https://phys.org/news/2013-05-evolution-lying.html?utm_source=feedly
...Cooperation evolves
Many species – most notably our own – have evolved quite extraordinary capacities to cooperate. We might take cooperation as an obvious facet of life, but long-term cooperative gain requires a willingness to put aside narrow self-interest in the short term. And that doesn't evolve easily.
Cooperation makes it possible for some individuals to cheat, prospering off the cooperative efforts of others. Cooperate too readily and you might get taken for a ride. Cooperate only grudgingly and you don't reap the benefits of working together....
Peer into the natural world, and the range of possible behavioural patterns that have evolved to fetter cheating and allow cooperation to flourish becomes even more complex.
In some species individuals reciprocate directly. Well-fed vampire bats regurgitate blood meals for starving bats that have helped them avoid starvation (also by regurgitating) in the past. Others reciprocate less directly....
comment: But one wonders if the next step, using representations of representations (symbols) as unfounded socially manipulatory devices (lie big, lie often) for personal, individual position and gain (restricting access to concentrated resources via dominance based on hierarchy rather than vice versa) didn't come later, or at least didn't diffuse until later. Cooperation... may have more to do with the odd stickiness of information once expressed. It remains, even a part of, plural, living systems. More than cooperating with others, cooperation (and altruism) might reflect that expressed stickiness, a reflection of itself to belong and remain.
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