Is There a Thing That Darwin Can't Explain?

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David Frum: Everything taking place around us, good and bad, can be understood from this evolutionary lens. He says Darwin realized that even though selfishness beats altruism within groups, groups of altruists will robustly outcompete groups whose members cannot cohere. And so self-preservation is not helping Kith and Ken a good thing until it becomes nepotism and cronyism, he adds.

It’s easy to tell ourselves we’re living in the world we want – one where Darwinian evolution drives competing technology platforms and capitalism pushes nations to maximize GDP regardless of externalities like carbon emissions. It can feel like evolution and competition are all there is.

If that’s a complete description of what’s driving the world and our collective destiny, that can feel pretty hopeless. But what if that’s not the whole story of evolution?

This is where evolutionary theorist, author, and professor David Sloan Wilson comes in. He has documented where an enlightened game, one of cooperation, rather than competition, is possible. His work shows that humans can and have chosen values like cooperation, altruism and group success – versus individual competition and selfishness – at key moments in our evolution, proving that evolution isn’t just genetic. It’s cultural, and it’s a choice.

In a world where our trajectory isn’t tracking in the direction we want, it's time to slow down and ask: is a different kind of conscious evolution possible?

On Your Undivided Attention, we’re going to update the Darwinian principles of evolution using a critical scientific lens that can help upgrade our ability to cooperate – ranging from the small community-level, all the way to entire technology companies that can cooperate in ways that allow everyone to succeed.

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Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_