Cooperation, a efficient strategy in the evolutionary origin of our species

Abstract

This article offers the hypothesis that cooperation in the form of generalized reciprocal altruism played an essential role in the bio-social origin of our species. As in other species whose individuals became associated in a permanent way under adverse conditions and as a consequence increased their biological efficacy, in the origin of our mammal, primate and gregarious species, individuals with parental inversion behavior patterns, kinship relation and reciprocal altruism co-selected themselves and increased their biological efficacy at the individual as well at the group level. I also propose that from reiterative cooperative interactions between all the interdependent individuals, a pattern of egalitarian social organization with symmetric structures appeared which resulted efficient as they conjugated individual interests with those of the group and it maintained a dynamic balance with regulation and control mechanisms of those behaviors that could have turned social order unstable.