Has anybody noticed the proliferation of articles in the science magazines about the “Survival of the—Nicest?” I see one with that title by Eric Michael Johnson from Yes magazine and another one called “Cooperation Instinct” in Discover by Kristin Ohlson, a third by John Horgan, also in Discover, entitled “No, War Is Not Inevitable,” and yet another one in Scientific American titled, “Why We Help: the Evolution of Cooperation.” The Internet promises many more articles and books on the subject. So why all the sudden attention to cooperation and why do we have to study this?

I suppose for clues, we can turn to our two recent, ongoing, wars. Horgan believes that people who believe in “survival of the fittest,” meaning the toughest, meanest, most competitive, think that is “a permanent manifestation of human nature.” According to that reasoning, he writes, “we have no choice but to maintain powerful militaries to protect ourselves from our enemies.”

Johnson cites an “ideological legacy that says the corporate economy . . . produces best for humanity.” This ideology justifies “an economy of vicious competition and inequality,” writes Johnson. But he writes, Charles Darwin, in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, argued that the human species had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion. Maybe that’s because humans evolved on the savannahs with much larger animals that wanted to eat them. To save themselves, they had to band together for protection.

American psychologist, Michael Tomasello, supports Darwin’s conclusion in a synthesis of thirty years’ research. Fossil bones from two million years ago, during the time of Homo habilis show stone-tool cut marks overlaid on top of carnivore teeth marks. “. . .individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others,” he writes. That could be fatal on the plains where it takes a group to protect against large predators who want that carcass.

Martin Nowak argues that “cooperation was not merely the product of evolution, but an engine, driving the process along with mutation and natural selection itself. . . . Whenever you see something interesting, like the evolution of multi-cellular creatures or human language, cooperation is involved.”

So is it possible to build a kinder, gentler society where people regularly perform random acts of kindness and senseless beauty? I found a pattern interviewing Grandma Hazel. Not only did she talk about the way family members filled in when someone was sick or disabled, but she also talked about neighbors helping each other—especially, but not only, with the crops. She described the day she and Grandpa George had breakfast and left the house with machetes in hand, planning to cut weeds. They found their neighbor Frank Arterburn already in the field hard at work.

There were other times when Frank just showed up to provide random help. When she described those times, it seemed to me that Frank may have just wanted the company. He had a family, but sometimes you need to talk to somebody else. You can call that what you want—cooperation, neighborliness, maybe even foolhardiness—but it made people feel good. I don’t know about you, but I need to do a better job of walking across the street and saying hello to the neighbors. It could be really nice to develop some neighborhood projects couldn’t it? Maybe a block party for starters.