Liars and Outliers Bruce Schneier: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive

Chapter 3

The Evolution of Cooperation

Two of the most successful species on the planet are humans and leafcutter ants of Brazil. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has spent much of his career studying the ants, and argues that their success is due to division of labor.1 There are four different kinds of leafcutter workers: gardeners, defenders, foragers, and soldiers. Each type of ant is specialized to its task, and together the colony does much better than colonies of non-specialized ant species.

Humans specialize too, and—even better—we can adapt our specialization to the situation. A leafcutter ant is born to a particular role; we get to decide our specialization in both the long and short term, and change it if it's not working out for us.2

Division of labor is an exercise in trust. A gardener leafcutter ant has to trust that the forager leafcutter ants will bring leaf fragments back to the nest. I, specializing right now in book writing, have to trust that my publisher is going to print this book and bookstores are going to sell it. And that someone is going to grow food that I can buy with my royalty check. If I couldn't trust literally millions of nameless, faceless other people, I couldn't specialize.

Brazilian leafcutter ant colonies evolved trust and cooperation because they're all siblings. We had to evolve it the hard way.

We all employ both cooperating and defecting ...