# Cooperation May Grow With Better Discrimination by Robert Trivers > “Are there long-term trends we could feel optimistic about? Thirty years of work on the evolutionary trajectory of cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination.” > **— Robert Trivers**, *2007 Edge Annual Question, response passage* ## Sources and Context - **Direct publication and locator:** [Evolutionary Biologist, Rutgers University; Coauthor, Genes In Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements — Robert Trivers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11982) — 2007 Annual Question response, contiguous sentence(s) within the representative extract. - **Exact original excerpt:** “Are there long-term trends we could feel optimistic about? Thirty years of work on the evolutionary trajectory of cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination. It seems likely that when similar models are produced for varying degrees of deceit and self-deception, long-term trends toward honesty to others and self will (at least under some conditions) be favored.” - **Context and editing:** Trivers frames this as a question and a trend suggested by models, under a broad range of conditions and contingent on more sophisticated discrimination. The poster retains all of those limits. No editorial words were inserted. - **Local Edge archive:** [[research/Edge 2007 Full Quotation Curation|Edge 2007 Full Quotation Curation]], response EDGE2007-005. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] - **Article:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Cooperation|Cooperation]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Cooperation|Cooperation]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Are there long-term trends we could feel optimistic about? Thirty years of work on the evolutionary trajectory of cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination.” — Robert Trivers, 2007 Edge Annual Question, response passage https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-robert-trivers-cooperation-may-grow-better-discrimination ```