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Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of the 20th century – forced us to confront the cold, calculated nature of having evolved biologically.

More recently, however, anthropologists and psychologists have pushed back against this pessimistic view. Dozens of books over the past decade have focused on human cooperation, promoting it as the secret ingredient to our conquest of the planet. We work together, using our intelligence, language and a diverse skillset to build on complex cultures, develop technologies, and solve problems in our societies and environments. We learn at a young age what the rules of our groups are, and those rules, imprinted on us culturally, govern the safe, cohesive units that allowed us to conquer inhospitable parts of the world and out-compete unfriendly groups of people who don’t work well together.

This narrative saves us the embarrassment of accepting that biological selfishness – acting only to maximise our Darwinian success – is the foundation of all behaviour. It also matches some claims by anthropologists that ancient humans were egalitarian, living in small groups with little permanent rank, where leaders (if any) had limited authority and people collectively pushed back against anyone trying to dominate.

Yet, as with sociobiology, it is only half true. Instead, our collective predilection for exploitation, deceit and competition is equally important to cooperation in the story of human evolution. We evolved not to cooperate or compete, but with the capacity for both – and with the intelligence to hide competition when it suits us, or to cheat when we’re likely to get away with it. Cooperation is consequently something we need to promote, not presume.

The modern dispute about whether humans are fundamentally cooperative or competitive dates back to the publication of Mutual Aid (1902) by Pyotr Kropotkin, an anarchist who took his views about human nature from observing animals helping each other in the unhospitable wilds of Siberia. Kropotkin believed that it’s only through interdependence that any species can survive in the struggles against predation, violence and the environment, which characterise the omnipresent dangers individuals face. Like so many other species, fish, flesh and fowl, we work together to survive and reproduce.

On the surface, Kropotkin’s views are at odds with Darwin’s, who championed the individual struggle for survival and mating as the fundamental driver of evolution by natural selection. The twin pillars of competing for survival and competing for mates – natural and sexual selection, respectively – were, for Darwin, the foundations of biological life. For Kropotkin and his colleagues, by contrast, the emphasis was on how individuals acted for the good of the species: mutual aid meant a better, safer life for everyone.

Today, the debate is substantially the same, though the language and tools we use to make our points are different. Experiments conducted by anthropologists and psychologists across the world evaluate how cooperatively people behave in a multitude of conditions, with obvious ideological battle lines between those who espouse a self-interested versus a beneficent model of human nature.

For example, in one famous study from 2001, anthropologists worked with 15 different small-scale societies to see how they behaved in an economic experiment called the ultimatum game. In this game, the researcher gives one player a set amount of money – in this case, the local value of one or two days’ worth of wages. That player then chooses an amount of the money to offer to the second player, who may either accept or decline. In the case of acceptance, the players receive the amounts of money agreed upon; in the case of rejection, both receive nothing.

We are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus

In a calculated world governed only by self-interest, we’d expect the first player to offer the smallest possible amount, and for the second player to accept any offer. Something is better than nothing, no matter whether that something is unfair on either side.

Of course, the participants in the small-scale societies didn’t play the game in this way. The offers were almost never lower than 25 per cent of the overall pot, and in some groups, like with the Aché people of Paraguay and the Lamelara people of Indonesia, the offers were often greater than half the total amount.

Some scientists, notably the economist Ernst Fehr, used this outcome to defend the idea that humans are ‘inequity averse’ – that is, we are a species that almost universally dislikes unfairness. (‘Prosociality’ is also a term you see in the literature a lot.) As a consequence of this alleged collective aversion, we are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus.

These ideas have broadened out into a modern theory of super-cooperation, with a caveat: instead of the ‘good of the species’ view advocated for by Kropotkin, researchers focus on how people behave within groups. We learn to cooperate within groups because we are interdependent on one another for survival: reciprocal relationships are essential when anyone meets with failure in hunting, gathering or agriculture. Need-based transfers – where people ask from others only when they need help, for example when........

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