- The problem with cooperation is that although a group of cooperative individuals is fitter than an equivalent group of selfish individuals, selfish individuals interspersed amongst a community of cooperators are fitter than their hosts. This means they raise, on average, more offspring than their hosts, and will therefore ultimately replace them.
If, however, the selfish individuals are ostracized, and rejected as mates, because of their deviant and unusual behavior, then their evolutionary advantage becomes an evolutionary liability. Cooperation in all of its very many forms then becomes evolutionarily stable. Sociability, social conventions, ritualistic behavior, expressions of the emotions, and other forms of communication between individuals, all essential ingredients for full cooperativity, can all be similarly evolutionarily stabilized by koinophilia.
Thus, whether it is a matter of joining the hunting pack, respecting the rules governing contests over territories, or gannets adhering to a convention which permits breeding on only one of two adjacent cliffs, koinophilia vigorously defends all of these practices against extinction at the hands of selfish, antisocial or nonconformist mutants*.
* or, as they are known in human society: Economists.