Carl Zimmer's Sociobiological Hagiography

I've noted this kind of thing once before with respect to Carl Zimmer's hagiographic accounts of Harvard "Scientists at Work", but it'd be really nice if the New York Times' science writers knew, researched or presented readers with a little bit more about their topic.  While the omission of the contested nature of sociobiology in an account of David Haig's work on the "combat" between fetuses and mothers is more problematic (to me) than the idea expressed in Zimmer's recent article on Martin Nowack which contains the quote below, the quote below (which makes the rest of the article possible) is still scientifically problematic and misleading.

When biologists speak of cooperation, they speak more broadly than the rest of us. Cooperation is what happens when someone or something gets a benefit because someone or something else pays a cost. The benefit can take many forms, like money (when did biologists start talking about money? - APR) or reproductive success. A friend takes off work to pick you up from the hospital. A sterile worker bee tends to eggs in a hive. Even the cells in the human body cooperate. (How could we live if they didn't?!  How is this surprising?! - APR) Rather than reproducing as fast as it can, each cell respects the needs of the body, helping to form the heart, the lungs or other vital organs. Even the genes in a genome cooperate, to bring an organism to life. (These last two sentences are farcical in that life itself would be impossible if genes, cells, organs, etc. didn't cooperate... my question is which of them is "paying the price" for this "cooperation"? - APR) ,

The key is that there is not technical definition of cooperation in biology and if there were it wouldn't be "getting something because someone else pays the price"... perhaps most particularly because so many of the examples (which lean towards commensualism and symbiosis) in the article do not fit this model.  Under these conditions however, the regularly implicit anthropomorphic assertion of intentionality to cells, bacteria, etc… verges on scientific irresponsibility (though it speaks to what may be Zimmer's ongoing and uncritical take on sociobiology and its scientific kin).

The variants of "cooperation" in biology – mutualism, symbiosis and commensualism (differentiated from competition and predation) – are widely variant, just as are the number of associations and trophic levels involved.  Doug Boucher, Sam James and Kathleen Keeler (1982, "The Ecology of Mutualism.," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, pp. 315-347) write that they 

"use the term mutualism, defined as 'an interaction between species that is beneficial to both'…. Symbiosis is 'the living together of two organisms in close association,' and modifiers are used to specify dependence on the interaction (facultative or obligate) and the range of species that can take part ( oligophilic or polyphilic)…. Thus mutualism can be defined, in brief, as a +/+ interaction, while competition, predation, and commensualism are respectively –/–, –/+, and +/0." (315)

And also, that:

"Although exceptions abound, symbiotic mutualism tend to be coevolved and obligate, while facultative mutualisms are frequently nonsymbiotic and not coevolved…. On the one hand, an enormous number of ecologically and economically important interactions, found throughout the biosphere, would seem to be mutualistic [broadly defined – APR].  On the other hand, few studies have actually demonstrated increases in either fitness or population growth rate by both of the species in the interaction." (316)

Certainly there has been a great deal of work done on these kinds of relationships since 1982, though the flawed definition of cooperation, much less its uncertain connection to mutation and selection leaves the article in the land of public disinformation rather than civic utility.  As before, seeking to ground theories of the evolution of cooperation on strategic models of competition, uncertainty and "naturally" scarce resources (a la the Prisoner's Dilemma and its derivative mathematical games) is a long-contested and oft-critiqued approach to theorizing society and nature and I believe the TImes' readers are done a disservice by reporting this stuff so uncritically.

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