permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130802-on-the-microbial-frontier-cooperation-thrives/

Population expansion may be a major driver in the evolution of cooperation,
with implications for new antibiotics, cancer treatments and perhaps even
human behavior.

"Despite their single-cell status, microbes are capable of striking feats
of cooperation: They can secrete polymers that enable them to stick
together and form biofilms in order to defend themselves against
antibiotics and other poisons. They can manufacture large volumes of
lubricants that allow a colony to swarm over soft surfaces, and they can
even produce iron-scavenging molecules that allow them to live in iron-poor
environments, such as a human host.

This diverse behavioral repertoire poses a major question in evolution:
Given the selfish nature of natural selection, how can cooperators triumph?
*“*The classic problem is that any sort of cooperative trait will impose
some kind of cost on the individual expressing the trait,” said Michael
Desai <http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/desai/desai-oeb.html>, a
physicist turned evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who studies
microbes. “The mystery is how can this evolve?”"

<https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130802-on-the-microbial-frontier-cooperation-thrives/attachment/yeastwikipedia_web/>