Darwin's theory of evolution is infamous but it has one major chink. If life is all about survival of the fittest, then why do people risk their lives to save strangers? And what about charity and fairness? Why do we cooperate?

Evolutionary scientists have struggled with this problem since the days of Darwin. Now Harvard's celebrated evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak has built on previous efforts, and his own research over two decades, to come up with five laws of cooperation, revealing how this very human characteristic is as fundamental as gravity. With the editor of New Scientist, Roger Highfield, he explains in this groundbreaking book that cooperation is central to the four-billion-year-old puzzle of life – how molecules in the primordial soup first crossed the watershed that separates dead chemistry from biochemistry. In Super Cooperators Nowak and Highfield deftly unpack the basic laws of cooperation to explain the most fundamental mechanics of everyday life.