Cooperation goes to the very core of life.
According to University of Arisona ecologist Judith Bronstein, “every organism on earth is probably involved in at least one and usually several mutualism during its lifetime.”
Simply put, a mutualism is an interaction that is mutually beneficial.
If you want to see an example of one at work, just look in a mirror.
You may be surprised to know that you are a collection of cooperating organisms.
This may sound odd, but mutualisms are synergistic — they involve different organisms integrating or working together to become something better than the sum of their parts.
In 1966, Lynn Margulis, a young biology faculty member at Boston University, submitted to a scientific journal a paper proposing that the cells that make up multicellular organisms are collections of cooperating organisms.
Dubbed the endosymbiotic theory, the idea was not entirely new, having been articulated by Russian biologist Konstantin Mereschkowsky some sixty years earlier.
But with the benefit of more advanced technology, Margulis was able to develop and defend the idea more rigorously.
Nevertheless, it was a radical theory with deep implications for the origins of complex life forms.
The paper, titled “The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells,” was rejected.
Margulis submitted it to another journal.
It was rejected again.
And again.
In all, Margulis recalls the paper being rejected by about fifteen journals before the Journal of Theoretical Biology finally published it.
Today, the endosymbiotic theory is widely accepted, and Margulis has achieved scientific stardom as much for her tenacity in forwarding the idea as for its veracity.
Had she been a shrinking violet, we might still be wondering why mitochondria — cellular organelles that are largely responsible for a cell’s energy supply — have their own DNA.
At some relatively early point in the evolution of life, one unicellular organism engulfed another, both survived, and over the course of another few million years they evolved a mutually beneficial relationship.
Thus was born the eukaryotic cell, of which all plants and animals are made.
Multicellular organisms are hives of cooperation.
In the words of Margulis and her son and coauthor Dorion Sagan: “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”