od has raised the entire trajectory of evolution into existence,” says Martin Nowak, “and this is one of the images that came out of our work.” He is referring to the program “Evolution and Theology of Cooperation” which, with the help of a $2 million Templeton grant, he has been conducting since 2005, investigating the phenomenon of cooperation within the evolutionary process—more commonly regarded as competitive—and its implications for theology.
Nowak, professor of biology and mathematics at Harvard University, has been collaborating on the project with Sarah Coakley, the Edward Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, who has now accepted an appointment at University of Cambridge in her native England. Nowak attributes much of the success of the project to his colleague: “She has managed to bring so many people to the table over these past years, people from many different disciplines.”
The program has been strongly interdisciplinary, involving a cross-section of theologians, philosophers, and scientists. The mathematics of evolutionary game theory has been used to study the competition and cooperation of individuals adopting various strategies and phenotypes. One such study gained widespread publicity in early 2008. This was an experimental paper called “Winners don’t punish” which demonstrated that individuals who engage in costly punishment do not benefit from their behavior.
That paper was published in Nature, as were several other essays produced by the program group, including some that made the cover of that publication. A volume is also in train. “At the moment we are writing a book,” reports Nowak, “which has contributions from all those people who were involved in the program and it will be ready in the second half of 2008.”
The numbers involved in the program increased to an unforeseen extent as it progressed. Up to nine post-doctoral scholars and other participants became involved, including some not funded by the Foundation. “Somehow they were drawn in and they found it so exciting that they wanted to contribute,” says Nowak. One designed a game theoretical experiment that Sarah Coakley employed among the parishioners in her local church, testing specifically religious motivations.
The project’s Visiting Scholars program was also a success. “We have had a number of Visiting Scholars and some stayed for a year, for example Philip Clayton (an expert on science and religion) and Timothy Jackson (an ethicist), and others stayed for a shorter time.” Nowak believes they injected fresh ideas into the discussions and there were always visiting professors present throughout the project. There were also regular monthly seminars, involving people like John Hedley Brooke, from University of Oxford, as well as a conference at which the contributors included Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor of Theology at Claremont School of Theology, Jean Porter, John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Ned Hall of the Harvard Philosophy Department, and a group of younger philosophers of religion: Alex Pruss, Dean Zimmerman, and Michael Rota.
As regards the central focus of the study, the relationship between God and the evolutionary process, Nowak and Coakley’s ideas converged over the three years on a position much influenced by the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but subtly modified to embrace the insights of contemporary evolutionary theory.
“It is very important to realize that God is not only creator,” insists Nowak, “but both creator and sustainer. God is not somebody who sets the process going initially and then just watches everything unfolding, but instead God is necessary to will every single moment into existence.” He relates the teachings of the early Doctors of the Church to modern evolutionary insights: “If you take the notion of Saint Augustine that God is atemporal, it means that God—beyond time—can anticipate the outcome of this evolutionary process.”
Although game theory has played a leading role in the program’s research, Nowak has recently discovered a critical deficiency in this methodology. It arises in investigating what he regards as the biggest question in this field: the motivation behind altruism. “True altruism is defined in the most meaningful way by motive.” But he now realizes that motivation is something that has not yet played a role in the game theoretical analysis employed by his team, in which action is decisive and motive is left unexplored.
“The question why do you want to help somebody makes a big difference when you come to think about the philosophical implications of altruism and what true altruism, in the theological sense, actually is.” Nowak describes the phenomenon of helping somebody out of love for the individual and of God as “the only possible true altruism.” His dilemma, in terms of research, is that there is currently no game theoretical means of investigating this question of motive, but he is now working towards developing such a system. The collaboration with other members of the ETC team has been crucial in this development.
This program has a contrarian approach, insofar as it highlights cooperation as a significant element in the evolutionary process which has so often been identified with competition. There is a similar vein of unconventionality in its openness to the reconciliation of evolutionary concepts with traditional Thomistic theology, as well as its employment of game theory in its research and Nowak’s determination to harness that methodology to his investigations into altruism.