i maintain that cooperation is just objectively the best strategy on large scales, to the point that life on earth is fundamentally cooperative.

Like, imagine if species couldn’t eat each other, if mushrooms didn’t exist to break things down into digestible nutrients, we would have a fraction of the biomass and diversity we do now and life would be extremely vulnerable.

Cooperation inherently leads to more efficient resource utilization as species can specialize and resources are continuously recycled.