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https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/darwin-competition-collaboration-evolutionary-biology-climate-change.html>
"You have probably heard the story of Darwin’s intrepid voyage to the Galapagos
Islands. On those rocky outcroppings far off the South American coast, Darwin
noticed small variations in the beaks of a few finches, unlocking, we are told,
the mystery of life’s variation over time and space. “The struggle for life,”
Darwin deduced, would naturally select those beings whose hereditary mutations
made them most fit to a specific environment. Over successive generations,
scientists came to see the driving force behind evolution as perpetual
competition between discrete individuals, a biological arms race to eat and
reproduce in a world of scarcity.
Though Darwin articulated his theories of evolution over decades, and though he
traveled far and wide during his years on the HMS Beagle, few accounts of his
theories fail to mention the Galapagos, their wild remoteness and exotic biota.
It’s important to us that Darwin went somewhere “out of the way” to discover
the nature of life. We can imagine Darwin to be observing nature directly,
unmediated by human interference.
Yet, like all humans, Darwin brought culture with him wherever he traveled. His
descriptions of the workings of nature bear resemblance to prevailing thinking
on human society within elite, English circles at the time. This is not a mere
coincidence, and tracing his influences is worthwhile. It was, after all, the
heyday of classical liberalism, dominated by thinkers like Adam Smith, David
Hume, and Thomas Malthus, who valorized an unregulated market. They were
debating minor points within a consensus on the virtues of competition. In an
especially humble (and revealing) moment, Darwin characterized the principles
underlying his thinking as naught but “the doctrine of Malthus, applied with
manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”
Fast forward a century and a half, and “survival of the fittest”—the expression
social theorist Herbert Spencer coined to sum up Darwin’s thinking—is as much a
cultural cliché as it is a scientific theory. Hell, your worst colleague at the
office might even offer it as a justification for his one-upmanship. More than
just a cliché, though, the supposed naturalness of competition has played a
central role in substantiating the laissez-faire variety of capitalism the
majority of the American political spectrum has championed for the past four or
so decades. Indeed, any non-market-based solution to social issues usually
falls prey to claims of utopianism, of ignoring the fundamental selfishness of
the human species. Advocates for welfare programs, for instance, often run up
against criticism that their policy proposals fail to understand to importance
of “losing,” that they lessen the stakes of the competition innate to human
social life. Similarly, collectively owned spaces or institutions (like
communal land trusts or co-ops) are often presumed short-lived or inefficient,
doomed to suffer the “tragedy of the commons” as the innate self-interest of
each member leads to an overuse of collective resources—a thesis that has been
debunked again and again since its first articulation by Garrett Hardin in
1968. To put it simply, we have let Darwinism set the horizon of possibility
for human behavior. Competition has become a supposed basic feature of all
life, something immutable, universal, natural."
Via Muse, who wrote "Every so often I do a search to see if any good research
comes up concerning the folly of human competition as it is used in our
culture. The problem is that competition has become a cherished value protected
by “the winners”. I am overjoyed to have found a couple articles today that
finally opens up a debate."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
