Everyone is familiar with Darwin's ideas about the survival of the fittest but Darwin's theory has one major chink: if only the fittest survive, then why would we risk our own life to save a stranger?

Some people argue that issues such as charity, fairness, forgiveness and cooperation are evolutionary loose ends. But as Harvard's celebrated evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak explains in this groundbreaking and controversial book, cooperation is central to the four-billion-year-old puzzle of life.

Cooperation is fundamental to how molecules in the primordial soup crossed the watershed that separates dead chemistry from biochemistry.

With wit and clarity, Martin Nowak and the bestselling science writer Roger Highfield make the case that cooperation, not competition, is the defining human trait. SuperCooperators will explain our understanding of evolution and human behaviour, and provoke debate for years to come.

'Groundbreaking...SuperCooperators is part autobiography, part textbook, and reads like a best-selling novel.' Nature