Properties of the epistemic-evolutionary cost function

For a long time it was believed that the evolution of cooperation was conditioned by a dilemma. However, the evolutionary selection processes of life forms, by sequence of survival and reproduction rates, are like the selection processes of hypotheses in probability theory, by sequences of predictions, multiplicative in nature. Because in them the impacts of losses are stronger than those of gains (a zero in the sequence produces an irreversible extinction), the variants that flourish are hypotheses or life forms that reduce fluctuations by individual diversification (epistemic property), by cooperation (evolutionary property), by cooperative specialization (speciation property), and by cooperative heterogeneity (ecological property). There is no such dilemma because in multiplicative selection processes, defecting individuals increase the fluctuations of the cooperators on whom they depend, increasing therefore their own fluctuations and negatively affecting their own long-term growth rate (mayor property). While certain circumstances may favor defection in the short term (minor property), the emergence of higher level cooperative units is a permanent phenomenon in the history of life (major evolutionary transitions). The evidence is our own life, which depends on at least four of these levels for survival: the cell with mitochondria, the multicellular organism, the social system and the ecological community. Moreover, in probability something similar occurs: sets of individual hypotheses form variables, relationships between variables form causal models, and several models form theories. In the history of human beings, the cultural transition had obvious positive effects: before epistemic cooperation (transmission of knowledge) we were in serious danger of extinction; then we were able to occupy all the ecological niches of the earth as no other terrestrial vertebrate. In recent history, certain junctures produced the emergence of colonialism, an era of genocide and massive loss of cultural diversity. Despite all the advances, metropolitan science has not been able to compensate for the loss of millenary knowledge, and the current ecological crisis continues to deepen. In the long term, only variants capable of reducing fluctuations through individual diversification and through cooperative ¨heterogeneous specialization survive.