Orienting brain/other development around a competitive process is often paired with a model of life as a kind of random accident of thoughtless self-replicating genes. The usual high-school biology stuff where Random Mutations produce change which is then carried on. The Peaty view is more about life an an intrinsic and intentional thing. Energy and Structure and all that, it is not an accident of genetics. In some sense intelligence is the exactly harmonizing (not competition) with the state of things before us, the building of an objectively correct and useful reality-model.
Read "Mind and Tissue" by Ray Peat for more details. Great book.
Murray Bookchin and Pyotr Kropotkin talk about the role of cooperation in nature itself, somewhat contrary to the "rules of nature" kind of stuff.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-sociobiology-or-social-ecology
Not an anarchist. But found this stimulating when I read it a year ago.
The conflict in nature between different kinds of organism has been popularly expressed in phrases like “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest.” Yet few people realize that mutual cooperation between different kinds of organisms—symbiosis—is just as important, and that the “fittest” may be the one that most helps another to survive.
I find this mentality in a lot of the more successful and intelligent people I know. Being as helpful as possible to as many as possible can be a form of competition: you have more favors to call upon and so on. (and go on for creating useful things that are valued by others in the economy or whatnot)
And, on mitochondria:
Much the same is true of the eukaryotic cell’s “powerhouse,” its mitochondria. The eukaryotic cells are the morphological units of all complex forms of animal and plant life. The Protista and fungi also share these well-nucleated cell structures. Eucaryotes are aerobic and include clearly formed subunits, or organelles. By contrast, the prokaryotes lack nuclei; they are anaerobic, less specialized than the eucaryotics, and they constitute the evolutionary predecessors of the eucaryotics. In fact, they are the only life forms that could have survived and flourished in the early earth’s atmosphere, with its mere traces of free oxygen.
It is now widely accepted that the eukaryotic cells consist of highly functional symbiotic arrangements of procaryotes that have become totally interdependent with other constituents. Eucaryotic flagella derive from anaerobic spirochetes; mitochondria, from prokaryotic bacteria that were capable of respiration as well as fermentation; and plant chloroplasts from “blue-green algae,” which have recently been reclassified as cyanobacteria. The theory, now almost a biological convention, holds that phagocytic ancestors of what were to become eucaryotes absorbed (without digesting) certain spirochetes, protomitochondria, and, in the case of photosynthetic cells, coccoid cyanobacteria and chloroxybacteria. Existing phyla of multicellular aerobic life forms thus had their origins in a symbiotic process that integrated a variety of microorganisms into what we can reasonably be called a colonial organism, the eukaryotic cell. Mutualism, not predation, seems to have been the guiding principle for the evolution of the highly complex aerobic life forms that are common today.
So it is the cooperation/economy of the division of labor that makes development and differentiation possible, expanding the possibilities and energy open to one person.
