For instance, if two or more extremophiles evolved together but remained separate species. They might even require one another’s contribution to successfully procreate. And successful procreation might be rare.
That sort of life, if it evolved to consciousness, would be averse to any form of damaging competition.
One poorly timed selfish move and the hostile environment wins: everybody dies.
This cooperation imperative would be built into their biochemistry, same as war is built into ours.
You’d probably still find insane or outlier members of their society, who are radically uncooperative or individualistic. But they would be rare and containable, otherwise their species couldn’t exist.
> That sort of life, if it evolved to consciousness, would be averse to any form of damaging competition.
Uh. That sounds like us. Our dependence on our mitochondria and chloroplasts to survive as microbial life, it turns out, did not translate into an aversion to war after we grew up as macroscopic life and everybody around us had their own endosymbionts too.
Honestly I think you're going in the wrong direction with this. A crueler world results in crueler people; scarcity begets conflict. Maybe you could technically create peace by simpy isolating everybody in some kind of desert-like environment, but if you want a Nash equilibrium and selection pressures favouring active prosocial cooperation, then I think what our own history of war, domestication, self-domestication, democratization, etc. shows is that you effectively need (amongst other things) an almost post-scarcity environment, where basic physical resources are no longer a constantly urgent limiting factor on life— A techno-utopia with nuclear weapons and additive manufacturing has both much more to gain from cooperation and much more to lose from war than their less fortunate equivalent struggling just to survive.
But then that goes back to my original reply to you: Anybody who evolves through that initial awkward phase of competition in fear of entropy is probably going to have violence as a part of that history, and part of themselves.
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Note that effectively post-scarcity environments do actually appear in nature now and then, and when they do appear, they do sometimes result in apparently utopic, peaceful, and more empathetic societies. E.g. for a particularly stark example, see bonobos versus chimps.
But as with many good things, it seems to usually be highly spacially/socially local, and temporally transient.
Other environments may differ.
But that's not really "mutually assured destruction on a species level", so much as more to gain by working together– Which honestly is better.
