Life is about competition. Staying alive is about cooperation.
Evolution and natural selection are pretty vicious things. Life is about doing the best with scarce resources, and if you are less efficient than something else, you stand the risk of losing those resources, and thus your life. This may not be at the level of AnIndividual; it may at the level of TheCollective, like a species. But either way, there is always the pressure to keep moving forward, progressing, doing things better, and learning what your competitors are doing so you can steal their best practices from them.
However, competition isn't only at the level of AnIndividual. If every individual competes with every other individual, that is grossly inefficient. Divide and conquer, as they say. The strongest species around are ones that have found out how to collaborate. This is endemic to all life processes. The mitochondria collaborates with the eukaryote. The eukaryotes collaborate with each other to make new eukaryotes. The eukaryotes collabote with each other to make a jelly fish. The jelly fish reorders to make itself a fish. The fish work together to form a school. The schools work together to form a symbiosis to defend against sharks.
Competition is what spurs on collaboration. Yet, collaboration is the only way to stay alive when competiting against others. And that encourages others to collaborate too so that they can compete with you. The two go hand in hand, or tail in mouth.
Sentience on the other hand is transcending this. You are TheIndividual, not AnIndividual. You understand and can think and talk about what it feels to be thrown about in the mix and milieu of life from a frame of reference outside it. If you want.
However, as a sentient species, we need the security of being relieved from competition in order to have the energy and mindfulness to experience existence for what it is.
Humans and sharks, or armadillos. The latter ones didn't nearly change anymore, their evolution is "completed" (as pretty perfect, that is working well) whereas we - monkeys who left the forest and went out in the savannah - are into an exponential explosion of brain. There is no known case of such a process in evolution. It is extraordinary. When this human evolution really began to explode, 200 thousand, 100 thousand years ago - who knows - something called cannibalism happened among different subspecies of the savannah monkeys. They ate each other. This caused fear which entered the genes: young human kids are the only ones to be naturally afraid of individuals of the same species. All of our national structures, our banking systems, our wars are based on this bug in our too fast evolution. We are basically sick. We can heal ourselves, using what we gained during this buggy evolution: intelligence. Using it collectively is the clue. I recently stated in CW, and I insist on it: since Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew" there is no such thing as competition anymore. There is wiki. -- MattisManzel
Evolution is never over. If you act like it's over, you're over. -- SunirShah
Could we have a reference for "young human kids are the only ones to be naturally afraid of individuals of the same species"? Compare that statement to this one, from class notes to a Psych I course: "By 14 to 16 weeks, infants will smile when they see any face" http://environmentalet.hypermart.net/psy111/motimotion.htm. Evidence of innate fear, please? (And what does Miles Davis have do with the subject?)