Major Cooperative Transitions and Management Theory in the Game of Life

Biological and cultural evolution show a trend towards increasing hierarchical organization, in which entities at one level combine cooperatively to form a new entity at a higher level of organization. In each case where such a cooperative transition has been studied, we have some understanding of how the transition came about, but it is difficult to formulate a unified theory that covers all of these transitions. John Stewart has proposed a theoretical framework called Management Theory, which attempts to explain all of the major cooperative transitions in biological and cultural evolution. The idea is that successful transitions require the integration of managers and workers into a cooperative organization. This theory seems appropriate when we consider the cultural evolution of corporations, where managers and workers are clearly essential, but it seems less plausible when we consider the biological evolution of entities that do not invite anthropomorphic projection. However, in the following article, we define managers and workers in an abstract way that enables us to apply these terms over a broad range of cases, including cultural evolution, biological evolution, and computational simulations of evolution. The core idea is that a manager is an entity that takes a leading role in the production of something and a worker is an entity that plays a supporting role in the production of something. We apply this abstract view of managers and workers to a computational simulation of evolving cooperative transitions in John Conway's Game of Life. The simulation confirms the expectations of Management Theory: (1) A combination of managers and workers performs better than managers alone or workers alone. (2) When there are relatively few workers, one manager is better than two or more managers.