2004-11-27
Darwinian group selectionism as a social meme
Another sign that Darwinian group selectionism is gathering steam as a major social meme. This is the same idea developed in Howard Bloom's _Global Brain_ and Robert Wright's _Nonzero_. Be prepared for a new wave of corporate sloganeering as this idea sinks in with global business elites.
It was the kind of situation in which a dog might have understandably
wanted to eat another dog. The month was January, the year was 1999,
and the crown princes and princesses of the largest companies in the
world had gathered for a little skiing, a little socializing, a little
polite conversation, and a little dabbling in the latest, most
provocative ideas -- something they do every year at the World
Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.
But this year, it was snowing like mad -- too much for skiing, too
depressing for socializing, and almost too cold for politeness. Hell
in this Swiss mountain town was beginning to take on a whiter shade of
pale. The meeting rooms started getting colder. Then the portions at
dinner started getting smaller. All of a sudden, the lights went out
all over town -- and you could almost feel the question being asked by
the rich, the privileged, the powerful: What happens now? Any
hypercompetitive, only-the-strong-survive, entrepreneurially minded
capitalist could be excused for hoarding food, defending prime
territory, and knocking off competitors. Or would he?
In this setting of surplus-turned-to-scarcity, Helena Cronin, 57,
philosopher, social scientist, and codirector of the Centre for
Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of
Economics, delivered her scheduled lecture on the survival of the
fittest: "Look carefully at nature, and you will find that it doesn't
always seem short, brutish, and savage," she told the cold, hungry
moguls. "Animals are strikingly unselfish, giving warnings of
predators, sharing food, grooming one another, adopting orphans,
fighting without killing -- or injuring -- their adversaries. In some
ways, they behave more like moral paragons of Aesop than the
hard-bitten, self-seeking individualists that natural selection seems
to favor."
The environment was decidedly cold, but Cronin warmed to her theme.
"It turns out," she told the assembled kill-or-be-killed crowd, "that
you can actually prosper more by entering into relationships of
reciprocation, so that you're both getting more than either of you
would have gotten separately."
The lecture was not what anyone expected. But in those dark moments of
the soul, Cronin offered a way of coping with shared adversity, a new
school of competitive thinking based on the notion of an unselfish
gene. Her ideas are a more challenging line of thought and a more
accurate reflection of how the world works than the view popularized
by Intel's Andy Grove that "only the paranoid survive."
Cronin's version of Darwinism shows that altruism and generosity
create more rewards than their opposites do. She introduced the CEOs
to the flip side of paranoia: "pronoia" -- the idea that everyone is
not out to get you, but that they are out to love you, or at least to
appreciate you, if you reciprocate. According to the new Darwinism,
only the pronoid survive -- in fact, only the pronoid endure and
flourish.
The really bizarre thing is that this belief comes from a bona fide
Darwinist -- and wasn't Darwin the top dog in the high court of Canine
v. Canine? Wasn't he the pseudoeconomist of choice in the
greed-is-good 1980s, offering justification for the decade of
financial reengineering? Wasn't Darwin the pseudosociologist of choice
in the Reagan years, providing a fig leaf of intellectual cover for
social policies that asserted that poverty was a sign of an
individual's unwillingness to evolve to some higher economic ground?
But that was then, and this is now. As we enter a new millennium, a
new generation of Darwinists, with Helena Cronin at the lead, is
turning those 1980s beliefs upside down. Today, Cronin is saying,
"Yes, but ..." What if being the fittest means having the most
generosity of spirit? What if enhancing your chance of survival comes
from improving your capacity to be altruistic?
Cronin has spent the past 20 years carefully rereading the work of
Charles Darwin, showing that most of what we believe about his
theories is wrong. "Darwin himself said that the war of nature 'is not
incessant' and that 'the happy survive and multiply,'" Cronin says.
Read Darwin's own fieldwork: He recorded dozens of examples of animals
engaged in self-sacrifice. Why, Cronin asks, did Darwin note countless
instances of an animal giving up its time, its food, its mate -- even
its life -- to help others? Because, Cronin answers, that kind of
behavior is smart evolution: It results in greater rewards.
Dusting off the lies from Darwin's principles can be the best thing
believers in the power of ideas can do. What we presume to be the
theory of survival of the fittest is probably the oldest story we tell
ourselves about success. We grow up believing that it's a jungle out
there. We learn that to survive, we must become "natural-born
killers." So Cronin's radical rethinking of Darwinism goes against the
grain and yet proves to be essential, especially now. At a moment when
most accepted wisdom is up for grabs -- when Karl Marx is dead,
Sigmund Freud is finished, and a "new physics" is looking very old --
only Darwin promises insight into our work and our future. But we need
to know the real Darwin. And the real Darwin says that the paranoid
may survive, but only the pronoid succeed.
The Gift Economy
"Doing what's immediately good for oneself has been understood by
Darwinists for a long time," Cronin says. "But what hasn't been
understood until recently is that you can actually do better for
yourself by being cooperative and altruistic than you can by selfishly
refusing to cooperate with others. It's not that you do as well. You
actually do better -- and all of you do better than if you had gone
off on your own and refused to help others."
At the conference in Davos, Cronin illustrated her point about the
power of altruism with an example of the new Darwinism: "In Britain,
blood is given free of charge. Donors are proud to be known as good,
altruistic people. There is never a shortage, and the quality of blood
is very high because the healthiest people give blood. In America,
it's the opposite. People are frequently paid to give blood, and so
you've got two big problems: The quality of blood is bad, because drug
addicts and the poor have an incentive to donate, and there tend to be
many shortages of blood.
"Two years ago, there was talk in Britain about selling blood to make
money for the new blood-donor service. Immediately, there was an
uproar. People didn't want to give blood, even though that money was
to go back into the blood-donor service. People felt it was no longer
a gift relationship.
"The number of people giving blood dropped dramatically in the weeks
following that decision. The currency changed. Therefore, the emotions
changed. When someone gives you money, you don't feel the same
emotions that you feel when someone demonstrates a kindness. We are
too quick to interpret everything as marginal that does not fit our
economic model," says Cronin. But the elements of the story of the
British blood bank and the essential factors of altruism are starting
to show up everywhere in the new economy.
The paranoid are having a hard time with this new rule: The more you
give away, the more you have. Yet America Online is about to give away
computers. The Linux operating system is readily available and free.
Meanwhile, eFax.com offers free faxing services. Also, a recent
meeting between two potential Internet partners, Inktomi Corp. and
venture capitalist CMGI, began by each throwing down the gauntlet --
of openness: In seeking grounds for cooperation, the two sides would
compete only to see who would do a better job of telling all. "The
deal is that we agree to tell each other everything; otherwise, there
is no meeting," is how one participant described the understanding
that prefaced the session. "We acknowledge that we can't create
something new by ourselves. In the past, people would be secretive.
You'd have to get drunk to open up and tell the truth."
Generosity, not greed, is a strategic good. Don Norman, author of "The
Design of Everyday Things," left Hewlett-Packard in 1998 to work solo.
He claims that his most significant asset is the list of 10,000 names
in his PalmPilot. Similar to the way that Britons give blood for the
common good, Norman puts people in touch with other people for
everyone's mutual benefit. The more Norman gives of his time and his
contacts, the more business flows back to him. The formula is not tit
for tat. Rather, it's another rule that the paranoid can hardly
fathom: "What goes around comes around." By putting people in contact
with one another, Norman helps new businesses begin, the pie gets
bigger for everyone, and sooner or later Norman benefits. It's a new
law -- not of diminishing returns or of increasing returns, but of
exponential returns.
This is the gift economy, where money is meaningless and gifts are the
new currency. The more a business or an individual worker gives away,
the more that everyone has. This is a vision of a new economic model,
a new evolutionary order that poet Lewis Hyde has captured in his 1983
underground classic, "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of
Property," in which he points out that these two very different
marketplaces -- gift and greed -- exist side by side, and increasingly
they converge.
What is the gift economy? It's based on tribal notions that a gift is
meant as currency, not property. A gift must be circulated; it must be
passed around. The old phrase of shame -- "Indian giver" --
paradoxically exemplifies the story behind the gift economy. When
Indians gave white settlers a gift, they expected one in return.
Instead of keeping gifts in circulation, the settlers would put their
peace pipes, which they had received from the Indians as gifts, on
their mantles. The Indians believed that gifts were meant to be kept
in circulation, so when they didn't get something in return, they
asked for their gifts back. This shocked the settlers and their
traditional notions of property. The whites faulted the Indians for
their bad manners, but to the Indians, it was just good economics.
If today's businesses were more immersed in the gift economy and less
steeped in the transaction culture, would we see more goods and
services like Linux? Cronin says that the minute you introduce money,
you turn off the altruism gene. It doesn't disappear from people's
character, it disappears from the transaction. And often -- as with
the British blood bank -- it impoverishes the transaction.
Altruism fundamentally changes economic and competitive equations:
Observers say that the biggest threat to Microsoft is not the U.S.
Department of Justice but the growing freeware movement. Under the new
rules of freeware, Linux rewards its network of elite programmers not
with pay but with prestige; the richest developer is not the greediest
but the one with the best reputation. In 1976, Bill Gates accused the
freeware movement of shoddiness. He wanted to know, "Who can afford to
do professional work for nothing?" But today, although its overall
market share is small, Linux presents an interesting competitive
scenario: Say, for instance, that China adopts Linux as its
countrywide operating system. "Then," says one observer, "whoever owns
China, will own the software business. Even software pirates prefer
not to steal but to take what's free."
Such changes are fresh and are still taking shape. And they challenge
the conventional wisdom of competition. They also make most
high-testosterone businessmen very uncomfortable. Nicholas Humphrey is
a Darwinist at the London School of Economics. Wherever he looks in
the culture of business, Humphrey sees the discomfort and
disorientation that generosity can cause. "An IBM spokesman came to my
child's nursery school several years ago," Humphrey says. "He said,
'We are not giving money to this school out of altruism. Every penny
has an intent of enlightened self-interest.' Somewhere this man was
told, 'Don't admit that anything you do is motivated by anything other
than self-interest.' He felt that he had to apologize on behalf of IBM
for giving the school a gift."
Management guru Peter Drucker offered the bottom line on a company's
purpose in the old economy: to make a profit. Today, even profits have
become a less-compelling way to keep score than intangible values,
such as share of mind, strength of relationships, or loyalty of
employees. These days, having a compelling story can be just as
important as having a compelling product. The bottom line is not a
single number, but more an emotion, a mind-set, a credible promise.
The transaction economy is changing into a gift economy. And in the
process, we're learning to reinterpret Darwin's fundamental lessons.
Darwin in Love
Flash back to 1831: Charles Darwin, 22, is the troublesome son of a
father who predicts that his boy will amount to nothing more than "a
rat catcher." He leaves his father's bruising opinions and goes
looking for something to do with his life.
He travels to the Galápagos Islands -- and he can hardly believe what
he sees. It looks like paradise. The finches have no fear of humans.
They land on Darwin as if he were a tree. They catch themselves in his
hat. The man who will become one of the greatest scientists of the
millennium is so bewitched by his surroundings that he succumbs to a
form of poetry: He claims to know what the rocks and animals are
thinking. He pulls the tail of one burrowing creature. "At this, it
was greatly astonished and shuffled up to see what was the matter,"
Darwin wrote, "and then stared me in the face, as much to say, 'What
made you pull my tail?' " Enchanted by the scenes, he called the
islets "a center of creation."
Flash ahead to the last days of the 20th century and the early days of
the digital economy. The Internet is a new locus of creation: Teeming
life. Spiraling evolution. Exotic species. Enchanted islands. It's the
perfect place for the unselfish gene to undergo a massive thrust in
evolution: a step change, an evolutionary twist in which nature is
redirected and behavior changes.
For years, scientists have recorded step changes in evolution. Before
the Industrial Revolution, for example, the predominant color of moths
was a light peppered form recorded in 1848, in Manchester, England, a
center for the new manufacturing economy. As factories grew, a
population of darker moths soon increased in frequency. By 1950, a
mere 100 years later, dark moths made up more than 90% of the moth
population. In the world of science, that's a sudden and dramatic
evolutionary change. The Darwinian change agent: birds hunting by
sight. Darker moths were better disguised on tree trunks covered by
the soot of the new factories, and thus, they were not so easily eaten
by birds.
Then, something truly bizarre happened: House cats got darker, too.
Not because birds preyed on them, but because the darker color
protected them from the increased radiation that resulted from the
pollution. The Darwinian lesson has less to do with survival of the
fittest and more to do with how change happens in nature: Once
evolution enters a step change, most everything gets caught up in its
influence. Eventually, the future shows up everywhere.
To Cronin and her colleagues, a similar evolutionary shift is now
taking place with the altruism gene. Altruism, which literally means
"concern for the other," has been recessive for most of history. The
new economy makes it recessive no longer.
Natural-Born Cooperators
Altruism has been hardwired into us; it's right there in the genes.
When economies become larger, richer, and more interdependent,
conditions that favor the unselfish genes increase -- similar to the
conditions that increased the numbers of dark moths and dark cats in
smoggy England.
"We have a propensity for altruism, for wanting to give, for hating to
renege, for forgiving, for feeling indignant," says Cronin. "These are
part of our machinery for altruism. If we set up an environment to
evoke what is most altruistic from us, then it isn't at all difficult
to evoke altruism and increase it, because altruism grows on altruism,
and reneging grows on reneging. We don't have to change human nature
to change society. The environment evokes from a given human nature
more or less cooperative behavior."
We are born altruists in two areas. The first is by kin selection. "
We are finely tuned to offer altruism to others who share the same
genes," Cronin says. "A mother is self-sacrificial to her children."
The other source is reciprocal altruism -- tit for tat at its most
crude level. "If you're playing over a long period, it's worthwhile to
keep cooperation going," says Cronin.
Darwin himself hated conflict. When Alfred Russel Wallace, a young
naturalist, wrote Darwin a year before Origin of Species was to be
published and outlined word for word what was apparently Darwin's own
idea, Darwin wrote to a colleague asking whether he should publish his
own work: "I would rather burn my whole book than he or any other man
should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit." His colleague
insisted that he publish his book. But a year before he did, Darwin
published a joint paper with Wallace.
Altruism breeds altruism, and reciprocal acts breed reciprocal acts.
"If we feel that other people are only out for themselves, one is wary
of being altruistic. If we feel other people are not giving, we say,
'I'm not going to be a sucker,' " says Cronin. "The more people
understand that we are evolved altruists, and the more people feel
that no one is taking advantage of another, the more we will become
altruistic, and the more we won't take advantage of one another."
Living by the Laws of the Unselfish Gene
Darwin had a great gift: curiosity. He saw nothing as ordinary. Helena
Cronin has the same gift. The big mystery about Darwin is how this
wealthy country boy, far from brilliant as a youth, became a genius.
Helena Cronin has a similar mystery about her.
When she began studying Darwin, the field was not fashionable. In
fact, Cronin has a background much like Darwin's: She was left out of
the mainstream for years, thinking she would study English literature.
She studied philosophy, but with no great passion. "I have three
degrees in philosophy, but I never really enjoyed it," she says. "I
never quite decided what I wanted to do when I grew up, but in the
meantime, I was studying philosophy." Throughout her career, she was
driven by others' direction. "Basically, I got a PhD because my
adviser thought I should. This is a typical woman's story."
It's one of Cronin's less-than-politically-correct Darwinian theories:
In a Darwinian world, women don't have the competitive direction of
men. "The problem with Darwinism is that it is a male-advantaged
science," she says. "Darwinists explain males as peacocks, strutting
and displaying their advantages. The men were killing elk or giraffe
while the women were catching rabbits. What is it to be the rabbit
catcher? The colorless creatures. What is it to own that? There's a
theory of the peacock, but where is the theory of the peahen?"
In the spring of 1963, Cronin was reading the philosophies of Karl
Popper in a library much like the great reading room of the British
Museum. "I still remember how the light was streaming in on the page,"
Cronin says. What struck her was the explanatory power of science.
>From there, it was a small step to getting hooked on Darwin. She was
drawn to Darwin at a time when philosophers were saying that Darwin
was bad science, and survival of the fittest was a tautology. On the
other hand, Cronin says, "It was the foundation of all biology. It
needed reexploring. I thought I would take a new look at evolutionary
theory." She wrote a book, "The Ant and the Peacock," chosen by the
New York Times as one of its top books of 1992. The subject: the
innate altruism of animals.
Is it possible to give in to the altruism gene in your career?
Darwin's own career is practically a study in submission to the
altruism gene. He never seemed to have any clear sense of ambition or
determination. His father, a wealthy, successful doctor, despaired for
his son's future. The younger Darwin, meanwhile, never ardently
pursued degrees or honors.
For her part, Cronin used her gender to her advantage -- that, "and
doing things in the decent, right way," she says. "If I were a man, I
would not have the luxury of being able to behave in noncompetitive
ways. Most men couldn't afford to do what I'm doing, because it
wouldn't affirm their careers, and it wouldn't show up well in a
competitive arena. I have the luxury of not needing to do that, partly
because I'm not driven the way they are. I've never had a career.
Things just happen to me." She has evolved, much as Darwin's own
discoveries had evolved. "I think of my career as a series of
contingencies. I see it as a fortuitous stumbling onto things that
were worthwhile, without seeking them out."
In 1995, Cronin enjoyed another fortuitous stumble, founding
"Darwin@LSE," an interdisciplinary program that has become the hottest
salon in England. It attracts writers like A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan,
scientists like Paul Davis, and others who gather to debate the truth
as Darwinists interpret it. Structurally, Darwin@LSE is a study in the
gift economy of altruism. "We were desperately underfunded," Cronin
says. "I wrote to the world's best scholars and asked them to appear
for free, not even offering to pay for expenses. Everyone I approached
found the money, rearranged their schedules, and appeared. People who
normally were paid thousands of dollars a lecture would say, 'I have
gone out of my way because it's a worthwhile cause, done with
commitment, integrity, and good feeling.'"
Cronin's approach shows the limits of competitive strategy for
building careers and institutions, along with the evolving
alternative: cooperative strategy. "If I had set out to start
Darwin@LSE, I don't know if it would have been such a success," she
says. "I set out to start a seminar with the best people and no money
at all. It turned out that the best people wanted to take part. How do
you plan something like that? Typically, you go out, get an
administrator, and raise money. But if I'd gone that route, I wonder
if people would have responded in the same way. Everything was done by
me, from securing hotel rooms to buying candles for dinner. Because of
that, I gathered lots of voluntary help, which I've still got. If I
had money to pay for everything, who would have volunteered?" It's the
story of the blood bank, applied to Cronin's own undertaking.
In fact, Cronin applies the same thinking to her own career choices:
what she thinks about and how she spends her time. "It would have been
better for my career if I had written another book," she says
candidly. "But it's been better for Darwin's theory for me to have
founded Darwin@LSE."
The Sobriety of the Gene
Management depends on changing people's behavior. In a Darwinian
worldview, however, people cannot change. "It is important to know
what is fundamental to us as evolved animals, so that we don't waste
our efforts trying to change what we cannot change," says Cronin.
"People can't be managed, but systems can be altered to take advantage
of the behavior that begins in our brains. When you know what you can
control versus what you cannot control, that allows you degrees of
freedom. You can't change human behavior, but you can change the
conditions in which you work and the policies that you create to
elicit a certain kind of human response."
It's a sobering thought, but whether you see it as imprisoning or as
liberating depends on your worldview. "My younger students get very
depressed studying Darwin," says Nigel Nicholson, a Darwinist at the
London Business School. "They think he robs them of their free will by
arguing that genes define behavior. But my older students love Darwin.
They are at the point in life where they see that control counts for
little, that there are larger forces determining who we are and how we
act."
How different would the world be if neo-Darwinism held sway? Here are
some of Cronin's insights about the intersection of human behavior,
business practices, and neo-Darwinism:
Forget romantic love. Darwinists believe that everything starts with
the force of the genes. Romantic love is just the desire of genes to
be passed down from one generation to the next. Females are attracted
to males who are able to secure family resources; males, meanwhile,
look for signs of female reproductive health -- which in humans is
best determined by a formula: waist size that is one-third of hip
size. The arts of all kinds -- poetry, music, theater -- are like the
peacock's tail: displays of virtuosity or of desirability that lead to
sex.
Psychology isn't sustaining. "Freudian theory makes no sense," Cronin
insists. "Why on Earth should you carry into your adulthood childhood
incidents that influence your behavior? There are no adaptive reasons
for this." On the other hand, there are very sound Darwinian
explanations that connect lessons learned in early childhood to
personal decisions made in adulthood. For example, a woman who was
brought up by a mother who had no male support might decide to have
children early in life, because she doesn't see herself as having a
long or comfortable reproductive future. But in Darwinism, such
behavior is adaptive, not neurotic.
Management goes bankrupt. You can't change behavior; it's hardwired.
You can only change structures or environments, which will make
recessive behavior more prominent.
Strategy is a badly flawed approach to problems. "The problem with
strategy," says Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics,
"is that you have to think first. In a fast-moving game, you want to
make the behavior seamless with the being, so that pause and thought
are not necessary."
The science of leadership looks false. Visions don't come from on
high. Change comes from the ground up, from genes and subtle shifts in
nature. But you can't alter these -- you can only respond, and respond
quickly.
And if new-economy businesspeople seek to adapt their behavior and
practices to the new Darwinism, what kinds of changes would then be
called for?
Understand how cooperation pays. The more cooperation there is, the
more it pays. Altruism, generosity, and loyalty are at the heart of
the famous prisoners' dilemma -- which is, itself, a test of which
version of Darwinism you choose to practice. It works like this: Put
two prisoners under an investigator's bright light. If each rats on
the other, both remain jailed. If neither rats, both stand a chance of
going free. "The more a tit-for-tat strategy is successful, the more
likely people will be able to reap the rewards of mutual cooperation,"
says Cronin. "Out of selfishness comes altruism."
Put renewed emphasis on policy. "The more we understand how altruism
evolves, the more we will be able to feed it into our policies,"
Cronin says. "And the more we will be able to understand things that
are either odd or downright paradoxical to the standard economic
models that make the world run very well. Simple things like
neighborliness or being trusting without paying guards to create a
sense of safety. The belief that financial rewards are what attracts
people is not only false, it destroys a lot of goodwill."
Show respect for marginal examples. "There have been some experiments
that don't fit the standard economists' models, and they are pushed
aside," Cronin says. "The more we seek to understand them, the more
they can be brought into the center, and the more we can run societies
based on them. And that will serve to induce more altruism in people.
"For example, a professor of economics in Zurich asked people whether
they would be prepared to have a nuclear-waste dump near their homes,
given that it was socially necessary. When it was thought to be a
public good and also safe, 50% said they would agree to have this dump
nearby. The professor then changed the conditions: People would be
paid money to have the dump near their homes. The percentage of people
who agreed then dropped to 25%. People agreed in the first scenario
because they felt the dump was for the public good. As soon as it
became a matter of money changing hands, having the dump nearby became
a different sort of act. People then believed, 'Well, maybe I'm not
getting enough for it.' With money, a whole new area of transaction
comes into play."
Don't romanticize competition. This may be Cronin's most compelling
argument -- and the hardest for traditional business players to
accept: Competition is not mortal or moral combat. In the animal
kingdom, it's simply an opportunity to show off. To make the point,
Cronin undertakes a little anthropological fieldwork.
In a prettified British pub -- one of those new pink-tablecloth joints
in Tony Blair's kinder, hipper Britain -- Cronin is talking about the
irrational, primal choices economic creatures consistently make. Her
voice is constantly drowned out. Upstairs, a party of shouting British
businessmen is celebrating some fresh triumph in the market-place.
They are mighty frisky, thumping tables, stamping on the floor,
yelling, laughing, toasting.
This, says Cronin, is how the successful typically compete: "They're
lekking. 'Lek' from the Swedish, meaning to sport or to mate," she
explains. "It means, to play. In the animal kingdom, once a year males
get together and lek. They strut around. During mating season, for
example, the grouse compete for certain areas. They have to go to
special clearings. The females come and look at them and choose a
mate. The definition of 'sad' is lekking that has no female viewers."
Understanding that most competition is a display feeds into the
argument for the ultimate triumph of altruism. Most people believe
that animals do only what they must to survive: eat, sleep, ward off
predators, and reproduce. But studying the peacock's tail, as Cronin
has done, reveals how animals favor looking good themselves. Cronin
invites a deeper consideration of the simple version of competition as
a battle for survival: When the race goes to the fastest, then how do
we explain peacocks' tails -- extravagant, over the top, grossly
inefficient adaptations?
"The peacock's tail is a wild extravaganza," says Cronin. "It's a
burden, unnecessarily bright and gaudy. The peacock could well be
better off without it, in a way that you couldn't say the cheetah
would be better off without its sprint or the wren without its
camouflage. How do we explain this wild extravaganza that takes a lot
of resources, doesn't produce anything, is heavy to tote around, and
marks the bird as a target for predators?"
Why has nature designed something so useless? As useless as being nice
to the other guy? As useless as sharing information? As useless as
committing your life to pursuing an idea whose outcome you can't
possibly know? Reputation, says Cronin, is a key element in
competition. "Once you understand that sexual selection is displaying
qualities like kindness or goodness, or is demonstrating that you can
afford to give things away, then you understand the close connection
between flamboyance and altruism. Altruism can be one of those evolved
peacock feathers in our minds."
Physicists don't believe that in 100 years there will still be
Einsteinian physicists. But in 100 years, biologists will still be
Darwinians. "Once you understand that we are evolved animals, then
everything has to be Darwinian," says Cronin. "That economics could
treat us as pure, rational 'choice entities' is sadly mistaken. We're
not; we're human beings." It's one of those rare instances in science
where the founder of an idea continues to affect everything we desire:
what we wish and what we don't wish. Darwin's radical finding is that
ours is a world of "man from monkeys." For neo-Darwinists, there's an
even more radical conclusion: It's also humans who make angels -- the
symbol of altruism.
Harriet Rubin (hrubin@aol.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor.
Her new book, "Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambition," will be
published this month by HarperCollins. Her Web site
(www.ivillage.com/thesoloist) also debuts this month. You can contact
Helena Cronin by email (cronin@lse.ac.uk).
Sidebar: How Altruistic Are You?
The characteristics of altruism are of greatest value in a
fast-changing environment, where people are frequently called on to
trust strangers, invest in new companies, or make deals with people
they have just met. To get a sense of your own evolutionary
trajectory, ask yourself the following questions:
How much do you value high risk?
Taking risks is a primary characteristic of altruists. For example,
altruists are apt to jump into a lake to save somebody they don't
know. Other ways that risk and altruism intersect include camaraderie
in battle -- that is, risking your life for someone who is not related
to you or for an idea in which you believe.
Are you concerned with your own view of your reputation?
How do you behave when there is no one around to judge? For example,
do you leave a tip in a town where you'll never be seen again? An
altruist would behave appropriately, so she could think of herself as
a person who does worthy and upright things.
How good are you at detecting when people are being kind for selfish
reasons and when they are being altruistic?
Noticing altruism in others is a trigger for reciprocity, and it
starts at the youngest ages: A very young baby can respond to a smile.
The skill in adulthood is discerning between a real smile and a fake
one.
Do you feel empathetic or sympathetic to others' situations?
There is a physical test for this: How much do you attempt to read
other people's minds to learn their concerns? Eye gaze is the defining
factor, says Helena Cronin. "You look toward someone else, and I
follow your eyes and look at someone else. A baby develops eye gaze
when he sees an adult stare away, and he follows that gaze. That baby
can put himself into someone else's life. It's part of our
psycho-logical machinery that natural selection has given us to be
able to be good reciprocators."
If you notice these altruistic tendencies in yourself, you may worry
that this type of behavior is dangerously unstrategic. Instead of
worrying about being too altruistic, pretend you are a gene, Cronin
suggests. Otherwise, economic behavior makes no sense. "Genes are the
strategists," she says. "It's no good for nature to build a perfect
bird if that bird won't sit on its nest and hatch its young. Behavior
is strategies adapted by genes as they pass down the generations --
including genes for altruism."
Altruism, says Cronin, is dangerous to the individual -- and good for
the species. We put ourselves in jeopardy to be altruistic, the same
way many animals will act as sentries for their tribes. To think of
ourselves as strategic, in Darwinian terms, is a mistake. Says Cronin:
"Essentially, humans have no strategy. It's an illusion to think of
ourselves as rational. We have animal brains in our bodies."
Sidebar: The Undiscovered Darwin
Business has made a mess out of Darwin's theories. For the most part,
business has built its understanding of competition and strategy on a
foundation of Darwinian misreadings. Here's the truth about some
commonly misunderstood Darwinian principles:
The struggle for existence.
One of the ways that Darwin used that expression was to refer to the
death of a plant that didn't get enough water. The struggle for
existence doesn't mean the lion biting into the lamb. Lots of
Victorian gentlemen perverted Darwinist theories to justify their own
predatory instincts.
The selfish gene.
Do you believe that natural selection is just about selfishness? Try
explaining it then: Think of yourself as a gene sitting in a body. You
give an alarm call. By so doing, you call attention to yourself, which
may alert the predator to your presence. At the same time, you will be
saving the kin group -- and saving copies of yourself -- in future
generations. Genes do self-sacrificial things regularly. Those that do
are often the best replicators -- that is, they are the ones that make
their way down through the generations.
Competition hurries progress.
This false notion suggests that you get better outcomes by eliminating
the weaker member of a group. That is supported by another Darwinian
misreading: Only the strong survive, and the outcome will be better if
you have people of first-rate strength. These assumptions have become
the foundation of growth, progress, and capitalism: stronger, better,
more. But they are not part of Darwinism. Darwin's insight was that
competition can lead to all sorts of new ecological niches. If
predators are devouring animals (like you) during the day, you might
become nocturnal. If predators are becoming stronger or larger, you
could become smaller, more mobile, or less visible.
Nice or nasty?
There is nothing vengeful or vindictive about Darwinian theory.
Invoking Darwin to justify cutthroat behaviors is wrong.
- "Don Norman, author of "The Design of Everyday Things," left
- Hewlett-Packard in 1998 to work solo. He claims that his most
- significant asset is the list of 10,000 names in his PalmPilot.
- Similar to the way that Britons give blood for the common good, Norman
- puts people in touch with other people for everyone's mutual benefit.
- The more Norman gives of his time and his contacts, the more business
- flows back to him. The formula is not tit for tat. Rather, it's
- another rule that the paranoid can hardly fathom: "What goes around
- comes around." By putting people in contact with one another, Norman
- helps new businesses begin, the pie gets bigger for everyone, and
- sooner or later Norman benefits. It's a new law -- not of diminishing
- returns or of increasing returns, but of exponential returns."
- Hewlett-Packard in 1998 to work solo. He claims that his most
It was the kind of situation in which a dog might have understandably
wanted to eat another dog. The month was January, the year was 1999,
and the crown princes and princesses of the largest companies in the
world had gathered for a little skiing, a little socializing, a little
polite conversation, and a little dabbling in the latest, most
provocative ideas -- something they do every year at the World
Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.
But this year, it was snowing like mad -- too much for skiing, too
depressing for socializing, and almost too cold for politeness. Hell
in this Swiss mountain town was beginning to take on a whiter shade of
pale. The meeting rooms started getting colder. Then the portions at
dinner started getting smaller. All of a sudden, the lights went out
all over town -- and you could almost feel the question being asked by
the rich, the privileged, the powerful: What happens now? Any
hypercompetitive, only-the-strong-survive, entrepreneurially minded
capitalist could be excused for hoarding food, defending prime
territory, and knocking off competitors. Or would he?
In this setting of surplus-turned-to-scarcity, Helena Cronin, 57,
philosopher, social scientist, and codirector of the Centre for
Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of
Economics, delivered her scheduled lecture on the survival of the
fittest: "Look carefully at nature, and you will find that it doesn't
always seem short, brutish, and savage," she told the cold, hungry
moguls. "Animals are strikingly unselfish, giving warnings of
predators, sharing food, grooming one another, adopting orphans,
fighting without killing -- or injuring -- their adversaries. In some
ways, they behave more like moral paragons of Aesop than the
hard-bitten, self-seeking individualists that natural selection seems
to favor."
The environment was decidedly cold, but Cronin warmed to her theme.
"It turns out," she told the assembled kill-or-be-killed crowd, "that
you can actually prosper more by entering into relationships of
reciprocation, so that you're both getting more than either of you
would have gotten separately."
The lecture was not what anyone expected. But in those dark moments of
the soul, Cronin offered a way of coping with shared adversity, a new
school of competitive thinking based on the notion of an unselfish
gene. Her ideas are a more challenging line of thought and a more
accurate reflection of how the world works than the view popularized
by Intel's Andy Grove that "only the paranoid survive."
Cronin's version of Darwinism shows that altruism and generosity
create more rewards than their opposites do. She introduced the CEOs
to the flip side of paranoia: "pronoia" -- the idea that everyone is
not out to get you, but that they are out to love you, or at least to
appreciate you, if you reciprocate. According to the new Darwinism,
only the pronoid survive -- in fact, only the pronoid endure and
flourish.
The really bizarre thing is that this belief comes from a bona fide
Darwinist -- and wasn't Darwin the top dog in the high court of Canine
v. Canine? Wasn't he the pseudoeconomist of choice in the
greed-is-good 1980s, offering justification for the decade of
financial reengineering? Wasn't Darwin the pseudosociologist of choice
in the Reagan years, providing a fig leaf of intellectual cover for
social policies that asserted that poverty was a sign of an
individual's unwillingness to evolve to some higher economic ground?
But that was then, and this is now. As we enter a new millennium, a
new generation of Darwinists, with Helena Cronin at the lead, is
turning those 1980s beliefs upside down. Today, Cronin is saying,
"Yes, but ..." What if being the fittest means having the most
generosity of spirit? What if enhancing your chance of survival comes
from improving your capacity to be altruistic?
Cronin has spent the past 20 years carefully rereading the work of
Charles Darwin, showing that most of what we believe about his
theories is wrong. "Darwin himself said that the war of nature 'is not
incessant' and that 'the happy survive and multiply,'" Cronin says.
Read Darwin's own fieldwork: He recorded dozens of examples of animals
engaged in self-sacrifice. Why, Cronin asks, did Darwin note countless
instances of an animal giving up its time, its food, its mate -- even
its life -- to help others? Because, Cronin answers, that kind of
behavior is smart evolution: It results in greater rewards.
Dusting off the lies from Darwin's principles can be the best thing
believers in the power of ideas can do. What we presume to be the
theory of survival of the fittest is probably the oldest story we tell
ourselves about success. We grow up believing that it's a jungle out
there. We learn that to survive, we must become "natural-born
killers." So Cronin's radical rethinking of Darwinism goes against the
grain and yet proves to be essential, especially now. At a moment when
most accepted wisdom is up for grabs -- when Karl Marx is dead,
Sigmund Freud is finished, and a "new physics" is looking very old --
only Darwin promises insight into our work and our future. But we need
to know the real Darwin. And the real Darwin says that the paranoid
may survive, but only the pronoid succeed.
The Gift Economy
"Doing what's immediately good for oneself has been understood by
Darwinists for a long time," Cronin says. "But what hasn't been
understood until recently is that you can actually do better for
yourself by being cooperative and altruistic than you can by selfishly
refusing to cooperate with others. It's not that you do as well. You
actually do better -- and all of you do better than if you had gone
off on your own and refused to help others."
At the conference in Davos, Cronin illustrated her point about the
power of altruism with an example of the new Darwinism: "In Britain,
blood is given free of charge. Donors are proud to be known as good,
altruistic people. There is never a shortage, and the quality of blood
is very high because the healthiest people give blood. In America,
it's the opposite. People are frequently paid to give blood, and so
you've got two big problems: The quality of blood is bad, because drug
addicts and the poor have an incentive to donate, and there tend to be
many shortages of blood.
"Two years ago, there was talk in Britain about selling blood to make
money for the new blood-donor service. Immediately, there was an
uproar. People didn't want to give blood, even though that money was
to go back into the blood-donor service. People felt it was no longer
a gift relationship.
"The number of people giving blood dropped dramatically in the weeks
following that decision. The currency changed. Therefore, the emotions
changed. When someone gives you money, you don't feel the same
emotions that you feel when someone demonstrates a kindness. We are
too quick to interpret everything as marginal that does not fit our
economic model," says Cronin. But the elements of the story of the
British blood bank and the essential factors of altruism are starting
to show up everywhere in the new economy.
The paranoid are having a hard time with this new rule: The more you
give away, the more you have. Yet America Online is about to give away
computers. The Linux operating system is readily available and free.
Meanwhile, eFax.com offers free faxing services. Also, a recent
meeting between two potential Internet partners, Inktomi Corp. and
venture capitalist CMGI, began by each throwing down the gauntlet --
of openness: In seeking grounds for cooperation, the two sides would
compete only to see who would do a better job of telling all. "The
deal is that we agree to tell each other everything; otherwise, there
is no meeting," is how one participant described the understanding
that prefaced the session. "We acknowledge that we can't create
something new by ourselves. In the past, people would be secretive.
You'd have to get drunk to open up and tell the truth."
Generosity, not greed, is a strategic good. Don Norman, author of "The
Design of Everyday Things," left Hewlett-Packard in 1998 to work solo.
He claims that his most significant asset is the list of 10,000 names
in his PalmPilot. Similar to the way that Britons give blood for the
common good, Norman puts people in touch with other people for
everyone's mutual benefit. The more Norman gives of his time and his
contacts, the more business flows back to him. The formula is not tit
for tat. Rather, it's another rule that the paranoid can hardly
fathom: "What goes around comes around." By putting people in contact
with one another, Norman helps new businesses begin, the pie gets
bigger for everyone, and sooner or later Norman benefits. It's a new
law -- not of diminishing returns or of increasing returns, but of
exponential returns.
This is the gift economy, where money is meaningless and gifts are the
new currency. The more a business or an individual worker gives away,
the more that everyone has. This is a vision of a new economic model,
a new evolutionary order that poet Lewis Hyde has captured in his 1983
underground classic, "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of
Property," in which he points out that these two very different
marketplaces -- gift and greed -- exist side by side, and increasingly
they converge.
What is the gift economy? It's based on tribal notions that a gift is
meant as currency, not property. A gift must be circulated; it must be
passed around. The old phrase of shame -- "Indian giver" --
paradoxically exemplifies the story behind the gift economy. When
Indians gave white settlers a gift, they expected one in return.
Instead of keeping gifts in circulation, the settlers would put their
peace pipes, which they had received from the Indians as gifts, on
their mantles. The Indians believed that gifts were meant to be kept
in circulation, so when they didn't get something in return, they
asked for their gifts back. This shocked the settlers and their
traditional notions of property. The whites faulted the Indians for
their bad manners, but to the Indians, it was just good economics.
If today's businesses were more immersed in the gift economy and less
steeped in the transaction culture, would we see more goods and
services like Linux? Cronin says that the minute you introduce money,
you turn off the altruism gene. It doesn't disappear from people's
character, it disappears from the transaction. And often -- as with
the British blood bank -- it impoverishes the transaction.
Altruism fundamentally changes economic and competitive equations:
Observers say that the biggest threat to Microsoft is not the U.S.
Department of Justice but the growing freeware movement. Under the new
rules of freeware, Linux rewards its network of elite programmers not
with pay but with prestige; the richest developer is not the greediest
but the one with the best reputation. In 1976, Bill Gates accused the
freeware movement of shoddiness. He wanted to know, "Who can afford to
do professional work for nothing?" But today, although its overall
market share is small, Linux presents an interesting competitive
scenario: Say, for instance, that China adopts Linux as its
countrywide operating system. "Then," says one observer, "whoever owns
China, will own the software business. Even software pirates prefer
not to steal but to take what's free."
Such changes are fresh and are still taking shape. And they challenge
the conventional wisdom of competition. They also make most
high-testosterone businessmen very uncomfortable. Nicholas Humphrey is
a Darwinist at the London School of Economics. Wherever he looks in
the culture of business, Humphrey sees the discomfort and
disorientation that generosity can cause. "An IBM spokesman came to my
child's nursery school several years ago," Humphrey says. "He said,
'We are not giving money to this school out of altruism. Every penny
has an intent of enlightened self-interest.' Somewhere this man was
told, 'Don't admit that anything you do is motivated by anything other
than self-interest.' He felt that he had to apologize on behalf of IBM
for giving the school a gift."
Management guru Peter Drucker offered the bottom line on a company's
purpose in the old economy: to make a profit. Today, even profits have
become a less-compelling way to keep score than intangible values,
such as share of mind, strength of relationships, or loyalty of
employees. These days, having a compelling story can be just as
important as having a compelling product. The bottom line is not a
single number, but more an emotion, a mind-set, a credible promise.
The transaction economy is changing into a gift economy. And in the
process, we're learning to reinterpret Darwin's fundamental lessons.
Darwin in Love
Flash back to 1831: Charles Darwin, 22, is the troublesome son of a
father who predicts that his boy will amount to nothing more than "a
rat catcher." He leaves his father's bruising opinions and goes
looking for something to do with his life.
He travels to the Galápagos Islands -- and he can hardly believe what
he sees. It looks like paradise. The finches have no fear of humans.
They land on Darwin as if he were a tree. They catch themselves in his
hat. The man who will become one of the greatest scientists of the
millennium is so bewitched by his surroundings that he succumbs to a
form of poetry: He claims to know what the rocks and animals are
thinking. He pulls the tail of one burrowing creature. "At this, it
was greatly astonished and shuffled up to see what was the matter,"
Darwin wrote, "and then stared me in the face, as much to say, 'What
made you pull my tail?' " Enchanted by the scenes, he called the
islets "a center of creation."
Flash ahead to the last days of the 20th century and the early days of
the digital economy. The Internet is a new locus of creation: Teeming
life. Spiraling evolution. Exotic species. Enchanted islands. It's the
perfect place for the unselfish gene to undergo a massive thrust in
evolution: a step change, an evolutionary twist in which nature is
redirected and behavior changes.
For years, scientists have recorded step changes in evolution. Before
the Industrial Revolution, for example, the predominant color of moths
was a light peppered form recorded in 1848, in Manchester, England, a
center for the new manufacturing economy. As factories grew, a
population of darker moths soon increased in frequency. By 1950, a
mere 100 years later, dark moths made up more than 90% of the moth
population. In the world of science, that's a sudden and dramatic
evolutionary change. The Darwinian change agent: birds hunting by
sight. Darker moths were better disguised on tree trunks covered by
the soot of the new factories, and thus, they were not so easily eaten
by birds.
Then, something truly bizarre happened: House cats got darker, too.
Not because birds preyed on them, but because the darker color
protected them from the increased radiation that resulted from the
pollution. The Darwinian lesson has less to do with survival of the
fittest and more to do with how change happens in nature: Once
evolution enters a step change, most everything gets caught up in its
influence. Eventually, the future shows up everywhere.
To Cronin and her colleagues, a similar evolutionary shift is now
taking place with the altruism gene. Altruism, which literally means
"concern for the other," has been recessive for most of history. The
new economy makes it recessive no longer.
Natural-Born Cooperators
Altruism has been hardwired into us; it's right there in the genes.
When economies become larger, richer, and more interdependent,
conditions that favor the unselfish genes increase -- similar to the
conditions that increased the numbers of dark moths and dark cats in
smoggy England.
"We have a propensity for altruism, for wanting to give, for hating to
renege, for forgiving, for feeling indignant," says Cronin. "These are
part of our machinery for altruism. If we set up an environment to
evoke what is most altruistic from us, then it isn't at all difficult
to evoke altruism and increase it, because altruism grows on altruism,
and reneging grows on reneging. We don't have to change human nature
to change society. The environment evokes from a given human nature
more or less cooperative behavior."
We are born altruists in two areas. The first is by kin selection. "
We are finely tuned to offer altruism to others who share the same
genes," Cronin says. "A mother is self-sacrificial to her children."
The other source is reciprocal altruism -- tit for tat at its most
crude level. "If you're playing over a long period, it's worthwhile to
keep cooperation going," says Cronin.
Darwin himself hated conflict. When Alfred Russel Wallace, a young
naturalist, wrote Darwin a year before Origin of Species was to be
published and outlined word for word what was apparently Darwin's own
idea, Darwin wrote to a colleague asking whether he should publish his
own work: "I would rather burn my whole book than he or any other man
should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit." His colleague
insisted that he publish his book. But a year before he did, Darwin
published a joint paper with Wallace.
Altruism breeds altruism, and reciprocal acts breed reciprocal acts.
"If we feel that other people are only out for themselves, one is wary
of being altruistic. If we feel other people are not giving, we say,
'I'm not going to be a sucker,' " says Cronin. "The more people
understand that we are evolved altruists, and the more people feel
that no one is taking advantage of another, the more we will become
altruistic, and the more we won't take advantage of one another."
Living by the Laws of the Unselfish Gene
Darwin had a great gift: curiosity. He saw nothing as ordinary. Helena
Cronin has the same gift. The big mystery about Darwin is how this
wealthy country boy, far from brilliant as a youth, became a genius.
Helena Cronin has a similar mystery about her.
When she began studying Darwin, the field was not fashionable. In
fact, Cronin has a background much like Darwin's: She was left out of
the mainstream for years, thinking she would study English literature.
She studied philosophy, but with no great passion. "I have three
degrees in philosophy, but I never really enjoyed it," she says. "I
never quite decided what I wanted to do when I grew up, but in the
meantime, I was studying philosophy." Throughout her career, she was
driven by others' direction. "Basically, I got a PhD because my
adviser thought I should. This is a typical woman's story."
It's one of Cronin's less-than-politically-correct Darwinian theories:
In a Darwinian world, women don't have the competitive direction of
men. "The problem with Darwinism is that it is a male-advantaged
science," she says. "Darwinists explain males as peacocks, strutting
and displaying their advantages. The men were killing elk or giraffe
while the women were catching rabbits. What is it to be the rabbit
catcher? The colorless creatures. What is it to own that? There's a
theory of the peacock, but where is the theory of the peahen?"
In the spring of 1963, Cronin was reading the philosophies of Karl
Popper in a library much like the great reading room of the British
Museum. "I still remember how the light was streaming in on the page,"
Cronin says. What struck her was the explanatory power of science.
>From there, it was a small step to getting hooked on Darwin. She was
drawn to Darwin at a time when philosophers were saying that Darwin
was bad science, and survival of the fittest was a tautology. On the
other hand, Cronin says, "It was the foundation of all biology. It
needed reexploring. I thought I would take a new look at evolutionary
theory." She wrote a book, "The Ant and the Peacock," chosen by the
New York Times as one of its top books of 1992. The subject: the
innate altruism of animals.
Is it possible to give in to the altruism gene in your career?
Darwin's own career is practically a study in submission to the
altruism gene. He never seemed to have any clear sense of ambition or
determination. His father, a wealthy, successful doctor, despaired for
his son's future. The younger Darwin, meanwhile, never ardently
pursued degrees or honors.
For her part, Cronin used her gender to her advantage -- that, "and
doing things in the decent, right way," she says. "If I were a man, I
would not have the luxury of being able to behave in noncompetitive
ways. Most men couldn't afford to do what I'm doing, because it
wouldn't affirm their careers, and it wouldn't show up well in a
competitive arena. I have the luxury of not needing to do that, partly
because I'm not driven the way they are. I've never had a career.
Things just happen to me." She has evolved, much as Darwin's own
discoveries had evolved. "I think of my career as a series of
contingencies. I see it as a fortuitous stumbling onto things that
were worthwhile, without seeking them out."
In 1995, Cronin enjoyed another fortuitous stumble, founding
"Darwin@LSE," an interdisciplinary program that has become the hottest
salon in England. It attracts writers like A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan,
scientists like Paul Davis, and others who gather to debate the truth
as Darwinists interpret it. Structurally, Darwin@LSE is a study in the
gift economy of altruism. "We were desperately underfunded," Cronin
says. "I wrote to the world's best scholars and asked them to appear
for free, not even offering to pay for expenses. Everyone I approached
found the money, rearranged their schedules, and appeared. People who
normally were paid thousands of dollars a lecture would say, 'I have
gone out of my way because it's a worthwhile cause, done with
commitment, integrity, and good feeling.'"
Cronin's approach shows the limits of competitive strategy for
building careers and institutions, along with the evolving
alternative: cooperative strategy. "If I had set out to start
Darwin@LSE, I don't know if it would have been such a success," she
says. "I set out to start a seminar with the best people and no money
at all. It turned out that the best people wanted to take part. How do
you plan something like that? Typically, you go out, get an
administrator, and raise money. But if I'd gone that route, I wonder
if people would have responded in the same way. Everything was done by
me, from securing hotel rooms to buying candles for dinner. Because of
that, I gathered lots of voluntary help, which I've still got. If I
had money to pay for everything, who would have volunteered?" It's the
story of the blood bank, applied to Cronin's own undertaking.
In fact, Cronin applies the same thinking to her own career choices:
what she thinks about and how she spends her time. "It would have been
better for my career if I had written another book," she says
candidly. "But it's been better for Darwin's theory for me to have
founded Darwin@LSE."
The Sobriety of the Gene
Management depends on changing people's behavior. In a Darwinian
worldview, however, people cannot change. "It is important to know
what is fundamental to us as evolved animals, so that we don't waste
our efforts trying to change what we cannot change," says Cronin.
"People can't be managed, but systems can be altered to take advantage
of the behavior that begins in our brains. When you know what you can
control versus what you cannot control, that allows you degrees of
freedom. You can't change human behavior, but you can change the
conditions in which you work and the policies that you create to
elicit a certain kind of human response."
It's a sobering thought, but whether you see it as imprisoning or as
liberating depends on your worldview. "My younger students get very
depressed studying Darwin," says Nigel Nicholson, a Darwinist at the
London Business School. "They think he robs them of their free will by
arguing that genes define behavior. But my older students love Darwin.
They are at the point in life where they see that control counts for
little, that there are larger forces determining who we are and how we
act."
How different would the world be if neo-Darwinism held sway? Here are
some of Cronin's insights about the intersection of human behavior,
business practices, and neo-Darwinism:
Forget romantic love. Darwinists believe that everything starts with
the force of the genes. Romantic love is just the desire of genes to
be passed down from one generation to the next. Females are attracted
to males who are able to secure family resources; males, meanwhile,
look for signs of female reproductive health -- which in humans is
best determined by a formula: waist size that is one-third of hip
size. The arts of all kinds -- poetry, music, theater -- are like the
peacock's tail: displays of virtuosity or of desirability that lead to
sex.
Psychology isn't sustaining. "Freudian theory makes no sense," Cronin
insists. "Why on Earth should you carry into your adulthood childhood
incidents that influence your behavior? There are no adaptive reasons
for this." On the other hand, there are very sound Darwinian
explanations that connect lessons learned in early childhood to
personal decisions made in adulthood. For example, a woman who was
brought up by a mother who had no male support might decide to have
children early in life, because she doesn't see herself as having a
long or comfortable reproductive future. But in Darwinism, such
behavior is adaptive, not neurotic.
Management goes bankrupt. You can't change behavior; it's hardwired.
You can only change structures or environments, which will make
recessive behavior more prominent.
Strategy is a badly flawed approach to problems. "The problem with
strategy," says Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics,
"is that you have to think first. In a fast-moving game, you want to
make the behavior seamless with the being, so that pause and thought
are not necessary."
The science of leadership looks false. Visions don't come from on
high. Change comes from the ground up, from genes and subtle shifts in
nature. But you can't alter these -- you can only respond, and respond
quickly.
And if new-economy businesspeople seek to adapt their behavior and
practices to the new Darwinism, what kinds of changes would then be
called for?
Understand how cooperation pays. The more cooperation there is, the
more it pays. Altruism, generosity, and loyalty are at the heart of
the famous prisoners' dilemma -- which is, itself, a test of which
version of Darwinism you choose to practice. It works like this: Put
two prisoners under an investigator's bright light. If each rats on
the other, both remain jailed. If neither rats, both stand a chance of
going free. "The more a tit-for-tat strategy is successful, the more
likely people will be able to reap the rewards of mutual cooperation,"
says Cronin. "Out of selfishness comes altruism."
Put renewed emphasis on policy. "The more we understand how altruism
evolves, the more we will be able to feed it into our policies,"
Cronin says. "And the more we will be able to understand things that
are either odd or downright paradoxical to the standard economic
models that make the world run very well. Simple things like
neighborliness or being trusting without paying guards to create a
sense of safety. The belief that financial rewards are what attracts
people is not only false, it destroys a lot of goodwill."
Show respect for marginal examples. "There have been some experiments
that don't fit the standard economists' models, and they are pushed
aside," Cronin says. "The more we seek to understand them, the more
they can be brought into the center, and the more we can run societies
based on them. And that will serve to induce more altruism in people.
"For example, a professor of economics in Zurich asked people whether
they would be prepared to have a nuclear-waste dump near their homes,
given that it was socially necessary. When it was thought to be a
public good and also safe, 50% said they would agree to have this dump
nearby. The professor then changed the conditions: People would be
paid money to have the dump near their homes. The percentage of people
who agreed then dropped to 25%. People agreed in the first scenario
because they felt the dump was for the public good. As soon as it
became a matter of money changing hands, having the dump nearby became
a different sort of act. People then believed, 'Well, maybe I'm not
getting enough for it.' With money, a whole new area of transaction
comes into play."
Don't romanticize competition. This may be Cronin's most compelling
argument -- and the hardest for traditional business players to
accept: Competition is not mortal or moral combat. In the animal
kingdom, it's simply an opportunity to show off. To make the point,
Cronin undertakes a little anthropological fieldwork.
In a prettified British pub -- one of those new pink-tablecloth joints
in Tony Blair's kinder, hipper Britain -- Cronin is talking about the
irrational, primal choices economic creatures consistently make. Her
voice is constantly drowned out. Upstairs, a party of shouting British
businessmen is celebrating some fresh triumph in the market-place.
They are mighty frisky, thumping tables, stamping on the floor,
yelling, laughing, toasting.
This, says Cronin, is how the successful typically compete: "They're
lekking. 'Lek' from the Swedish, meaning to sport or to mate," she
explains. "It means, to play. In the animal kingdom, once a year males
get together and lek. They strut around. During mating season, for
example, the grouse compete for certain areas. They have to go to
special clearings. The females come and look at them and choose a
mate. The definition of 'sad' is lekking that has no female viewers."
Understanding that most competition is a display feeds into the
argument for the ultimate triumph of altruism. Most people believe
that animals do only what they must to survive: eat, sleep, ward off
predators, and reproduce. But studying the peacock's tail, as Cronin
has done, reveals how animals favor looking good themselves. Cronin
invites a deeper consideration of the simple version of competition as
a battle for survival: When the race goes to the fastest, then how do
we explain peacocks' tails -- extravagant, over the top, grossly
inefficient adaptations?
"The peacock's tail is a wild extravaganza," says Cronin. "It's a
burden, unnecessarily bright and gaudy. The peacock could well be
better off without it, in a way that you couldn't say the cheetah
would be better off without its sprint or the wren without its
camouflage. How do we explain this wild extravaganza that takes a lot
of resources, doesn't produce anything, is heavy to tote around, and
marks the bird as a target for predators?"
Why has nature designed something so useless? As useless as being nice
to the other guy? As useless as sharing information? As useless as
committing your life to pursuing an idea whose outcome you can't
possibly know? Reputation, says Cronin, is a key element in
competition. "Once you understand that sexual selection is displaying
qualities like kindness or goodness, or is demonstrating that you can
afford to give things away, then you understand the close connection
between flamboyance and altruism. Altruism can be one of those evolved
peacock feathers in our minds."
Physicists don't believe that in 100 years there will still be
Einsteinian physicists. But in 100 years, biologists will still be
Darwinians. "Once you understand that we are evolved animals, then
everything has to be Darwinian," says Cronin. "That economics could
treat us as pure, rational 'choice entities' is sadly mistaken. We're
not; we're human beings." It's one of those rare instances in science
where the founder of an idea continues to affect everything we desire:
what we wish and what we don't wish. Darwin's radical finding is that
ours is a world of "man from monkeys." For neo-Darwinists, there's an
even more radical conclusion: It's also humans who make angels -- the
symbol of altruism.
Harriet Rubin (hrubin@aol.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor.
Her new book, "Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambition," will be
published this month by HarperCollins. Her Web site
(www.ivillage.com/thesoloist) also debuts this month. You can contact
Helena Cronin by email (cronin@lse.ac.uk).
Sidebar: How Altruistic Are You?
The characteristics of altruism are of greatest value in a
fast-changing environment, where people are frequently called on to
trust strangers, invest in new companies, or make deals with people
they have just met. To get a sense of your own evolutionary
trajectory, ask yourself the following questions:
How much do you value high risk?
Taking risks is a primary characteristic of altruists. For example,
altruists are apt to jump into a lake to save somebody they don't
know. Other ways that risk and altruism intersect include camaraderie
in battle -- that is, risking your life for someone who is not related
to you or for an idea in which you believe.
Are you concerned with your own view of your reputation?
How do you behave when there is no one around to judge? For example,
do you leave a tip in a town where you'll never be seen again? An
altruist would behave appropriately, so she could think of herself as
a person who does worthy and upright things.
How good are you at detecting when people are being kind for selfish
reasons and when they are being altruistic?
Noticing altruism in others is a trigger for reciprocity, and it
starts at the youngest ages: A very young baby can respond to a smile.
The skill in adulthood is discerning between a real smile and a fake
one.
Do you feel empathetic or sympathetic to others' situations?
There is a physical test for this: How much do you attempt to read
other people's minds to learn their concerns? Eye gaze is the defining
factor, says Helena Cronin. "You look toward someone else, and I
follow your eyes and look at someone else. A baby develops eye gaze
when he sees an adult stare away, and he follows that gaze. That baby
can put himself into someone else's life. It's part of our
psycho-logical machinery that natural selection has given us to be
able to be good reciprocators."
If you notice these altruistic tendencies in yourself, you may worry
that this type of behavior is dangerously unstrategic. Instead of
worrying about being too altruistic, pretend you are a gene, Cronin
suggests. Otherwise, economic behavior makes no sense. "Genes are the
strategists," she says. "It's no good for nature to build a perfect
bird if that bird won't sit on its nest and hatch its young. Behavior
is strategies adapted by genes as they pass down the generations --
including genes for altruism."
Altruism, says Cronin, is dangerous to the individual -- and good for
the species. We put ourselves in jeopardy to be altruistic, the same
way many animals will act as sentries for their tribes. To think of
ourselves as strategic, in Darwinian terms, is a mistake. Says Cronin:
"Essentially, humans have no strategy. It's an illusion to think of
ourselves as rational. We have animal brains in our bodies."
Sidebar: The Undiscovered Darwin
Business has made a mess out of Darwin's theories. For the most part,
business has built its understanding of competition and strategy on a
foundation of Darwinian misreadings. Here's the truth about some
commonly misunderstood Darwinian principles:
The struggle for existence.
One of the ways that Darwin used that expression was to refer to the
death of a plant that didn't get enough water. The struggle for
existence doesn't mean the lion biting into the lamb. Lots of
Victorian gentlemen perverted Darwinist theories to justify their own
predatory instincts.
The selfish gene.
Do you believe that natural selection is just about selfishness? Try
explaining it then: Think of yourself as a gene sitting in a body. You
give an alarm call. By so doing, you call attention to yourself, which
may alert the predator to your presence. At the same time, you will be
saving the kin group -- and saving copies of yourself -- in future
generations. Genes do self-sacrificial things regularly. Those that do
are often the best replicators -- that is, they are the ones that make
their way down through the generations.
Competition hurries progress.
This false notion suggests that you get better outcomes by eliminating
the weaker member of a group. That is supported by another Darwinian
misreading: Only the strong survive, and the outcome will be better if
you have people of first-rate strength. These assumptions have become
the foundation of growth, progress, and capitalism: stronger, better,
more. But they are not part of Darwinism. Darwin's insight was that
competition can lead to all sorts of new ecological niches. If
predators are devouring animals (like you) during the day, you might
become nocturnal. If predators are becoming stronger or larger, you
could become smaller, more mobile, or less visible.
Nice or nasty?
There is nothing vengeful or vindictive about Darwinian theory.
Invoking Darwin to justify cutthroat behaviors is wrong.
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