Science magazine thinks they can defend one of Evolution's bigger holes--altruism.

Science goes on to agree that with this one additional rule, Darwin can now survive his critics:

In recent papers, Dr. Nowak has argued that cooperation is one of the three basic principles of evolution. The other two are mutation and selection. On their own, mutation and selection can transform a species, giving rise to new traits like limbs and eyes. But cooperation is essential for life to evolve to a new level of organization. Single-celled protozoa had to cooperate to give rise to the first multicellular animals. Humans had to cooperate for complex societies to emerge.

“We see this principle everywhere in evolution where interesting things are happening,” Dr. Nowak said.

But Science appears mystified that Nowak doesn't see Evolution as a Religion-killer.

What shocks the editors at Science about this professor at Harvard is a yawner. The good professor grew up in Vienna, where they still teach philosophy to undergraduates. He knows that inductive science is incomplete, unable to explain the absolutes that it strains to discover, unable to explain itself even. So he makes some allusion to Mathematics being true without science proving it. This is no more than the Kantian divide between Science and Religion, except that he puts Math on the Religion side of the divide, as most mathematicians would themselves, just not Science editors.

So what about this great discovery of cooperation being a third force of Darwinism? It is nothing else but a reworking of Dembski. You might say it is ID in disguise. ID has always said that there are three explanations for everything: law, chance and design. Nowak says Natural Selection (Law), Mutation (Chance) and Cooperation. On the surface, cooperation looks like something other than design, and one could imagine, (not unlike the way Darwin could imagine anything), that it is a random sort of event, or if pushed really hard by the Santa Fe Institute, an emergent sort of event.

But it is nothing of the sort. Nowak argues it comes out of the Prisoner's Dilemma. But his "game" is all about an intelligent agent, say, the police, forcing two individuals to cooperate lest they fall afoul some more global punishment. Dembski calls this "smuggling in design", because the Prisoner's Dilemma cannot be a random act, cannot be a law of nature, but must be the decision of an intelligent agent. So all this "game theory" that Nowak specializes in, shows how individuals who are forced to follow some intelligent agent's rules, develop strategies that appear non-Darwinian, in order to be Darwinian (survive).

This is a complete no-brainer. Chihuahuas don't do well in the wild, and Darwin would predict they'd be extinct in, oh, the 6 months it takes to die in a cold winter. Nevertheless, Chihuahuas thrive today because people use their intelligence to set up rules promoting Chihuahuas as a certified dog breed. Non-Darwinian traits survive Darwinian elimination because of (surprise) intelligent agent designs.

Science, however, thinks Cooperation is some sort of unintelligent "emergent" property that requires no intelligence and is a product of law and chance. Let us suspend our disbelief and do our best to be submissive Darwinists and gasp appreciatively (Oooh! Ahhh!) The problem all Darwinists have with alturism, is that they assume organisms are extremely selfish, act individually for their own survival and the propagation of their own genes. Altruism just is sooo un-Darwinian. So the first attempt by Dawkins and others to pacify critics, was to suggest that uncles and 2nd cousins act altruistically because an eensy-weensy part of their genes is still getting propagated. Okay, I'll close my eyes and click my heels and think nice thoughts about this theory, but it still doesn't explain why, say, a mother wolf would nurse twin boys, or a pet dog would nurse a stray cat, etc etc. (Proof? Just watch 101 Dalmations. Better proof than most Science articles actually.)

So Science has been embarrassed, and Nowak gives them another alternative. Cooperation can arise between unrelated species or people or whatever, as a superior survival strategy. But does it? What cooperation is undermining is not the law/chance metaphor, but the individual survival metaphor. Dembski has already trashed the truncated metaphysics of scientific materialism, pointing out that design has a long history in science, but now Nowak is trashing the idea of the individual. Recall that nearly all of physics proceeds by reductionism, reducing everything down to the smallest unit. Denying Darwin his individualism denies him the plausibility of reductionist physics and even more importantly, reductionist materialist metaphysics.

Let's take the humble nematode. To understand embryonic differentiation, biologists spent 3 days continuously watching hundreds of nematodes grow from egg to adult, labelling every cell and documenting every cell division. (Sounds like grad-student hell, but videocameras took much of the pain out of it.) It turns that of the 1000 or so cells in an adult nematode, 131 die along the way, pre-programmed to die. Now, if each cell were an individual, you might ask, "why would a cell want to die and not propagate its genes?". And the answer, of course, is that it is necessary for the health of the nematode. Cooperation is a requirement of multi-cellular life. So if two prisoners cooperate in The Prisoner's Dilemma, one just answers it is a requirement of multi-individual societies. There is nothing innately un-Darwinian about this cooperation, as soon as one recognizes that there exist organization at a higher level. But if such organization exists between single-cells and multi-celled organisms, it might also exist between single individuals and multi-individual societies, and it might exist between multi-individual societies and ... Where does this chain end? With the organization of the Universe, with God.

Now you see why Darwin did not allow such higher organizations to exist. Because cooperation is evidence of an external intelligence, of a greater mind, of a world-spirit; cooperation is evidence of God.