enough others, and where they have the ability to recognise each other, remember information for long enough and communicate it in some way. So this rule wouldn’t apply to species that can’t do these things (like bacteria).

Here’s another example of a specific rule from my research. My colleague Dave, who’s a psychologist, and I recently showed that women find men more attractive if they are cooperative. The theory goes that in our species, women find cooperative men attractive because if a man is generally cooperative, that’s a signal that he’s likely to cooperate with his partner and help her look after their children. So this female preference is one way in which evolution can maintain cooperation in humans, because it means that cooperative men are more likely to find a partner and have children. But we wouldn’t expect the same rule to apply in species where the male never provides any care for the young – which is the case for lots of animals.

Hope this helps to answer your question!